Thoroughbred Horse Racing
Following her marriage to Jock Whitney, the new Mrs. Whitney immediately became involved in Thoroughbred racing. Not satisfied to watch her husband race horses, she set up her own operations and made her Llangollen home a major breeding and training center. On the property she constructed a variety of equine fittings, including a famous horseshoe-shaped barn, stud barn and broodmare sheds, tack rooms, paddocks, and a training track.
In the 1930s, she owned a string of successful racehorses, winning the 1931 Adirondack Stakes with her filly Brocado and with Stepenfetchit, won the 1932 Latonia Derby and ran third in the Kentucky Derby. With her colt Singing Wood, Liz Whitney won the 1933 Belmont Futurity Stakes, the 1934 Withers Stakes and Queens County Handicap. In 1936 Singing Wood won the Toboggan Handicap at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York and when her husband's business interest took the couple to Hollywood, the colt raced there and won the 1936 Santa Margarita Handicap.
Divorced in June 1940, Liz Whitney retained the Virginia estate and in Upperville in June 1948, she married for a second time to Dr. E. Cooper Person, Jr., a surgery professor. She would be married a third time in November 1954 in Washington, D.C. to Richard Lunn, a forty-year-old public-relations man and step-son of U.S. Senator Wallace H. White. Her fourth marriage, in 1960, was to Col. Cloyce J. Tippett (1913–1993). This marriage, her longest, lasted until her death in 1988.
Following her divorce from Jock Whitney, in its March 16, 1942 issue, TIME magazine reported that Liz Whitney planned to concentrate on racing and would sell all but one of her show horses. Nonetheless, she remained very active in equestrian sport for many years and race horses in both flat racing and steeplechase events under the name of Llangollen Farm. She imported bloodstock from Europe for breeding purposes and over the years expanded operations to breed horses in Ocala, Florida and in Ireland.
She also purchased a farm property on Fitch Road in the town of Saratoga, New York. The house, built in the 1770s, was used as her residence during the racing season at nearby Saratoga Race Course where many of America's horse racing elite gathered each summer. Sold in 1971, the property today is owned by McMahon of Saratoga Thoroughbreds, LLC. Her stable colors of purple and pink on farm structures in time have given way to the more modest colors for McMahon of green and white.
Whitney worked with notable trainers such as future U.S. Racing Hall of Fame inductee Henry S. Clark who got his first stakes win with her colt, Blue Cypress. Other trainers of note who conditioned Llangollen Farm horses were James W. Healy, Stanley T. Greene, Frank H. Merrill, Jr. and another future Hall of Fame trainer Charlie Whittingham who got his big break when she hired him to run her California stable. In 1953, Whittingham trained his first Champion in the form of her two-year-old colt, Porterhouse. She bred Sherluck, winner of the 1961 Belmont Stakes.
Some other successful racehorses owned by Liz Whitney Tippett included:
- Corn Husker - won L. E. Stoddard Jr. Steeplechase in 1956 and in 1957 flat racing won the San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano Handicap and the prestigious Santa Anita Handicap
- Divine Comedy - won the 1960 Saranac Handicap
- Gone Fishin - third in the 1958 Preakness Stakes
- Lord Derby - won 1972 San Luis Obispo Handicap
- Mister Gus - won 1956 San Antonio Handicap and 1956 Arlington Handicap
- Nashville - won 1957 Palos Verdes Handicap
- Porterhouse - 1953 Champion 2-year-old colt. Won the Belmont Futurity Stakes, San Carlos Handicap (1955, 1956), Santa Barbara Handicap (1956), defeated Swaps in the 1956 Californian Stakes
- Pretense - won numerous stakes races including the 1967 Santa Anita Handicap and finished second to Native Diver in the 1968 Hollywood Gold Cup
- Restless Runner - won 1971 Baldwin Stakes
- Restless Wind - won 1958 Washington Park Futurity, Arlington Futurity, Tremont Stakes. He was the leading Florida-based stallion during the mid-sixties.
- Royal Living - won 1959 San Juan Capistrano Handicap
- Social Climber - won 1956 San Felipe Stakes
At her Llangollen estate, Liz Whitney entertained celebrities and politicians as well as personalities involved in the racing world such as Bing Crosby, Eddie Arcaro and Prince Aly Khan. Always a free spirit, in a 2001 book titled The Middleburg Mystique, author Vicky Moon recounted how Whitney hosted wild hunt balls and of the time when she brought her favorite horse into the mansion's great room. Moon's book also says that she kept thirty-five dogs with the most beloved ones stored in her deep freezer after they died.
Read more about this topic: Liz Whitney Tippett
Famous quotes containing the words thoroughbred, horse and/or racing:
“A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or has visited a menagerie or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. “A boy,” says Plato, “is the most vicious of all beasts;” and in the same spirit the old English poet Gascoigne says, “A boy is better unborn than untaught.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)