Thoroughbred

Lucy C. Acton, a former Evening Sun feature writer who later was editor of Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred, formerly Maryland Horse Magazine, died June 7 of cancer of the appendix at Gilchrist Hospice Care. The Timonium resident was 63. "She was a deliberate person and real dedicated to the Maryland horse racing industry. She really cared and that was her life," said Joseph B. Kelly, retired Washington Star racing editor and turf historian. "It is a very complicated business, and she wrote about and participated in every phase of it," said Mr. Kelly, who had worked with Ms. Acton's father, Wilton Snowden Carter, in the late 1940s when both were young reporters covering racing for The Baltimore Sun and the old Evening Sun. "Lucy was a very quiet person but a real hard worker and a little giant," he said.

Country Life Farm in Harford County is a place where the bloodlines of the humans and of the horses have flowed through time and into the future with the ease of a stream. On this Preakness Week morning, the thoroughbred mare Go Steady nurses her 12-day-old foal in a paddock, while up at The Big House, as it is known, three strapping young men circle their grandmother's refrigerator with the same thing in mind — food. "I may grow old," said Mary Jo Pons, the matriarch of a family that has lived and bred horses here since the Depression.

Secretariat. Man O' War. Citation. Maybe, if he manages to win a couple more races in the next few weeks, Animal Kingdom. These are the names of some of the greatest thoroughbreds ever, horses that ran to glory on tracks like Pimlico, Churchill Downs and Belmont Park. Their names have deservedly gone down in history and become part of popular culture. But what about names like Jail Bait, Comply or Die, Onoitsmymothernlaw and the oughtta-be-immortal Yakahickamickadola. In a sport where the names of horses are often wonders to behold (much less to pronounce)

Donald Phillip Townsend, a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran who became a licensed thoroughbred horse breeder, died Nov. 29 from complications after blocked blood vessel surgery at St. Joseph Medical Center. The longtime Keymar resident was 61. Mr. Townsend, the son of a stationary engineer and a homemaker, was born in Baltimore and raised in Highlandtown. After graduating from Patterson Park High School in 1967, Mr. Townsend was drafted into the Army in 1968 and served as an infantryman with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam.

Let's hope that by now Maryland horsemen have learned not to get their hopes up when Frank Stronach makes big promises. A day after the owner of Maryland's thoroughbred tracks promised to keep Laurel Park open, Penn National, his partner in the Maryland Jockey Club, is throwing cold water on it. A Penn National spokesman says the company was not consulted before Mr. Stronach reversed course on the Laurel closing and disagrees with him. Penn National...

Jayne McKenney Meredith, who assisted in the operation of a Baltimore County horse breeding farm and attended 50 consecutive Preakness Stakes, died of Alzheimer's disease complications June 26 at the Blakehurst Retirement Community in Towson. She was 90 and had lived in Kingsville. Born Jayne McKenney in Centreville, where she was raised, she attended Western Maryland College for two years and then Bard Avon Secretarial School, from which she graduated in 1941. She worked for five years as a private secretary at the McCormick spices plant on Light Street.

Henry Contee Bowie "Hal" Clagett II, scion of an old Southern Maryland family and elder statesman of Maryland racing whose name has been synonymous with the sport for more than six decades, died Monday of pneumonia at Anne Arundel Medical Center. He was 93. "Hal was an icon in horse breeding in Maryland and maintaining the thoroughbred breed was his life," said Joseph B. Kelly, retired Washington Star racing editor and turf historian. "And he was the picture of the typical English-style landowner and horseman."