Six-Figure Hunch

The heady smell of horses, leather, manure and stable antiseptics has fortified many a gypsy horse owner and trainer against the stress of staying half a jump ahead of the sheriff. Often as not there is no rainbow at the end of the trail. For little Jean Charles ("Frenchy") Pinon there was--after 13 threadbare years.

With just one horse, a four-year-old chestnut filly, Frenchy Pinon built a hunch into a six-figure bank account in 1944. He won the $15,000 Hawthorne Handicap, the $25,000 Vanity Handicap, topped off the season with a $61,425 check from the Hollywood Gold Cup, last big race of the year.

Spinach to Mother. With 25 years of flat and steeplechase jockeying on both sides of the Atlantic, 13 years of schooling on the U.S. smalltime circuit, Frenchy knew a good horse when he saw one. In August 1943, he saw one at a Chicago track. Despite a game front leg, Happy Issue ran the way Frenchy liked--fast from behind. Her breeding was none too fashionable: Bow To Me, her sire, had already been shunted off to Cuba as a has-been. But her paternal grandsire was the great French racer Epinard (spinach), for whom French-born Pinon had high regard. He took the plunge, led away Happy Issue from a claiming race for $1,500.

Turned out to pasture for eight months, the filly got rest, treatment for her game leg, the nickname "Mimi." Then 52-year-old Frenchy jerked a black & white plaid cap down over his ears, lifted his 128 lbs. into the saddle, set about the business of legging-up Happy Issue for the racing wars. Allowing no one near his filly, the ex-jockey quadrupled as groom, exercise boy, owner and trainer. From then on it was a rags-to-riches campaign.

Challedon to Champagne. Before the Gold Cup race last fortnight, Frenchy told his jockey: "If she is going to lose, I want her to lose running my way." The lone filly in a field of 13, Happy Issue was several lengths behind in the early running, but closed fast--Frenchy's way--to break the mile-and-a-quarter Hollywood Park track record set by Challedon in 1940, and boost her earnings for the year to $118,000.

After the race, his chubby French wife straightened his bow tie and Frenchy filled the ten-inch-across gold cup with water so that Happy Issue might quench her well-earned thirst. That evening, a dozen celebration guests straw-sipped champagne from the cup--and glowed with hopes for Happy Frenchy in the Santa Anita Handicap, scheduled to be run again March 3 for the first time since Pearl Harbor. A week later, War Mobilization Director Jimmy Byrnes ruled racing out for 1945.

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