The Lady Who Won Too Often

The other morning out at Belmont Park a blue-eyed blonde in soiled jodphurs, holding a stop watch as though it were the Hope Diamond, stood at the rail watching a thoroughbred work out in the thin morning sun. A few feet away a knot of exercise boys stood watching her. "That one could win breezing," said one from a safe, reverent distance.

The blonde was Josephine Abercrombie of Houston, Texas, part owner of Pin Oak Farms, one of the country's leading horsewomen, and, since the retirement of Native Dancer, possibly Belmont's stellar attraction on these crisp fall days. Although she is only 16 hands high, like The Dancer, Miss Abercrombie is handsomely configured, stands superbly, and is rumored to have a bank account that runs into eight figures.

A NIGHT OF REVELRY

It was 6:25 a.m. and the lady in question should have been sleeping off a night of revelry instead of clocking the workout of Bless Pat, one of the 18 thoroughbreds which she hopes will shortly make Pin Oak a name to conjure with at mutuel windows from Hialeah to Hollywood Park.

There had been a night of revelry, all right, but Miss Abercrombie had slept it off in exactly 3? hours. She left the Waldorf's Blue Grass Ball at 2 a.m., slept until 5:30 and drove into Belmont's Stable 42 shortly after six, thus combining the best of two fairly heady worlds. If Miss Abercrombie?"Call me Jo," she said sternly?is the result of burning the candle at both ends, the candlemakers of America should be standing in line for testimonials.

This is her first brush with thoroughbred racing, although she fell in love with her first horse when she was four years old on her father's 90,000-acre Houston ranch, and has been showing them with blinding (as in silver cup) success since she was six, some 22 years ago.

If she does as well with racers as she has done with show horses, mutuel windows from coast to coast should be glutted with Pin Oak bettors. At the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden a year ago, for example, Miss Abercrombie, wearing a black satin dress designed by Charles James, took 10 out of 11 firsts in the harness-pony classes, and added two more harness-horse blues to the award-studded Abercrombie scutcheon. She also won the American Horse Shows Association Award for the leading harness pony in the U.S. in 1953 with Glenholme Troubador, and this year took the Fine Harness Horse championship at Louisville with Parading Lady.

This staggering success story is perhaps the main reason that she will be missing from the line-up when the 66th horse show opens at the Garden next week (p. 36-37). "I've proved myself with show horses," she said diffidently, "but I'm a real greenhorn at this racing business and I'd like to see what I can do with it."

Miss Abercrombie pushed back a strand of blonde hair and dropped her stop watch in the process. Three stableboys dived for it and she grinned at them apologetically. "The first time I used this thing I didn't know how to start it," she said, brushing the watch off tenderly. "The second day I couldn't stop it, and the third day out I lost it. But I'm learning...."

Pin Oak Farms, which she owns in partnership with her Uncle Bob Abercrombie and two Houston contractors, William A. Smith and Herman Brown, is barely a year old and is still relatively unknown, but stable scoop says it won't be for long.