Horse Trainer

John Forbes remembers hanging out with his dad on the Delaware Park backstretch in the late-1950s and all through the 1960s. Every year, father and son would spend the summer at Delaware, getting the father's horses ready to run and watching some of the best animals anywhere race at DelPark. In the intervening 40 years, John Forbes, like his father, became a horse trainer, a very successful trainer. He's been back to DelPark from time to time, but never been back like yesterday.

In 1984, David Hofmans was set to give up. He was in therapy, not far, he thought, from a breakdown. He was a horse trainer with exactly four horses in his barn. He was considering a job in sales. His father, a racing fan, had introduced him to the sport. He had learned the inside of the game from college classmate Gary Jones, later a top trainer and the son of another top trainer, Farrell Jones. The race track, Hofmans decided, was where he wanted to be. And then he found himself staring at those four horses, contemplating a job in the real world, far from the fantasyland that is horse racing.

Retired 76ers star Julius Erving, columnist Art Buchwald and Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D., Hawaii) are among the winners of this year's Horatio Alger Awards, given to Americans who have triumphed over "humble beginnings and adversity. " The awards were announced yesterday. Erving, 39, was cited for helping to support his family when he was a youngster by working at odd jobs. Buchwald, 63, grew up during the Depression in an orphanage and foster homes, and Inouye, 64, grew up in a Japanese ghetto of Honolulu.

For nearly three decades, horse trainer Melvin P. Dutton has been riding at the Ludwig's Corner Horse Show and Country Fair, an annual Labor Day event that draws hundreds of riders and thousands of spectators. On a recent Saturday afternoon, Dutton was putting Optimist, a four-year-old gelding entered in the Baby Green Hunter class this year, through the paces, gently easing him over a series of jumps in a dusty practice ring at Overlook Road Farm near Downingtown. "That's the best this horse has jumped," Dutton said as he rode Optimist back to the barn, pleased with the animal's workout.

Want to buy a racehorse? Try a blood-stock agent named Joseph Gerard Brocklebank, Erin American Inc., Elmont, N.Y. Need a trainer for that horse? Call Joseph Gerard Brocklebank's brother-in- law, Michael Miceli, Garden City, N.Y. And you'll need to talk to a jockey's agent for someone to ride the horse, right? Call Joseph Gerard Brocklebank, jockey agent. But first you'll need someone to design and make your racing silks. Contact Thoroughbred Racing Silks, Elmont, N.Y., owned by Joseph Gerard Brocklebank's wife, Antoinette, who will sew the silks personally or have them done by her sister and partner, Anna Marie Miceli, wife of the horse trainer, Michael.

Burton Sipp, the horse trainer who was banned from racing in 1984 and reinstated in Pennsylvania last year, has been put out of business at thoroughbred tracks in the state. The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, upholding appeals by the Bensalem Racing Association (Philadelphia Park) and Penn National Turf Club, last week denied Sipp access to the only two thoroughbred tracks in the state. "Sipp's record is so deplorable," wrote Judge James Gardner Colins in a 15-page opinion, "that there was clearly reasonable justification for (the tracks')

Billy Turner Jr. grew up in Chester County, not far from Kennett Square. The first major horse race he ever saw was the 1958 Delaware Handicap. The first steeplechase horse he ever rode was at Delaware Park. From the very day he saw Christiana Stable's Endine win that '58 DelCap until yesterday, Turner wanted a DelCap of his own. The jump rider turned horse trainer was mildly detoured along the way. He trained Dust Commander as a 2-year-old, but was fired before the horse won the Kentucky Derby the following year.

Bill Shoemaker wasted no time and little emotion getting on with his new life as an ex-jockey and a budding horse trainer. About 90 minutes after the final ride of his 41-year career last Saturday, a gallant but disappointing fourth-place effort aboard 3-5 favorite Patchy Groundfog in the Legend's Last Ride Handicap, the world's winningest and most popular jockey was back in the Santa Anita Park winner's circle, dapperly attired in a blue suit...

Almost as soon as horse trainer Tony Dutrow bought the filly for $95,000 in 2010, his wife Kim knew the name. She could only be Grace Hall. One of her owners was Mike Caruso, the three-time NCAA champion Lehigh wrestler from the mid-1960s, a man whose high school and college record was 141-1. Then as now, the Lehigh wrestling venue was intimidating Grace Hall, named after Eugene Grace, the president of Bethlehem Steel and a great Lehigh baseball player. "I've lived in Bethlehem the last 50 years since I came to Lehigh," said Caruso, who went to St. Benedict's Prep in Newark, N.J. He was on the Lehigh board of trustees for 14 years.

HARRISBURG - Kelsey Lefever was well-known in the Pennsylvania horse world. The 24-year-old horse trainer from Chester County competed at the Devon Horse Show and traded show ponies and draft horses on the Internet. At Penn National, near Harrisburg, one of the biggest racetracks in the state, she schmoozed thoroughbred owners, telling them she would find great homes for their horses when their racing careers were over. In fact, state police allege, Lefever was selling the horses - as many as 120, by her admission - to contractors for a Canadian slaughterhouse, where they were butchered and shipped overseas for human consumption.