Tony Franklin’s Ford Gran Torino was just like the one Starsky and Hutch tooled around in on ABC TV every Saturday night, the one they used to chase down pimps and drug dealers. Tony’s car was the color gold, and it was strictly for the good guys. He used it to escort Marian to the food market or to chauffeur his kids to their friends’ houses and jobs. The Gran Torino was just a ride, but it was also pure Tony Franklin—American-made and as solid as they come. But it was a little badass too.
In the spring of 1977 Tony wheeled the car around front, and Ronnie came out of the house. He opened the trunk, tossed in his grip, and then slammed himself into the back seat. Marian rode shotgun. Father, mother, and son pulled out of their narrow Dundalk street and lit out for the broad highway. They were barreling down the road and headed for the ancient town of Middleburg, Virginia, only about two and a half hours from their front door and yet a world away.
It was a journey that would take them from the cold, hard concrete streets of their industrial hometown to a privileged world of stone fences and rolling green meadows. Middleburg was an old town still clinging to eighteenth-century agrarian values and a stringent caste system, a place where the rich and poor often came together in the horse industry.
The Franklins weren’t going there looking for bygone charm. They were hurtling through time and space hoping to find Ronnie’s future and, with any luck at all, the origin story of what they hoped would be his legend.
Middleburg, like Dundalk, had plenty of hard-working poor folks, but it was dominated at various times by celebrated American families like the Mellons, the DuPonts, and the Kennedys. They were the ones who gave the small, charming place its edge, its opulence, and its aura.
Middleburg was established before the Revolutionary War, but it was of the Civil War. Located in the heart of the Confederacy, it once saw huge armies of boys, not much older than Ronnie, come thundering through on horseback, rifles slung over their shoulders and sabers glinting by their sides. The kids were goaded to clash and spill their blood all for the sake of old men and their financial interests.
The boys wound up on the ground—a feast for buzzing flies, scavenger birds, and foraging dogs—while the powerful old men whose ideals had killed them were sculpted in bronze and bolted to marble slabs. It was an honor, supposedly, but the old men’s names faded as quickly as their dreams, and the statues became public toilets for crows and pigeons.
Tony Franklin, as always, was there for his son. To him it was a pleasure to drive his boy to a more meaningful life. But going to Middleburg was also something of a sad ending for the Franklins. It marked the discontinuation of their parental control over him and his ascendancy to adulthood. Success in Middleburg, if Ronald could find it, meant not only a more independent life for him but also a far different life than that of his parents.
Tony and Marian dropped Ronnie off and then returned to the row houses of their neighborhood, comfortable and confident that their son was in good hands. They left him at the prestigious training facility founded by Paul Mellon himself, an heir to a great banking fortune and one of the ten richest men in America.
Tony may have done the driving, but everyone in the car knew it was Buddy Delp who was driving the process. The Franklins were grateful to Ronnie’s famous and powerful benefactor. It seemed to them that Buddy alone had the ability to give the boy a real future.
Delp’s plan was to have Ronnie tutored in the fine art of race riding by Barbara Graham. Buddy knew Barbara well. She was his go-to source for training and breaking his early-stage horses. Shopping sprees in Kentucky by Delp or his clients ended with Buddy shipping the new stock to Barbara in Middleburg.
Breaking colts was one line of the horse business that held no intrigue at all for Delp. He was more than happy to let Barbara handle that, and why not? To the press and public Buddy got the credit for making racers out of the horses, and he was the one who enjoyed whatever real financial reward there was to be gained out of a horse’s success. By the same token, training race-riding jockeys wasn’t really in Barbara’s wheelhouse. She was known far and wide as a superb rider and early-stage trainer. She even tutored young riders of various sorts from time to time. But rarely, if ever, had she trained a jockey. It wasn’t a job that she relished.
Barbara accepted Buddy’s request to teach Ronnie, but only because he twisted her arm to do it. In fact, she owed a great deal of her business success to Delp and his unwavering commitment to her organization. Buddy was one of her biggest, most important, and most consistent clients. In a large sense she was financially successful because he fed her work. It was something she could count on year after year. “She didn’t just, by the grace of her heart, say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’d love to train a jockey and let him ride my horses and fall off,’” one of Graham’s employees remembered. She took on Ronnie as a pupil because Delp expected her to do it and he enjoyed the leverage to make it happen.
Tucked away in rural Virginia, Barbara was something of a secret to the wider world, but she was an eminence in Middleburg. She was known and respected by virtually everyone in her hometown as a successful businesswoman. In addition to her humming horse operation, she also ran a profitable farm only about twenty minutes away from Middleburg.
Male admiration for Barbara went beyond the workplace. She was a great beauty, highly athletic at about 5 feet 5 inches and 120 pounds, and possessed of pleasing curves. She had dark eyes and a creamy complexion, but her trademark was her windswept brown hair, proof that she was an outdoorswoman and a professional too serious and self-confident to bother with her appearance.
Barbara sometimes enthusiastically returned the male attention that she got. She was a vivacious spirit, a coquette who openly flirted with men she liked despite the serious and burdensome responsibilities that were constantly on her shoulders. She had more than one great romance in her lifetime.
In her horse obsession, youth, brown hair, ruddy complexion, and painfully beautiful face, the young Barbara bore a striking resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. And like the main character of that film Barbara had a savant’s understanding of thoroughbreds.
Barbara’s many positive qualities made her attractive to important women too. Jacqueline Kennedy, a rider since her privileged childhood, built a home for herself and her young husband, President John F. Kennedy, in Middleburg’s hunt country. She intended it as a getaway from the White House for her husband and a place where she could spend more time on horseback. The Kennedys’ estate, called Wexford after the Irish county where the president’s forbears had originated, was a Brady Bunch banal rancher, but it held a lot of promise for Mrs. Kennedy, who imagined a family retreat there and a home base for her serious riding.
The one person whose company Mrs. Kennedy sought in Middleburg was Barbara Graham’s. The two women enjoyed a close and enduring friendship, and they rode together for many decades, despite the fact that Wexford was sold soon after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. They were still riding together thirty years later, until the last year of Jackie’s life.
Before Barbara raised and trained horses, she had been raised side by side with them. Her father, Sam Graham, was a farmer and a thoroughbred breeder. His farm in Purcellville was young Barbara’s classroom and laboratory. She broke her first yearlings there while she was still only a young girl.
As an adult and a professional, Barbara took her natural talent to another level. One of her clients, Preston Burch, a Hall of Fame trainer with a long resume of stakes victories, paid her to keep his horses in her barns. During his daily visits to check in on his stock he also provided her a free education. Burch taught Barbara his methods for horse care, regaled her with stories from his career, and indulged her endless stream of questions. “I should be paying [Burch],” Barbara said, “rather than accepting money for his horses.”
Burch’s advice might have been free, but it was valuable to Barbara, who listened to everything the experienced horseman told her and amalgamated it into her own distinct methods. In short, her education about horse care, management, and training was as impeccable as it could be. She knew as much about horses as there was to know.
Graham was ambitious and built an enviable operation at the training center that was her headquarters, dominating Barn 1, the largest structure among the many stables. Her stock also spilled over into about half of Barn 3. She filled her stalls with dozens of thoroughbreds, each one coming to her as little more than a baby but leaving her care after about six months—tame, calm, and ready to fulfill its function at the race track for its permanent trainer.
Working for Barbara was hard but fun. Women, especially in the exercise-rider ranks, dominated her operation. Each December the ladies adorned their protective helmets with reindeer antlers; in the spring, they donned bunny ears. It was a highly cohesive, mostly happy, and totally satisfying professional environment with a familial feel. The only drawback was that no one, except maybe Barbara, got rich working there. Nevertheless, her largely female staff was a model of feminine empowerment in a less than progressive era. Though it was admirable, it was hardly a political statement. “Barbara hired us because she could get us cheaper,” her close friend and employee Sharon Maloney remembered with a laugh.
In truth, it was brutal work. After laboring all day for Barbara at the training center, in the late afternoon the ladies hustled over to her farm in Purcellville, where they put in another partial workday. They’d catch the wild horses on her land and break them in her stalls. “It was an all-day thing,” Maloney wistfully remembered, “and I got $75 a week for doing it.”
If Barbara was a little tight with a buck (her father was rumored to be even cheaper), she was at least as parsimonious with herself as she was with the help. That was never more evident than when she suffered a terrifying mishap. She was exercising a horse they all knew to be difficult when the animal suddenly went rogue and darted for the inside rail. In a frantic instant Barbara was jerked from her saddle and plunged to the hard ground. In the violence of the moment, both of her wrists were broken.
Barbara was in immense pain, but she scraped herself off the ground, hobbled to her car, and drove home to rest for the remainder of the day. The next morning she was back at Barn 1 bright and early and without complaint. She never bothered going to the doctor. That cost money. Cheap and tough, that was Barbara.
Her personality featured some other trying aspects. She was a perfectionist, and when she was in a foul mood, she could be short with her people. If she observed a job being handled poorly, she would quickly eject the errant employee from both the task and her barn. “You do it my way or you get up out of here,” she’d say. And then she’d expertly complete the task herself.
Barbara demanded that everyone, regardless of title or primary function, have an expert’s knowledge of every task, no matter how difficult or menial. And if you worked for Barbara Graham, you’d better love the job because the days were long and unforgiving. The lights in the barn went on at around 4:30 a.m. The training began at dawn, which meant taking the horses out and galloping them. That would go on roughly until lunchtime, when the animals were cooled down and fed. After a break for the workers to eat and rest up a little, everyone came back to the barn around 3:00 p.m. to pick out the stalls and, eventually, to feed the horses their dinner.
Barbara’s workers typically went home around 4 p.m. In addition to her horse-breaking business, however, she also trained horses of racing age. On the days when her horses raced, a Graham employee’s “work day” could stretch far into the night. On racing days they traveled to tracks in West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, or New Jersey to compete, and they rarely came home until midnight or even far beyond.
That schedule was more or less adhered to seven days a week, 365 days a year. “The horses don’t know anything about weekends or holidays,” John Dale “J.D.” Thomas, another Middleburg trainer, said.
While Barbara was universally respected by her staff, there were moments when she was egotistical and even grating. She was known, when the mood struck her, to walk through the barn loudly proclaiming her accomplishments, as though she alone had brought them all off. The word “I” especially stung the ears of her colleagues, but none more than those of her assistant trainer, Horace Marlow Jr. “‘Remember when I did this!’ she’d shout,” Horace said. ‘“Remember when I did that!’” Horace was sometimes called by his nickname, “Junior,” but he was so cool and casual that even his nickname had a nickname, and he usually went by “Junie.”
Like Barbara, Junie was born in Middleburg in what was then the apartheid state of Virginia. He was African American and attended segregated schools. His father was a chauffeur and a butler on the large domestic staff of John S. Pettibone, a wealthy land and horse owner.
Junie attended Frederick Douglass High School in nearby Leesburg. It was the very first public high school in the area ever built for African American students, and it wasn’t even constructed until 1941. Junie was an easygoing and good-natured man and was mostly untroubled by the oppressive racial mores he encountered throughout his life. “Junie,” his old dad told him when he was only a boy, “you ain’t no better than nobody else, but there ain’t a damned soul better than you.”
Junie lived by those words. “I didn’t believe in the Martin Luther King turn-the-other-cheek bullshit,” he said. “If you hit me, I’m gonna hit you right back. If you cuss me, I’m gonna cuss you back. If you was too big, I was going to find the biggest thing I could find and knock hell out of you.”
Despite Junie’s eye-for-an-eye credo, rural Virginia in the Jim Crow era was a little kinder to Junie and his family than it was to others like them. When he was a child, Marlow and his siblings had played with white children from a neighboring family. The two sets of kids, raised together, were extremely close, so much so that Billy, the oldest of the white kids, became highly protective of Junie and his siblings. “If some white kid said something to us that we didn’t like, Billy would kill us if we tried to go after [that other kid],” Junie remembered. “He’d say, ‘Y’all, get back; I’ve got this.’ He’d take care of it. His parents also would take care of my mother and father in the same way.”
Junie was grateful for that protection; it saved him from having to do a hard and dangerous job himself. But he didn’t believe for a second that it came from any sort of racial progressiveness. It was just familiar affection, an odd aspect of southern life that bound the families so tightly together. “I guess [that family] loved us,” Junie said. “If ‘John’ down the road was Black, they’d treat him like a Black person, but for us it was different.”
Despite his tough talk, Junie wasn’t a bruiser. He was just average sized and more predisposed to humor than rage. He had suffered with asthma since boyhood, and that had kept him out of sports and, later, the army. After high school, with his vocational options limited by racial inequities, a modest education, and location, he picked up work with a horse trainer and learned the trade.
Eventually he was “discovered” by Barbara, who taught him her incomparable training methods.
By the time Junie reached his forties, he was an exuberant middle-aged man and in full command of his profession. He was the head of Barbara’s core business, the horse-breaking operation. If he had weaknesses, they were for whiskey and women. Junie had a passion for both, and both got him into steep trouble from time to time. Nevertheless, Marlow had Barbara’s full confidence, and he was her key man at Middleburg in the spring of 1977, when Buddy Delp’s protégé, Ronnie Franklin, made his appearance for his jockey training.
After his mom and dad dropped him off, Franklin moved into a bedroom in Barbara’s farmhouse, and the Bid was given a straw bed in one of the many stalls in Barn 3. Ronnie was personally tutored in race riding by Barbara, but he also spent much of his time taking orders from the young staff of female exercise riders and from Junie. That didn’t sit well with him, especially in the beginning.
Alix White, an exercise rider who personally helped oversee Franklin, experienced firsthand his displeasure at being controlled by anyone or anything. Especially a woman. “Barbara said, ‘Teach him everything,’” White remembered. But that wasn’t easy. Ronnie rebelled against her instructions. “He was very much a Baltimore boy,” White said, and it wasn’t a compliment.
Graham wanted Ronnie to learn a lot more than just riding. She wanted him to understand everything about horses, from the ground up, and there were no better teachers than the six young women who attended to the thoroughbreds in her operation. But Ronnie, an impatient and impudent kid, was focused solely on being a jockey. He couldn’t understand why he had to waste his time listening to anyone else but Barbara about anything else other than riding. “He was a little wise ass,” Alix White said. And her riding colleague, Paula Parsons, knew just what she meant. “He was a kid, a brat,” Paula said.
Ronnie did his best to confirm that assessment. If they said something to him, tried to teach something to him, he took it as a personal insult and fired back. “I don’t need to know that,” Ronnie shouted at Alix. She responded to his babyish protests with ration and reason: “You need to know the basics of how a horse works,” she calmly told him. Instead of accepting the instruction, Ronnie protested, pleaded, and complained. “He . . . irritated all of us,” Paula Parsons admitted.
Even though Ronnie was young and the women were mature, the give and take of male versus female played a role in their interactions. “You can’t tell me nothing; you a girl,” Ronnie screamed at his “bosses.”
The young ladies felt it too. “It’s a pain in the rear when you have [to teach someone] who can’t ride and they are at that cocky male age,” Paula said. But Franklin’s outsized swagger, coupled with his tiny frame, also amused her. She almost saw him as a rooster. “Those little guys are so cocky,” Paula said, laughing. “It’s the little man complex.”
Alix and the other exercise riders took no real offense in Franklin’s impudence. And anyway, they knew how to put him in his place. “We knocked him down every day,” Alix said. Like any novice, Ronnie was started on sweet-natured horses. “Knocking him down” meant putting him on animals that were, according to Alix, “just pure evil, [animals] that will hurt you.” So when Ronnie acted up, the girls put him on something that would buck him right off. And it was a long way down.
Franklin’s attitude also earned him Junie Marlow’s tough love. “He was a prick, and I could’ve slapped his ass a couple of times,” Junie said. “He was sassy. If you asked him to do something, his answer was, ‘I’ll do it in the morning.’ He was a brat, that’s all, a know-it-all.”
Ronnie had maturity issues at Middleburg, but no one saw them as evidence of drug issues. Everyone who knew him at the training center was adamant about that. “That kid wasn’t on no drugs and wasn’t no drunk,” Junie Marlow said. “Believe me; I would know.” Alix White agreed. “There was no hint whatsoever that Ronnie had any kind of drug problem when he was here,” she said.
The teenage rider was sober but difficult. He was a trying kid, but to the professionals at Middleburg that made him all the more qualified to be a winner. “Ronnie Franklin was kind of arrogant,” Junie said, “so we knew right away he was gonna be a good race rider. Nice boys, I don’t think too many of ’em make good riders.”
And nobody at Middleburg doubted for a second that Ronnie had the swagger and the fight and the growing skill set of a successful race rider. “He had good balance on a horse; there was no doubt about that,” Alix White said. “He had natural ability.”
After a while Ronnie matured on the job, put the bad attitude behind him, and hunkered down in earnest to learn. Barbara’s people could see him working harder, and he was finally absorbing their lessons.
As they say in Middleburg, a rider had to know “when to go and when to whoa.” So Ronnie learned to ride fast and to pull a horse up. He was taught to warm up the horses and to gallop them. And he developed a natural clock in his head for breezing the animals.
Barbara stood beside the exercise track and watched his progress. She required him to understand the profession’s nomenclature. For instance, he had to understand the poles and be able to distinguish the quarter pole from the sixteenth poles. “Go from the quarter pole!” Barbara might scream out to him. When he reached the quarter pole, he had to recognize the marker and kick into high gear when he got there.
Overall, Franklin proved he was an adept student of racing and showed that he could quickly absorb everything he needed to know. He did as well with the subtle physical skills the job required. He learned everything, and he learned it all with the one skill prized above all others in horse racing: speed.
“He learned things in days that took others weeks to learn,” Alix White said. “He had a natural seat. He knew how to sit on a horse just right, relaxed, with nice quiet hands.” “He had good hands,” Junie Marlow agreed. “He could hold a horse in his hands. We showed him everything. And you knew that this punk was going to be a race rider.”
While he was in Middleburg growing and progressing, Ronnie missed his family back in Baltimore. His loneliness was alleviated by occasional visits from his parents and his little nephew, Tony Cullum.
Buddy also made the scene from time to time, but he was a disruptive presence. Barbara was highly respected in Middleburg, but when Buddy was there he spoke to her in condescending tones and without respect. He dominated Barbara and made unreasonable demands of her. On one visit to Middleburg he brought his girlfriend, Regina. Buddy insisted that Barbara find a “lead pony” for Regina to ride. Barbara didn’t even own one, but to appease Delp she rounded one up.
A tragicomedy unfolded. “Buddy insisted that his girlfriend wanted to ride [the pony],” Sharon Maloney said, “but we didn’t think she wanted even a little bit to do with it.” The pony, sensing the tentativeness of the rider, took off with her aboard. Regina was terrified as the horse circled the track twice with her bouncing around on its back, helpless to control it. Barbara shouted, “Oh, no!” as she chased them around the track.
Ronnie had much better luck on one of the first horses he got to ride. It was the steel gray colt that belonged to Harry Meyerhoff, the one that was called Spectacular Bid.
At first no one on the staff saw anything special or unusual about the Bid. Barbara took in about thirty yearlings every single year. They all came from excellent bloodlines, and every single one had high hopes attached to it. Of course, very few were special. Spectacular Bid didn’t arrive with shafts of light beaming down on him or a chorus exulting behind him. In fact, much like Ronnie, the young Bid didn’t even make a great first impression. “Yeah, he was just another horse to us,” Alix White admitted, just another long face in a sea of them.
If the Bid stood out at all, it was for negative reasons. “He was a lazy little piglet,” White said. “You had to kick and beat him to make him go. At first, the riders didn’t like riding him very much. They considered him slow and lethargic. They took turns on him so that no one would be stuck with him all of the time.”
The Bid was “broken” in the same small incremental steps as every other young horse that Barbara trained. He was taken to a small fenced-in pen and “lunged,” which simply meant that he was walked in circles. After that, he was outfitted with tack and then lunged some more. After he was used to the equipment, a small man or woman would lie across his back, without a saddle, just to give him the feeling of human contact. Finally, a saddle was added with a rider sitting atop when the staff was sure the Bid would take it well.
These small, slow steps were necessary before rapid movement could begin. And even then everything was incremental and deliberate. The horses were taught to jog before they cantered. They cantered before they galloped. They galloped for one mile before they were driven two miles. They walked through the starting gate before they were taught to bust out of it. After all of these steps, a horse was finally breezed or, in horse vernacular, asked to run.
Bid didn’t do anything differently than any of the other horses, and no one noticed anything exceptional in him. But in his steel gray coat he was kind of like Clark Kent stuffed into a conservative business suit that made him appear ordinary or meek. But looking closely enough, one could see the complex network of sinews, bones, and arteries, the machinery of a savage fighter and a winner.
The Bid was in fact physically ideal for a racer. He was a little larger than average but neither too big nor too small for speed. What really stood out were his powerful hindquarters. The Bid’s haunches rose high above his shoulders, where his thick thighs culminated in his muscular rump, like a monstrous jackrabbit.
Staff members noticed the Bid’s joy in completing all of the tasks of an aspiring racer. They noticed that he was a quick learner and performed without complaint, sensing his comfort in galloping and especially in how he found his rhythm. At the turns he effortlessly changed leads, switching from the right foreleg to the left or vice versa, a vitally important component of a successful racer.
While most fans and bettors would later examine the Bid’s physical characteristics, Junie’s educated eyes saw something special in his intellect and disposition. “He was one of the smartest, kindest horses,” Junie said. “He was a stud horse who never did anything wrong. He never bucked. A horse like that will nip at you a little bit, bite at you a little bit because he’s a stud. Spectacular Bid never did nothing like that. He was a kind horse, easy to break. He was a sweet horse. He was just a smart animal.”
Because Barbara’s primary responsibility was breaking horses, the young thoroughbreds in her care were never really asked to run at top speed for her. That came later, when they were with their permanent trainers. At Middleburg the primary task was to develop muscle and bone. In fact, the goal was to remodel bone and make it appropriate for a racing animal. They saw a danger in asking a horse to run too fast, too early, believing it could create permanent damage.
Barbara’s staff rarely had knowledge of a racer’s ultimate, mature speed. But with the Bid, it was different. Junie had a hunch, and he wanted to get a glimpse of exactly what the horse was capable of doing. Early one morning, under an orange-yellow dawn sky he went to the exercise track with three riders and three horses. One of them was the Bid. His instructions were simple: “Make them gallop,” Junie said. “Let ’em go.”
Marlow, the lifelong horseman, could scarcely believe his eyes. The steel gray immediately leapt out in front. The other two horses, both elite thoroughbreds, were moving as fast as they could, yet their legs looked leaden. They were plodding, barely moving, it seemed, and soon they weren’t even in Junie’s line of sight. Marlow’s eyes were fixed on the Bid, and almost out of the gate he was well beyond his competitors. “[The Bid] whistled Dixie,” Junie said. “He took off and left the other two in the dust.”
Junie Marlow was the first to know. He saw and recognized that one special horse every horseman waits a lifetime to see. With the help of his watch and his own two eyes, Junie knew that horse had arrived. It was the Bid.
Meanwhile, the world’s next great sensation in the saddle was ready to take a ride of his own. Ronnie Franklin was ready to depart. He had grown immensely in Middleburg, appearing on the scene as a petulant little boy, a source of amusement to his handlers and teachers. But in two short years he’d grown disciplined, passed from indolent to industrious, and earned the respect of his skeptical co-workers.
In fact, though, Franklin was still a boy. He was slated to stay in Middleburg until late December, but as the end of November approached, he was homesick. Thanksgiving was coming, and he desperately wanted to be back in Dundalk for the holiday with his mother and father and the rest of his family. So the night before the big day Ronnie called his dad and asked the old man if he wouldn’t mind coming to get him.
Tony had expected to take it easy and watch football. Thanksgiving was one of the few holidays Tony allowed himself rest from his grueling schedule. But when Ronnie’s call came in, there was never any doubt about what he would do. The next morning, he was up and out the door and in his car by 5:00 a.m. He drove all the way to Middleburg, picked up Ronnie, and then drove all the way back to Dundalk. He spent about five and a half hours in his car that day just to bring his boy home.
By dinnertime Ronnie was seated comfortably at the table, surrounded by all of the people who loved him. He was about to become a professional jockey, and he was the star of the family. All they wanted to talk about was horse racing and his new life high atop the fast and powerful animals. Ronnie knew all about it, but the greatest ride he had had in the last two years was the one earlier that day, going home in Tony Franklin’s Gran Torino.