David Briggs: Embattled Medina Spirit traces pedigree to famous Toledo horse
May 13—Even with street names such as Secretariat Road and Damascus Drive, the subdivision across from Wildwood Metropark on the western edge of Ottawa Hills does not exactly conjure the ghosts of thoroughbred history.
But the memory can be a funny thing.
And more than four decades after the famed Hasty House Farm was turned into high-end homes and condos, one of its former caretakers still sees it in her mind, the magic of the farm as it was.
For Julie Weidner to drive down Hasty Road is to drive back in time, through the 82 acres of rolling green pastures and woods graced with some of the fastest race horses in the world.
"I can't go by it without thinking how wonderful it was," said Weidner, 68, a grand niece of Billie Reuben, who along with her husband, Allie, owned Hasty House. "It was total beauty."
I called Weidner up because, as you may have heard, the old farm is back in the news this week.
Kind of.
Actually, it's one of its equine relatives who's making hay.
You know Medina Spirit? Well, it's not just his desire, smarts, and maybe a dab of steroids that led the colt to a thrilling victory in the Kentucky Derby and a perch as the 9-5 morning-line favorite in Saturday's Preakness. It's also a pedigree that includes Toledo's most famous thoroughbred.
Yes, Medina Spirit is the great-great-great-great-great grandson of Hasty Road, the Glass City horse that stunned the genteel racing establishment in winning the 1954 Preakness.
To most of the world, the embattled Derby winner (can a horse be embattled?) may represent a pawn in horse racing's irrepressible circus. Medina Spirit tested positive for the anti-inflammatory steroid betamethasone — a result trainer Bob Baffert attributed first to sabotage, then an anti-fungal ointment, then ... (stay tuned) — but he will be allowed to run in the Preakness.
We'll leave that debate to the neighsayers (forgive me, father).
To me, Medina Spirit represents an invitation to look back on a remarkable time in local history, when a small horse farm in Sylvania Township — later annexed to Ottawa Hills — punched with the heavyweights of the sport, and then some. At its height, in 1955, no stable in the country won more prize money.
"To be able to accomplish what they did was amazing," said Bill Cooke, the director emeritus of the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Ky. "Let's face it: Toledo was never the horse capital of the world. It's not Lexington or Saratoga. That's what makes Hasty House Farm so much more special. They did it on their brains and willpower."
In a previous interview with the Blade, he added: "Make no mistake: That Toledo farm is part of racing history."
Now, all these years later, that history remains very much alive, including in the bloodlines of the great thoroughbreds of today.
For kicks, I paid $10 for a month's subscription to the hoofed version of Ancestry.com, and the results were fascinating. Through generations of breeding, Hasty Road has become more connected than Kevin Bacon.
The late champ is a forefather of nine winners of the Kentucky Derby. He first popped into the lineage of Monarchos — who captured the Run for the Roses in 2001 — and has since become a championship mainstay. Other Derby winners with Hasty Road in their pedigree include Barbaro (2006), Street Sense (2007), I'll Have Another (2012), Orb, (2013), Nyquist (2016), Country House (2019), and Authentic (2020).
"To know that legacy lives on is really cool," said Weidner, who lived on the farm for a time. "It's a real sense of pride for me and my family. We talk about it all the time."
And that's to say nothing of the memories.
As noted, you can't write the book on American horse racing without a chapter on Toledo.
We'll go with the CliffsNotes version, beginning with the turn of fate that brought together Allie Reuben, a local real estate tycoon, and his soon-to-be-wife, Billie, an accomplished equestrian who rode at shows across the country. They married in 1923 and moved onto the farm on Hasty Road in 1927.
The couple had no visions of someday turning the property into a racing stable, let alone a world-class one, but, many years later, after Billie's riding days were over, they made the leap.
"[Billie] rode until she couldn't," Weidner said. "She had fallen off so many times that her body finally said, 'OK, that's it.' But she didn't want to give up on her passion, so that's when she and her husband decided to get into racing. My uncle mostly gave her free rein and said, 'It's up to you, you pick the horses.' And she was good at it from the beginning."
The duo formed the perfect team.
After an uneven start in the racing world, they caught their huge break in 1952, spotting a dashing, 1,140-pound yearling with an excellent pedigree at a horse sale in Kentucky. They paid $23,100 and named the dark bay colt Hasty Road.
The rest is indeed racing history.
Next thing they knew, the farm took off and the Reubens were competing with the biggest hitters in one of the country's biggest sports, including the Vanderbilts, duPonts, and Calumet Farm. In 1954, Hasty House Farm had two horses in the Kentucky Derby — Hasty Road finished second, Goyamo fourth — and captured the Preakness, with Hasty Road edging the favored Correlation in the $140,150 race. The next year, the stable raked in $832,579 in winnings.
"A true success story in sports," the New York Times declared.
The Reubens kept it going until 1972, when, sadly, Billie died of breast cancer. Allie died three years later. He left much of the estate to the Toledo hospital — which sold the land to developers — and the home to his sister-in-law, Lucy Smith, who lived there until her death in 1995. (The Reubens did not have children.)
Allie also made sure to take care of the two remaining horses in the stable, Stan and Inseparable, leaving them an $80,000 trust fund.
"Those horses were all good to me," he said before his passing. "They gave me all they had."
Truly, it was a ride for the ages.
By a colt and a farm never to be forgotten.
First Published May 12, 2021, 3:29pm
