Harry Payne Whitney died in 1930, whereupon James Rowe and John Gaver moved their training operation over to Helen Hay Whitney’s Greentree stable. Helen Hay Whitney was the widow of Harry Payne’s estranged brother Payne Whitney. She and her son John Hay Whitney (known as Jock) and daughter Joan Whitney Payson, were devoted to horses and to racing. They were internationally famous for their charming personalities, impeccable manners and their dedication to doing things correctly – as well as for their immense fortune. With Rowe as head trainer and Gaver as assistant, Greentree’s success in the racing world really took off. The first important horse they had was Twenty Grand, winner of the Kentucky Derby in 1931 and the champion racehorse of that year. But Jimmy Rowe Jr. was not able to enjoy his success for long. In the fall of 1931, he died suddenly of a heart attack – he was just 42. John Gaver stayed on under a new trainer, slowly taking on more and more hands-on responsibilities. In 1939, after an apprenticeship of ten years, Mrs. Whitney’s business manager asked him to take over as head trainer. Of course, he said yes. In 1937, Gaver had married Mary Huston Molloy (known as “Husie”), the daughter of a doctor from Lexington, Kentucky. In 1940, they had their first son, John M. Gaver, Jr,. and in 1943 they had their second son, James M. Gaver. The family had a home on Long Island in New York, though John followed the Greentree horses to Saratoga in the summer and to Florida in the winter. By 1939, World War II had broken out in Europe, and after the United States entered the war in December 1941, the racing world entered a quieter period. The Gaver family came to Aiken for the first time in the fall of 1942. It had been announced that there would be no racing in Florida that winter. The Aiken Training Track had just been completed and the Whitney family had many Aiken connections, so Aiken was the natural place for Greentree’s new winter base. Right away, the Gavers knew they loved Aiken. They established a home on South Boundary Avenue, where they would stay from November to April while Gaver oversaw the conditioning of the Greentree horses at the Aiken Training Track. When the children reached school age, they attended Aiken Day School and Aiken Prep before going off to boarding school in Massachusetts. When they were in school in Aiken, Husie and the boys would come down to Aiken earlier in the fall, to be joined by John around Thanksgiving. From the 1940s into the 1970s, the Aiken Training Track was in its heyday. In addition to the Whitney’s Greentree horses, there were young horses from the Paul Mellon’s Rokeby Stables, horses from the Hancock’s Claiborne Farm and more. Horses that would go on to be champions abounded, as did future Hall of Fame trainers, such as Mack Miller and Woody Stephens. To say that the Greentree horses did well under Gaver would be an understatement. John had his first major success shortly after he became the head trainer. This was with two horses from the crop of 1939, both bred by Helen Hay Whitney at her farm in Lexington, Kentucky. Devil Diver and Shut Out would both make names for themselves: Shut Out by winning the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes in 1942, and Devil Diver by becoming the champion older male horse of 1943 and 1944. In addition, he also won the Metropolitan handicap in three successive years (1943, 1944 and 1945), a feat that had never been
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accomplished before, and has not been equaled today. The auspicious start to Gaver’s solo training career foreshadowed what was to come. He devoted his heart and soul to the Greentree horses, and they rewarded him by running and winning the most prestigious races at the most distinguished tracks in the country. His favorite horse and the one that he considered the best he ever trained was Tom Fool, a winner of 21 races with earnings of over half a million dollars (over five million in today’s money.) Tom Fool, the 2-year-old horse of the year in 1951 and horse of the year in 1953 was inducted into the National and Aiken racing halls of fame. Aside from his racing ability Tom Fool also had a wonderful temperament and he developed a close relationship with Gaver as well as with his regular rider, Ted Atkinson. “After Tom Fool was retired to stud in Lexington [Kentucky] Pop would go to visit him out in his pasture,” says John’s son Jim, who still lives in Aiken. “They tell me that Tom Fool would see him at some distance and come running up to him at the fence. It’s a stunning story. Those two were made for one another – both were at the top of their respective professions.” Gaver claimed there was no secret to his success. He was a devoted hard worker with high standards and the utmost integrity. He did not take days off or vacations. His horses always came first, and he expected everyone who worked for the stable to have the same commitment to his job. “He was so dedicated to what he was doing, to call him conscientious would be an insult,” says Jim. “He was besotted with his horses and his responsibilities: it was his life and those horses were his oxygen. If you could have seen the stables here in Aiken or Greentree Stable in New York – you could have eaten off the walking ring, that’s how clean it was. It was unbelievable, immaculate.” According to Jim, one of the other extraordinary things about his father was his close relationship with the owners of Greentree; Jock Whitney and his sister Joan Whitney Payson (Helen Hay Whitney had died in 1944). “For all three of them, the well-being of the horse always came first,” says Jim. “They loved racing and they loved their horses and they all three put the horse’s well-being before everything. If there was even the slightest question, they would not run the horse. The purse money did not come first, ever. And the Whitneys loved my father. They knew they could trust him with anything.” In addition to loving horse racing, Gaver was also a baseball fan. According to Jim, he took Mrs. Payson to her very first professional baseball game. She got hooked, too. In fact, she loved baseball so much, eventually she invested in the New York Giants. After the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1957, she started her own team, the New York Mets, becoming the first woman to own a major league team without inheriting it. As far as training methods went, Gaver believed first and foremost that each horse was an individual, and that no two could be trained exactly alike. He took great care in getting to know his charges, tailoring his program to each horse’s individual needs. Following in the footsteps of Jimmy Rowe Sr., he was also a great believer in conditioning. Never one to “race a horse into shape,” Gaver worked his horses hard before taking them to the track, so that when they got there they were ready to win. He used to cite Rowe’s great filly Regret as an example of this: the first race of her 3-year-old year was the Kentucky Derby, which she won. “That’s conditioning!” he said. Gaver’s success, coupled with his unusual story and personality made him something of a celebrity, especially in the New York area. “At Belmont and at Saratoga, where the public was close to the saddling area, people would yell out to him –‘there’s Princeton Johnny!’
The Aiken Horse
August-September 2018
