A Coming Of Age

Summer cooled into October. The daily rations of the Bold Ruler colt were boosted periodically, up to five and finally to six quarts of grain a day by the time he was separated from Somethingroyal.

With autumn, too, came the time to name the weanlings. In this matter The Jockey Club rules are stringent. For example, a name cannot be that of a famous horse, the trademark of a product, the name of an illustrious or infamous person, alive or dead—and it cannot contain more than 18 characters, including punctuation. One name after another was submitted and rejected by The Jockey Club stewards—The Meadow sent in a total of six, two sets of three names each, for the colt.

The first choice in the first set was Scepter, a name that Penny Tweedy liked. The second, suggested by Miss Ham, was Royal Line. The third was Mrs. Tweedy's Something Special. All three were quickly rejected. The first name of the second set was Game of Chance, which Mrs. Tweedy suggested, as she did the second, Deo Volente, a name for which she had been trying to gain acceptance: her maternal grandfather used to say, whenever he was planning to do something, that he would do it, "Deo volente," Latin for "God willing." (The stewards were not willing, no doubt because it used the name of an Illustrious Being.)

Miss Ham suggested the third name on that list. She had once been the secretary of Norman Hezekiah Davis, a banker and diplomat who served in a number of ambassadorial posts for the United States, including that of chairman of the American delegation to the disarmament conference in Geneva, the home of the League of Nations' Secretariat.

Secretariat, Miss Ham thought, had a nice ring to it, and the name was submitted as the last on the second list. The following January the stewards advised The Meadow that the colt by Bold Ruler—Somethingroyal, by Princequillo, with the white star and stripe and the three white stockings, born on March 30, 1970, had been registered under the name of Secretariat.

Secretariat grew out above the match-stick legs, his ration of grain increasing from six quarts to seven, on to eight as he lengthened, heightened and widened through his yearling year of 1971.

That September a 2-year-old Meadow Stud colt named Riva Ridge raced to a handy victory in the $75,000-added Futurity Stakes, and two days afterward the chief delegates from the stable victory party arrived at The Meadow. There were Penny Tweedy, Elizabeth Ham and a volatile little French Canadian, Lucien Laurin, Meadow stable's new trainer.

Three decades had passed since Laurin was ruled off the racetrack for alleged possession of an illegal battery in Rhode Island; since he galloped horses for Alfred Vanderbilt at Sagamore Farm; since Vanderbilt, believing in his innocence, had moved to have the ruling lifted. Laurin remembered that mediocre early career, with its painful moments and long winter and summer days under sheds from West Virginia through New England and Canada. It was a difficult circuit; low purses, sore and crippled horses banished from Long Island, small tracks, living from day to day.

Laurin was born about 50 miles north of Montreal, in St. Paul, Quebec, a town in which he did not stay long. He left school early to work at Delorimier Park, a half-mile oval in Montreal where he first exercised horses and finally, in 1929, he became a jockey. He was moderately successful, reaching his professional zenith when he rode Sir Michael to victory in the King's Plate in 1935. His career as a rider finally took him to that summer morning in 1938 when he walked into the jockeys' room at Narragansett Park, took off his jacket, hung it behind him and sat down to play a game of cards.

"The next thing I know, they said, 'The steward wants to see you downstairs,' " Laurin remembers. "And I said, 'For what?' " He got to his feet and went downstairs, into the office of one of the stewards. The steward put the battery device on the table in front of him and said, "What are you doing with this in your pocket?"