Secretariat is a name that has been known by hundreds of millions of people for more than 40 years — but most probably never heard of Penny Chenery until the Walt Disney Co. made a movie about Secretariat.
Chenery, who died last Saturday at the age of 95, was Secretariat's owner — but she was more than that, really. She was a tough old bird.
If you didn't grow up in the South, you may not know that is about the highest compliment one can pay. To be a tough old bird suggests that you have lived a long life and fielded everything life threw at you. Penny Chenery was a pioneer, and pioneers always have to be tough old birds.
They rarely win popularity contests.
In Penny Chenery's case she took over her father's once–successful horse breeding business when he became disabled and, applying what she had learned in business school, revived it and pursued her father's dream of winning the Kentucky Derby.
She had her father's love of horses, but she knew that horse breeding was not the kind of business she had studied in school. She encountered plenty of resistance along the way, but she achieved her father's goal with Riva Ridge in 1972.
In fact, with Secretariat, she went beyond her father's dream. She won all three of the Triple Crown races the following year, and Secretariat became the first Triple Crown winner in a quarter of a century.
Even now when I watch the footage of Secretariat's astonishing victory in the third and final jewel of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes, I feel that same sense of awe and excitement that I felt on that Saturday afternoon in June of 1973.
A decade after that accomplishment, Chenery became one of the first three women to be admitted as members of The Jockey Club, which is the breed registry for thoroughbred horses in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. A few years earlier she became a member of the Executive Committee of the American Horse Council, the horse industry trade association.
When the Disney movie was in the theaters seven years ago, some complained that it was more about Penny Chenery than it was about Secretariat, and there is some truth in that.
But the greater truth is that no movie could fully tell the story of Penny Chenery's remarkable life.
Rest in peace.
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