St Charles is about 35 miles from me. I';d love to visit the place. I've been to the Harness Racing Hall of Fame. I thought it sucked.
A Mission To Save a Piece of Harness Racing
History
By Joe Scarpa
They say that Greyhound might have been the greatest
standardbred ever, an accolade that should mean his
legacy will always be protected. That wasn't happening,
until Nancy Brejc and Jan Heine stepped in.
Greyhound, the 1935 Hambletonian winner, was the
most beloved
standardbred of his time. It
wasn't just that he was
fast. He was a grey who
got whiter by the day as he
got older, which earned
him the nicknames "The
Great Grey Ghost" and the
"Silver-Skinned Flyer."
When he retired his owner
Col. Edward J. Baker
wanted his many fans to
be able to visit him and he wanted Greyhound to live in
luxury. So he built a special stall at his Red Gate Farm in
St. Charles, Illinois, something as elaborate and as
ostentatious as
anything any horse has
ever lived in.
Greyhound did not die
until 1965 at the age of
33.
But time was not kind
to the memories.
Those who had any
connection with
Greyhound passed
away or moved on and
the farm was leased by
newcomers who had little knowledge of or interest in his
exploits.
"It was so disheartening," Brejc said. "The roof was
leaking. The elements had taken their toll. Jan and I
walked in and our hearts sunk. The door on the trophy
case was missing, the widows were wide open and
everything was blowing through there."
Brejc and Heine discovered that many of the mementoes
of Greyhound's career had gone missing. To this day they
don't know where his Hambletonian trophy is. Some other
trophies and artifacts had been taken to a hotel once owned
by the Baker family, an odd place for them to wind up since it
had been converted to an assisted living facility for the
elderly.
"Jan would pop in from
time to time and each
time something else
would be gone," Brejc
said.
Eventually word got to
the two, who describe
themselves as just your
average middle-aged
women, that the barn that
housed the stall was
going to be burned down
in order to clear land. To
the two, this was blasphemy. While some of the trophies
might have been lost over time and while the barn had seen
better days, this was still a magnificent stall built to house a
special horse. It was, perhaps, the greatest existing memory
of the great horse.
"We heard they were planning to burn all the barns down
and put everything back into farming," Brejc said. "We
panicked. We begged them. Let us take the stall. They said,
‘if you guys want it you can take it.' Now you have two
middle-aged women standing there saying, ‘uh, oh what do
we do now?'"
The two figured it out as they went, disassembling the stall
one board at a time.
"We don't know what possessed us or even how we got
started," Brejc said. "We numbered every board and started
taking them down. We just didn't know what we were doing.
We took the ceiling down, all the light fixtures. They has
seen better days, but they were the original ones. We took
an old thermostat, the gates. "
Along the way, they found teeth marks, which had to be
those of Greyhound since he was the only horse who had
ever lived in the stall. There was even some remnants left of
what looked like a meal.
As of now, everything is sitting in a garage, all wrapped up.
But the plan is to reassemble the stall and, hopefully, display
it at the Harness Horse Museum in Goshen, New York.
"When people see it I think their jaws will drop," she said.
"The wood in stall is beautiful and still in pristine condition."
It still remains to be seen what will happen to the stall.
Brejc and Heine have been in touch with the museum but
there is a problem finding space for the stall. Brejc estimates
that once everything is put back together it will be the size of
a three-car garage. That's not something you can exactly
shoe horn into a relatively small museum. But she believes
everything will eventually work out and that racing fans will
be able to view what they have saved.
"We've always been around the harness horses," she said.
"That stall was always Greyhound's and we'd always read
these old stories about him. I really believe that horse knew
who he was, knew he was great. For us this was an
obligation. How can no one care about this horse's stuff
and just let it be lost to time? That's something we could
net let happen. This horse is such a huge part of
standardbred history and we were not willing to just to let
his memories go up in smoke."
