A Wintry Fire in Barn 48

By Tom Callahan

Forty-five Thoroughbred horses, one stable pony, several cats, rabbits and a goat were killed a few weeks ago in a fire at New York's Belmont Park, producing a momentary headline as familiar as the chill of winter. By the standards of today's racing business, which is to say the standards of Arabian sheiks, it was an undistinguished lot, though three of the horses belonged to Nelson Bunker Hunt, a man of redoubtable means, and all but nine were trained by Johnny Campo, who saddled Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Pleasant Colony in 1981. That fine spring, Campo became as prominent as his stomach, holding forth on the unsentimental subject of cheap horses, crows as he is wont to call them, in front of Barn 48, which has now burned to the ground.

The rest of the deceased represented the entire string of small-time Trainer Mike Daggett, plus one dark three-year-old filly, the first horse under the complete care of Apprentice Trainer Steve Lewandowski, 26, and the only racehorse of Owner Katrina Hayward, 22. Her name was Concession.

Hayward did not purchase her for millions of dollars at the Keeneland yearling sales in Kentucky. Mating the old family mare, Better Queen, to a vagabond called Charlie Coast, Hayward bred Concession in the backyard at Nissequogue, N.Y., weaned her, broke her and mucked stalls for $6 an hour to keep her at Belmont. When the Jockey Club rejected the grand name Hayward first submitted, Royal Prerogative, Katrina and her leggy bay conceded their plainness with grace and humor. Concession would have made it to the races this month.

Lewandowski telephoned Hayward at 5 o'clock on a Sunday morning; her alarm bells were already ringing. "Steve was trying not to cry," she says. "I knew right then that Concession was dead." The cause of the fire is an uneasy mystery, though a sprinkler system had been disconnected in the cold. About all Lewandowski could tell her was, "There's been a fire at the barn. There'll be some papers to sign." He recalls with admiration, "She asked how I was doing. Katrina's smart, realistic. She understands the track."

Once, she and Johnny Campo Jr. were the only juveniles tolerated on the grounds at Belmont, where in the late '60s her mother was the sole female groom. Suddenly widowed, Cornelia Hayward elected this hard and unfamiliar work out of a vague affection for horses, picked up during her girlhood in Saratoga Springs. But mostly it was a way of keeping Katrina with her all the time: they rose together at 4 and went off to brush the horses.

"I had to behave," Katrina remembers the preschool years ruefully, "or I would be stuck in a feed bucket on the wall." It was all right to make mud pies in that wonderful shedrow gunk. "But if a horse broke loose, I was to run into the tack room as fast as I could go." While Katrina encountered only kindness on the backstretch, her mother was relieved nonetheless when they made their way to a small Long Island farm, where Cornelia eventually ascended to broodmare manager. "I handled the mares, Katrina the foals. She's a natural with horses, firm but kind. They seem to know what she wants." Unlike the young horsewomen of the old B movies, Katrina observed too much reality to put great stake in romantic illusions. "We've buried mares and babies," her mother says. "At best she'd have to take care of the babies and then see them leave. A filly ran into a fence once and broke her neck. It gets to you, but you can't let it."

Better Queen, an aging producer no longer wanted by her former owners, took up residence in the lean-to behind the Hayward place about the time Katrina was contemplating a more formal business education at the College of New Rochelle. As long as she was at school, it made special sense to sell the foals that Better Queen dropped with increasing difficulty. Now and then a beguiling newborn (once a bent-eared colt) enchanted her. But Katrina held out until graduation and the arrival in the toughest birth yet of the filly she would enlist as her own. Concession had "a pretty face," as Cornelia said, and an endearing disposition. "If you scolded her for something, she'd put her head against your arm." Katrina was more taken with her proportions. Concession was square to the ground. She showed business promise.

"It's a business; the Campos and the syndicators are right about that," said this daughter of the track who never learned to ride, who broke Concession by lying across the horse's back. "If a business doesn't make money, there's no use. If a foal's crooked-legged, you get rid of it at the best price you can. Still, I don't know. When you find yourself working two jobs for a filly that has one chance in a million, you realize it's not only a business. It's like when you see a shed-raised horse, and he looks terrible, and you fix him up, and he looks great. That's what it is. To be able to say you did that. To want everything to be good for a horse, just to want her to do well. You can't explain that. You can't describe a pain unless you have it."

Daggett, the trainer who lost the other eight, went in person to Virginia to tell Mrs. Jane Kramer that Easy Choice had perished. "He was very special," Daggett says. Despite rickety knees, "nearly every time he ran, he picked up some kind of check." A horse here, a horse there, Daggett has started anew. Better Queen is 21 and lost her last foal in a hurricane, but the Haywards will try again too. Sire Charlie Coast is no longer dispensing his $1,500 favors in the neighborhood. "He's faded," Katrina says. "I can't find him." (At his last sighting, he was charming the dams of Venezuela.) But Rosin the Bow is warming up. "It's the little people that make the track," Katrina says. They're a last concession to romance.