Boss Tweedy: Lady With A Lot Of Horse

It is eight o'clock on a clear spring morning at The Meadow farm, a 2,600-acre breeding establishment in the unfashionable reaches of Virginia. Penny Tweedy (see cover), who runs it, has carved time from her schedule for the important business of showing her track trainer, Lucien Laurin, the yearling crop and the laggard 2-year-olds who are not already in Laurin's Belmont barn learning how to get out of a starting gate.

The yearlings have already passed in a slow parade of inspection—Something-fabulous, king of the barn, a Northern Dancer-Somethingroyal colt already worth about $300,000; Line Officer, a deep-chested son of Crewman; a Dr. Fager filly whose legs are causing concern; and eight other glistening animals.

The party moves on to the training track to examine the 2-year-olds. Mrs. Tweedy knows their problems right down to Tally Round, a particularly intractable filly who tries to swallow her tongue, paddles when she walks and generally resists direction.

"Have her teeth been filed yet?" the owner asks. Just then a buzzer sounds indicating a phone call. It is her husband Jack back home on Long Island. Where are his shirts, he wants to know.

That problem dispatched, Mrs. Tweedy tells her farm trainer, Meredith Bailes—whose father worked at The Meadow for 25 years—that she wants to buy a starting gate to train her own horses as well as others on consignment. Before she invests, she wants Bailes to spend two or three months away from the farm in intensive training with Laurin. Bailes looks as if he has heard better ideas in his time, but the plan will probably go through.

In the six years since she took over the management of Meadow Stud from her father, the late Christopher Chenery, Mrs. Tweedy has cut the stable's size from 130 horses to 68, mostly eliminating dead wood. The overall plan is to tighten the operation in every way possible.

Mrs. Tweedy is the most visible owner in racing in a long time, and the closest thing to a new face that settled Establishment has. In manner and life-style she is considerably removed from more flamboyant racing ladies, such as Elizabeth Arden. Penny Tweedy is practical and energetic, as careful with time as with The Meadow budget. When giving an interview she may be sewing on buttons. On Long Island her only help is a part-time secretary and a cleaning woman. Jack's shirts and Tally Round's teeth arc coexisting responsibilities.

With Riva Ridge and Secretariat, Penny Tweedy began racing in a broad streak of luck as well as judgment, but she is thinking well beyond the careers of these two colts. To Rokeby Stable's Elliott Burch, perhaps the most prestigious trainer of all these days and a much-admired rival, Tweedy is a welcome addition to racing. "We think a lot alike. The principles are these: staking out a campaign for a horse, not overracing him, going for the big races, not planning to breed a bunch of sprinters. We both try for classic horses to run in classic races. If not, get rid of them. She is so thorough. She studies where other campaigns have gone wrong and learns."

Study she does—the Racing Form from cover to cover, including regional columns, British and American thoroughbred magazines, the prices that every last horse commanded in any sale or auction. It is all part of an intensive program of self-education that began in 1967 when Christopher Chenery's health started to fail. Prior to that year the Tweedys lived with their four children in Denver. Jack, a lawyer, was one of the original founders of the Vail ski resort and Penny's business activities were limited to sitting on the board of directors of Meadow Stud. She has an older brother and sister, but thinks "my father suspected that if any of us carried on, it would be I."

Chenery was a self-made public utilities millionaire who, against every kind of advice, started his stud in Doswell in 1936 because his impoverished family had antebellum roots there. He was told that the grass was bad, the land swampy, that the place lacked proximity to Kentucky. A former civil engineer, he drained the swamp, learned about grass and bought the horses—though his first notion about breeding was simply to let a stallion into a pasture with several mares. Soon, however, he was getting advice from A. B. Hancock of Claiborne Farm, starting the close association between the families that has continued through the late Bull Hancock, who advised Mrs. Tweedy when she took over, down to his son Seth, who was instrumental in the $6,080,000 syndication of Secretariat.