HOMEISTER ISSUE 26_Jerkins feature.qxd 18/10/2012 00:57 Page 2
THE HOMEISTERS
RELATIVE VALUES
The Homeisters In the third week of January, 2011, trainer Rosemary Homeister’s 38-year-old daughter, jockey Rosemary Homeister, Jr., was having a devil of time handling the positive result of a pregnancy test. She thought she couldn’t have children, and, at the time, her career couldn’t have been going any better. She’d won on five of her six mounts the week before at Tampa Bay Downs. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I was having a great meet at the time.”
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WORDS: BILL HELLER PHOTOS: HORSEPHOTOS.COM, LaRRy DEHaRT, FOUR FOOTED FOTOS
HE called trainer Eric Reed, a close friend and her biggest supporter. “She called me crying,” Reed said. “Her world was falling apart.” But unlike Mia Farrow, who whelped the spawn of Satan in Roman Polanski’s 1968 cult classic “Rosemary’s Baby,” Rosemary Jr. gave birth to an angel, Victoria Rose, on August 21, 2011. Victoria Rose just might become a third generation Homeister horsewoman. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Reed said. “I bought her a little toy rocking horse for her birthday, and she’s already been on that horse.” She certainly has the pedigree. Her mom, who successfully returned to racing a little more than two months after Victoria’s birth, was the first female jockey to win an Eclipse Award and is racing’s second alltime leading female rider, behind Hall of Famer Julie Krone. Riding at Arlington Park for the first time this summer, she finished third in the jockey standings.
Victoria Rose’s father, Irwin Rosendo, who is no longer with Rosemary Jr., is also a jockey. Both of Rosemary Jr.’s parents were jockeys before turning to training. Her late dad won more than 500 races in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, but how Rosemary Sr. fell in love with horseracing remains a bit of a mystery. Her mom, Phyllis, was a registered nurse in Lyndhurst, a small town in northern New Jersey. Her dad, Frank Sangi, was a chemical engineer who worked in a pharmaceutical company. Rosemary Sr.’s lone sibling, an older brother named Frank, Jr., made a career in advertising. Yet Rosemary Sr. was riding horses by the time she was five years old. Then she began showing them. “To me, it’s just fate,” she said. “It’s just my destiny because there wasn’t one person I ever talked to at home who had anything to do with horses. My parents were the most wonderful people in the whole world, but where I come from, you don’t raise your children to go to the racetrack. You raise them to go to college.”
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