Sagamore

Goodtobeking has never been a picture of grace, having fallen down at least 10 times in his brief and temperamental career as a thoroughbred.But what the 3-year-old gelding lacks in balance, he makes up for in speed. He showed his positive side in the $60,000 Goss L. Stryker Stakes for registered Maryland-breds yesterday at Laurel Park.Later on the card, Fred Bear Claw prevailed in the $75,000 Sagamore Stakes, giving jockey Rick Wilson a sweep in a rare, two-stakes day at Laurel.Wilson was careful as he guided Goodtobeking to the front in the seven-furlong Stryker, not daring to touch his mount with the whip.

TodaySeven veteran runners, who have become household names on Maryland circuit, meet in the 33rd running of the Native Dancer Handicap. Big Rut, who beat Algar in consecutive stakes last year, continues his rivalry with trainer Barbara Graham's runner in the $75,000-added event.Algar was assigned high weight of 118 pounds off a victory in the Maryland Million Classic. He also placed in the Hail Emperor Stakes and showed in the Congressional Handicap.Before pulling up lame in the Sagamore Stakes in March, Big Rut won last year's renewal of the Dancer and was victorious in its next start, the Johnson Memorial Handicap.

Today: By rescheduling the Goss L. Stryker Stakes, Laurel will present two added-money events. The Stryker was postponed and redrawn after snow halted all but one race on last Sunday's program.Three stakes winners are among nine entered for the 28th running.The seven-furlong event, carded as the eighth race, is worth $60,000 and limited to 3-year-old Maryland breds.Smart Guy, fresh off an upset victory in the Deputed Testamony, heads the field. The son of Smarten was urged under the wire 9 1/4 lengths by jockey David Appleby.

It must have been the call of the loon.Or so I thought as I stood on the shore at Great Camp Sagamore, watching the mist crawl over the lake at dawn. This mournful and timeless call, I thought as it died away into the grayness, is what drew people here in the first place. It had to be something compelling to drag the fabulously wealthy away from their elegant apartments in New York City and their mine-is-bigger-than-yours "cottages" in Newport, R.I. There had to be some powerful reason for the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, the Whitneys and the Astors to brave 12-hour train rides followed by teeth-rattling carriage rides to come to play in their Adirondack "camps" early in this century.

Maryland-based Fireside Brass and Garden State Park invader, Menace the Dennis, share topweight of 118 pounds in the $100,000 Grade III John B. Campbell Handicap.The Campbell enjoyed its heyday at Bowie as a winter-time classic for older horses when it drew such racing legends as Kelso, Mongo and Social Outcast.Along with the the top three finishers of the Sagamore Handicap -- Fireside Brass, Sovereign Storm and Praise Heaven, the 44th running has also attracted Traffic Circle back to Old Hilltop.

Sovereign Storm was putting on a big run, coming from last place in yesterday's seven-horse Sagamore Stakes at Laurel Park.So, leader Fireside Brass decided it was time to get down to serious business."

The continuing struggle to preserve Northern Baltimore County's farmland and the area's rural character now is focusing on Sagamore Farms, one of the nation's most storied horse farms.A deputy zoning commissioner last week tentatively ruled that part of the Worthington Valley farm was illegally subdivided.The subdivision by Patricia A. Ward, wife of developer James J. Ward III who purchased Sagamore Farms in 1987, and Dr. Richard D. Maffezzoli and his wife, Mary, violated the county's agricultural preservation zoning as well as its development regulations, said Deputy Zoning Commissioner Timothy Kotroco, whose ruling is not official until a written opinion is issued.

GLYNDON -- A single-alarm fire last night destroyed a hay barn at Sagamore Farm in the 3500 block of Belmont Ave., formerly one of the country's most prestigious breeding farms for thoroughbred racehorses.The Worthington Valley property -- formerly owned by Alfred Vanderbilt, and the burial site of his champion horse, Native Dancer -- is owned by a developer.Horses are no longer raised or trained there.Shortly after 8 p.m., fire broke out in a wooden 60-by-75-foot barn containing more than 100 circular bales of hay, said a spokeswoman for the Baltimore County Fire Department.

Once again the fields of Sagamore Farm, one of Maryland's great thoroughbred breeding and training establishments, are filled with mares and foals and there are horses galloping on the historic six-furlong training track.After sitting empty for nearly three years, Sagamore, near Hunt Valley in Baltimore County, reopened for business Aug. 1.The 400-acre showplace, home and final resting place of Native Dancer, one of the sport's great equine performers, was sold by its longtime owner Alfred G. Vanderbilt to Baltimore developer Jim Ward in 1987.

For decades it has been a Maryland landmark. Drive out Green Spring Avenue to Worthington Road and feast your eyes on Sagamore Farm, the famed horse center where Native Dancer, one of the equine sport's great performers, once galloped. The white fences surrounding the 400-acre showplace farm and the romping thoroughbreds in the pasture came to signify all that was grand about Maryland's long racing tradition.But in recent years, Sagamore Farm has come to signify all that has gone wrong with Maryland racing.

Fathers get respect if they deserve it I was disappointed to read Kevin Cowherd's personal conclusions to a national survey on in-home care for elderly parents ("Lousy survey shows dads get no respect," May 10). Those surveyed were more likely to say they would take care of their mothers than their fathers. In this commentary, Cowherd paints fathers as the helpless victims. From my view, the survey results are a reflection of the type of relationships people have with their parents. It is often the case that fathers are not involved in any aspect of their children's lives - as youth or adults.

It wasn't just a 425-acre swath of one of the prettiest sections of Baltimore County. The place pulsed with history. Its red-roofed barns had housed some of the 20th century's greatest thoroughbreds. The remains of Native Dancer, the genetic link between many modern champions, lay beneath a tombstone at its center. Sagamore Farm fit the ambitions of Under Armour founder Kevin Plank. When he plucked his high school buddy, Tom Mullikin, from a Kentucky farm to start a racing and breeding outfit, Plank said the only goal was to win a Triple Crown.

Dreams of a thoroughbred stallion operation that evoked the state's racing glory days were dealt a setback when the Maryland Stallion Station left its north Baltimore County home and relocated its horses to survive the tough economy. However, Stallion Station president Don Litz is hopeful that by scaling back some of the expenses of the stud operation, the business can thrive while also giving a boost to the two farms where the stallions now stand. Four of the horses were moved to Bonita Farm in Harford County at the end of last year, and three others are at Shamrock Farm in Carroll County.

When a great horse goes down, everyone seems to come together, funneling toward a greater good and higher purpose. We rush to fix this beautiful and broken sport with our megaphones, our picket signs and our finger-pointing. So it was no surprise that when Eight Belles was put down, just moments after crossing the Kentucky Derby finish line, the list of culprits couldn't grow fast enough. Overbreeding, track surfaces, drugs. But most curious of all was the finger pointed at another racehorse, one that died 41 years ago. How could this be?

Iditarod L. Mackey wins race in just over 9 days Lance Mackey won the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, becoming the first musher to win major long-distance North American sled dog races back-to-back. Mackey crossed under the famed burled arch in downtown Nome, Alaska, early yesterday evening, completing the 1,100-mile Iditarod in just over nine days. He celebrated as he came down Nome's Front Street, alternately waving a fist in the air, then high-fiving fans who lined the street. His family mobbed him at the finish line.

Garnet "Buddy" Troyer, a horse trainer who early in his career prepared thoroughbreds at Baltimore County's Sagamore Farm and regularly exercised the legendary racehorse Native Dancer, died of cancer Friday at Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pa. The former Glyndon resident was 70. Born in Baltimore, he was raised on the grounds of the Greenspring Hunt Club, where his father tended the hounds. A 1953 Franklin High School graduate, he served in the Air Force in North Africa. He then became a caretaker and ran the horse breeding stable at Piney Grove, the Butler-area estate of Elizabeth Nichols, and worked for well-known Maryland horsemen Henry Clark and Harry A. Love before becoming the farm trainer at Sagamore -where Native Dancer was standing at stud.

Maryland bloodstock agent Don Litz has long dreamed of bringing thoroughbred stallions to the Worthington Valley in Baltimore County. His dream became real yesterday in a ceremony celebrating the start of construction on the Maryland Stallion Station, a new breeding operation situated on a hill overlooking historic Sagamore Farm in Glyndon. Backed by Lane End's Farm of Kentucky, a top commercial breeder, and $7 million in investor capital, the stallion station is the first to open in Maryland since Cecil County's Northview Stallion Station opened in 1989.

In 1926, a horse owner stared across acres of crops north of Baltimore and envisioned another man's horse farm. The result was Sagamore Farm, a Worthington Valley showcase with brass finishings in the barns, miles of white-board fencing and top-caliber horses in the stalls for more than half a century. Today, the historic property has fallen on hard times symbolized by broken windows, abandoned buildings and corn stalks in the fields where champion horses once roamed. That investors plan to start a stallion station next door and help put Sagamore back in the thoroughbred mainstream is a reprise of what happened 77 years ago. Then, horse owner Guy Bernard Fenwick directed the land into the hands of an industrialist and his grandson, who built the farm and made it shine.

On September 28, 2003, FLORENCEKAPLAN (nee Aaron), beloved wife of the late Martin Kaplan; beloved mother of Shirley Prince, devoted mother-in-law of William Prince; devoted sister of the late Rose Deutsch, Mary Gold, Jack, Ellis and Samuel Aaron; loving grandmother of Martin and Ian Lieberman and Sharon Gendler; also survived by seven great-grandchildren. Services and interment at Oheb Shalom Memorial Park, Berrymans Lane, on Tuesday, September 30 at 1 P.M. Please omit flowers, in mourning at 12519 Sagamore Forest Lane, Reisterstown MD (21136)

Actress Betsey Means has spent the past two weeks getting a real feel for what it was like to be Mother Jones. Since July 7, she's been traveling across New Jersey dressed as the union activist, stopping at parks to recite Jones' famous fiery speeches. She's honoring the 100th anniversary of the March of the Mill Children, when Jones (with children along for part of the way) walked from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt's home on Long Island to protest the plight of child laborers.