Saving Baby (36 page)

While I was taken with the setting, the irony of it was not lost on me. Horses who raced at elite tracks such as Saratoga were sold over and over when they no longer performed well enough to compete at the country's few top courses and finally ended up broken and limping at tracks like ours in Michigan. As much as I was awed to suddenly glimpse people I'd seen on television over the years—owners of Kentucky Derby winners, nationally famous trainers like D. Wayne Lucas and Todd Pletcher—I was fully aware that they prospered at the horses' expense. The custom-designed hats women wore at tracks like Saratoga and Churchill Downs cost more than the couple hundred dollars I regularly haggled over on the backside, trying to keep a Thoroughbred from going to slaughter.

My award was presented at an exclusive luncheon given in my honor by Cothran “Cot” and Anne Campbell, in honor of their beloved horse Dominion, who died in old age. Under a tent on the grounds of a private club with a five-piece band and waiters in uniform, I received an introduction as someone who through CANTER had saved more than 4,000 horses. Normally, Cot and Anne do the honors, but John Hettinger requested that he present me with the award—a $5,000 check and a sculpture of Dominion—and the Campbells obliged him. I was so touched by that gesture. John, a champion of Thoroughbreds as much as he loved racing, was suffering from a brain tumor at that point and could barely make his way forward with a cane.

I was so moved that John Hettinger wanted to present me with the Dominion Award even though he was quite sick by that point.

I made my speech as gracious as possible. I truly was thankful that my work was being recognized, but beyond that, I was mindful of my aim to make a good impression so that when we went asking for money for our rehabilitation center, those with the means to help us would be well disposed toward us. Still, I did connect the dots for those present, suggesting in as pleasantly couched terms as possible that they bore at least some of the responsibility for what happened to their racehorses once they dropped down in the ranks and away from beautiful tracks like the one at Saratoga. In a talk filled with effusive thank-yous and vague references to the Thoroughbred industry's “unwavering concern” for racing's Thoroughbreds, I pointed out that only within the last few weeks, I had to sign a euthanization order for a horse at Great Lakes Downs who had won a race at Saratoga just three years earlier. During the same time frame, another former Saratoga winner was admitted to Michigan State for surgery after breaking down on our track.

I knew this with certainty because while I was preparing my speech at the end of July, it seemed like we were euthanizing or hospitalizing an awful lot of maimed horses, more than usual, and I wondered whether it was true or whether things just seemed worse than they generally were because of what John was going through and my mother's death earlier in the year. So I reviewed the Excel spreadsheets I always kept on our intakes and found that from the beginning of the year till July 29th, 56 percent of those who came into the CANTER program crossed the finish line only to find death. Many of them had started their racing careers at high-level tracks, including Saratoga. It was as it had always been. Horses who ran at our cheap little track just a couple of hours from a slaughterhouse, pumped with drugs to mask injuries, had often changed hands after illustrious starts in California, in Kentucky, in New York, and in other states with reputations for television-worthy racing.

I wasn't sure how my allusion to the deaths of former Saratoga Thoroughbreds would go over, but Joy told me afterward that people were not offended, that she even saw tears well up in people's eyes. And I could see that those present were acting warmly toward me; I hadn't ticked anyone off.

The choice not to come off accusatory had not been easy. I wasn't talking about wetlands being built on. This was pain and suffering and death in the worst way possible, year after year, horse after horse, and sacrificing the expression of my real feelings, as I did every week at the track when I asked trainers if they had “anything” they “wanted to get rid of,” took its toll emotionally. But what choice did I have? If I wanted to save horses, to raise money to save even more, I had to take the ingratiating route, even though I was speaking to people at the source of the trickle-down effect that allowed horses to reach Michigan lame and often unfixable. Pointing a finger wasn't going to get me anywhere.

After the speech, John Hettinger suggested to me that I should use the national attention from the award to advance the cause of saving horses from slaughter. I told him right then about our plans for a Midwest rehabilitation center and asked if he would consider becoming the honorary chairperson of an advisory board CANTER wanted to create with people at the top tier of racing in order to shine a spotlight on the plan. He agreed immediately, and also suggested that I approach Cot and Anne, a very well known trainer named Nick Zito, and a couple of others at Saratoga that day, all of whom said yes.

I spent the rest of my few days at Saratoga participating in events I would never have chosen to attend on my own. For instance, included in the honor of receiving the Dominion award was watching a race named for me, so in special box seats with Cot and Anne, I politely sat looking down or to the side as the horses ran by, the way a child might play with the peas on his plate to make it look like he had actually eaten some. I had not watched a race since Baby died, and I didn't want to see one now. To have done so would have been a direct betrayal of him, a violation of his memory.

Still, I did not leave feeling angry. I felt positive, buoyed by John Hettinger's enthusiasm and ready to make new inroads. I even was offered help by a woman named Annette Bacola, one of my guests at the award luncheon. I had known her for a few years by then as she had spent some time as Michigan's state racing commissioner, and I liked her because unlike so many other racing commissioners, she truly did care about the horses. Also, she, too, had lost a horse to racing, a grey she still thought of, and that deepened our bond.

Annette took Joy and me to lunch the day after the award ceremony, and while the three of us chatted about our love of horses, I asked her to join the newly created advisory board to help us get the rehabilitation center off the ground. Not only did she say yes, she also invited me to her home in Lexington to strategize. Flying back to Detroit, I knew we were on our way.

I drove down to Lexington the last weekend of August to meet with Annette, who put me up in her guesthouse, a beautiful brick edifice filled with antiques, mahogany furniture, and spacious rooms, including a library, with doors that spilled onto a large portico. While the surroundings, replete with bronze horse sculptures and other equine touches, were intimidating, Annette was not. Classy but warm and sweet—a beautiful person inside and out—she suggested that she and her husband host a fundraiser at her home, offering to cover all the costs. I was overwhelmed by her largesse.

It wouldn't be a major fundraiser, Annette said, rather more of a getting-people-interested kind of thing. The thinking was that it might bring in somewhere on the order of $25,000. True, that wasn't enough to build a rehabilitation center, which would cost millions. But for one night's work, I thought such a number would be terrific.

When I arrived home from Lexington, I called Congressman Whitfield and asked if he and his wife would join our advisory board along with Annette, John Hettinger, and the others. He said yes, and when I questioned whether he knew anyone else who might be interested, he gave me the phone number of Bo Derek, who had been very active in antislaughter legislation, even making a trip to Washington and visiting with a number of congressmen to raise support for the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act.

I felt nervous calling her, but after the first few words, once two people know they're both about horses, all the differences between them fall away. Also, she created no wall or feeling of distance. She was without airs, just very soft spoken and both passionate and compassionate about horses.

The conversation lasted only a few minutes, but Bo did agree to be on the advisory board and said that if she could make the fundraiser in Kentucky—we hadn't decided on a date yet—she would. My mind was racing. If Bo Derek committed to being present, we'd be beating people away from the door.

The date for the fundraising soiree was soon set for the end of November, and I made three more trips to Lexington that fall, a five-and-a-half-hour drive each way, to meet with Annette in preparation. I knew even without her telling me what the event would be like. She would have someone playing music on the grand piano, valet parking, a man who took coats at the front door, butlers carrying trays of appetizers. Annette was a society woman. I even made the Society Pages myself because of her back in Michigan one year when I attended her annual Michigan Horse of the Year Ball.

We sent out 250 invitations. Beige with brown lettering, they looked like wedding invitations, down to the little reply cards. They went to all the important racing people in Lexington and a few others we knew of in other areas. Some had been at Saratoga.

RSVPs only trickled in during the first weeks, with a good number of responses saying “will not attend.” But we weren't too concerned. Dr. Stick had already said he'd be coming—a big coup, because he was well known and well respected by those in the upper echelons of racing.

In the middle of this excitement, and with the urgency that always went with more and more horses taken in by CANTER during fall rush, Groovy came back to me. From the bottom of the driveway, I could hear him bellowing full-body whinnies from inside the trailer—not distress calls, which are more like odd snorts of warning, but sounds springing from deep within his chest. He knew where he was. “Open the door, open the door!” he was calling. I could hear his feet going up and down on the trailer.

He shot out of the back like a bullet once the driver unhitched the doors but didn't try to go running around. Instead, he breathed into my nose, then pulled immediately to the fence to see Sissy and Scarlett. I believe with all my heart that he knew, as I did, that he was home, that he would never be leaving again. He was the only CANTER horse out of thousands that I ever kept for myself.

“Is this the same?” he wanted to know about everything he passed, sniffing a pail he came across, a piece of equipment. “The trough is still here. Good. Let's go out into the pasture.”

Sissy and Scarlett didn't need any reintroductions. Scarlett sniffed into his nose, then, the next second, pulled her ears back, as was her way. “You remember, I'm the boss, don't you?” her body language warned him. Then she went right back to acting friendly.

Sissy, for her part, was delirious with joy. She and Groovy would graze together as if they were joined at the shoulder, not an inch between them as they walked.

But I was still his favorite horse in the herd. “How can I make your life easier?” he seemed to ask as he stood still while I picked up his feet to clean them, or while he let me spritz him with fly spray. That eagerness to please was why I had been even more afraid for him than other horses. He would have jumped for someone no matter how much it hurt him and no matter how much it would have destroyed his body.

Not that he didn't still enjoy his high jinx. He'd go into my pockets, pull off my hat to make me laugh. He'd play with latches, trying to figure out how to open gates on his own. “How does this work? Hmmm, more horses over there. Maybe I'll go visiting.”

He also loved to be scratched under his chin, and on his trunk if he had a fly bite he couldn't reach. “You want me to get it for you?” I'd ask.

“Oh, yes,” he'd respond by moving into position so I could reach it more easily. A pasture ornament who couldn't be ridden because of multiple problems—significant arthritis in both knees as a result of fractures, arthritis in both hocks in his back legs—Groovy slept every night in Baby's stall, the one he stayed in when he first came to my house years earlier.