AMERICAN SUCCESS STORY
Rodell, Fred
American Success Story By FRED RODELL ''JOSEPH E. WIDENER Dead at 71; Art Patron J and Racing Leader" read the two-column headline. There's an epitaph for a man to strive for. There's a quick...
...Joseph Early Widener, inheritor of an estate valued in 1915 at $50,000,000 to $70,000,000 never was a spectacular capitalist, though 'capitalist' was the designation he preferred...
...He tore down James Ben Ali Haggin's million-dollar Kentucky home to make a cemetery for his thoroughbreds...
...In speech he was brisk and direct, in bearing military...
...An Appealing Picture So I read Joe Widener's obit...
...He was critically injured in 1901 when a streetcar struck the tally-ho he was driving and overturned it...
...It is an appealing picture...
...Widener's favorite horse, mounted and under colors, was led to the 19th floor of the Biltmore to grace a dinner in Mr...
...You see, it would be pretty hard to build yourself up to the obituary title of Art Patron and Racing Leader—with Confederate money...
...Despite his inherited shrewdness...
...Operating On A Lavish Scale But back to the Herald Tribune...
...What I found was an almost priceless piece of Americana...
...When I buy a thing, I know its value.' " But wait...
...Widener's honor...
...Come on, call me a capitalist, J. P., just this once...
...I went to public grammar school with the son of Joe Widener's second groom, a nice boy named Bob Cosgrove, and the daughter of Joe Widener's chef, a little French girl whose name I don't remember but whose eyes I do...
...The poor little rich boy, so anxious to make a "contribution to the nation" that, after shutting up his art collection for decades behind the iron fence of his private home, he brings himself at last to give it away to public view—at a time and in a manner to save his estate millions of dollars in death taxes...
...There's a quick summary of a full and useful life...
...I suppose I'm just an old meanie at heart—or perhaps my psyche was warped in youth by that iron fence—but I somehow can't help wishing old man Widener had done his profiteering on the Southern side...
...It happens that I grew up about a mile away from what the obit, calls "the Widener ancestral estate" north of Philadelphia...
...Another time...
...I'm no fool,' he once told Emory H. Buckner in the course of a memorable legal battle with the late Prince Felix Youssoupoff, of Russia...
...Art Patron and Racing Leader...
...It could of course be that those 50 to 70 inherited millions played some small part too in the enabling process...
...Widener, in his prime, did things on a lavish scale...
...When he received such guests as Lord Derby and Signor Dino Grandi, then Italian Foreign Minister, he entertained handsomely...
...And two page-long columns of obituary in the New York Herald Tribune...
...I was curious to know something about this man whom I had never seen although he had been for years my neighbor in a rather small suburban town...
...But then I had a special reason...
...When thrown by a horse, remount immediately—as the saying goes...
...There is more, much more...
...From the humble but honorable trade of brick-laying, as indulged in by certain ancestors...
...Except for their silver spoon aspect: Where do you suppose all these millions came from that went into cemeteries for horses, zoots by Tautz, and such exotic fauna as pink flamingoes and Australian totalizators...
...I used to ride a bicycle—and it took about 10 minutes, pedaling hard—around the 12-foot iron fence that shut off the main part of the ancestral estate from possible trespassers but allowed a view of the beautiful hand-picked lawns and the horrible mausoleum-like buildings inside...
...His friends paid him back in kind in 1931, when Osmand, Mr...
...Travel abroad gave him...
...Except for the family and a few friends and a few hundred Old Family Retainers and one proof-reader who got tired toward the end, I daresay I was the only person who read those two columns all the way from upper left to lower right...
...He installed the Australian totalizator, most open and impersonal of betting devices, and the pink flamingoes from Cuba in a pool inside the oval which are still its trademark...
...The multi-millionaire, gnawed by the knowledge that he did not make his millions himself, haunted perhaps by the fact that some of his ancestors were day laborers—and wanting so desperately to be known as a capitalist...
...His interest in horses dated from boyhood...
...Instead he was best known for two contributions to the nation which had seen his ancestors rise from the craft of brick masonry...
...And I trust that neither you nor the Herald Tribune will mind if I share a few snatches of it with you who never looked in awe through an iron fence at Lynnewood Hall...
...Tautz, of London, visited him twice a year to arrange his wardrobe...
...One was the celebrated Widener collection of European art, which he presented last year to the National Gallery in Washington...
...And once my family led me through the gates to see the pretty pictures that were generously displayed to visitors, by special invitation, on something like alternate Thursdays...
...a knowledge of art which later enabled him to make distinguished additions to the Widener collection...
...The other was his 40 year effort to improve the breeding and racing of thoroughbred horses and broaden the popularity of the sport through legalization of pari-mutuel betting...
...The father of this serious-minded sporting man was Peter A. B. Widener, son of a brick mason, who founded his fortune on food contracts obtained during the Civil War...
...Where That Money Came From The choice of the verb "grace" strikes me as peculiarly appropriate...
...And irrelevantly, I keep thinking of the shaggy-dog yarn about the horse that was being coaxed up just one flight of stairs...
...But I am not one to look gilded lilies in the mouth...
...Mr...
...Still, it was before he came into the millions that he was attracted to the field in which he made his other great "contribution to the nation"—the sport of kings, and capitalists...
...In 1931, the ambitious Philadelphian, seeking a Winter racing plant, bought Hialeah Park, then a broken-down track, and reconstructed it at a cost of $1,750,000...
...The following year he took up racing in earnest by purchasing a colt for $5,500 and gradually building up a stable...
...Scarcely...
...There indeed was the capitalist in him, coming through at the end...
...Widener, no dilettante in either of his chosen fields, soon proved his professional abilities in both...
Vol. 7 • November 1943 • No. 47
