Page 93 - January 2019

“I’ve been pretty lucky that I’ve been around some great horses as well as some great people and I’ve had some great owners as well as great partners.”
Multiple stakes winner Snazzy Man, with Burton Wright, became one of Duayne’s top runners, winning 13 of 39 starts.
Twist) in 1966, Snazzy Man (Rocket Bar- Vanneva, Vandy) in 1968, and others. In 1970, the year Les Bois Race Track opened, he won stakes at every racetrack he ran horses at.
For eight or nine years before he moved to Boise and quit training, he partnered with N.S. Howells, a veterinarian from Preston, on quite a few mares and babies.
He names Miss Chic Twist, Larkwood and Snazzy Man as his top three runners. “Miss Chic Twist was really a rank horse, but she’d give you 100 percent every time,” he says. “She seldom ran less than second. Larkwood was probably my best 870 horse. And I took Snazzy Man to Denver. I was fortunate to have good horses around me. Good horses always make everyone— the owner, the trainer and the rider — look smarter!”
BRANCHING OUT
In 1971, he and a couple of veterinarian friends built a vet clinic and tack shop near Boise, Idaho, just north of Les Bois Park. He operated it until 1975, then sold it and moved back to Preston.
In 1974, he took a job as racing secretary
on the Eastern Idaho fair circuit and in 1975 he moved to back to Boise, where he stayed on as racing secretary, director of racing and general manager of Les Bois Park through 1989, during which time the Turf Club was built there. He also served as racing secretary and state steward at Sun Downs in Kennewick, Washington, during its race seasons from 1975 through 1979.
In 1991, he went to work for the struggling Idaho Racing Commission, where he played a large part in overseeing racing regulation compliance as well as writing the rules, regulations and legislation
to institute simulcasting. “Simulcasting hubbed out of Les Bois,” he says. “If you were betting on a horse in Ruidoso or Oklahoma, you came through our hub here in Boise.”
He also created an examination and licensure system for stewards and other racetrack officials and acted as liaison with the Idaho Legislature and local, state and federal agencies engaged in regulating horse racing, as well as regional and national associations of those agencies.
From 1994 through 2002, he served as managing partner of Les Bois Park. He then sold his interest and partially retired, but a life of leisure wasn’t in
his immediate future. In 2008, he revived Hialeah, which had closed in 2001, then stayed on until 2010 as horsemen’s liaison, representing the interests of
the Florida Quarter Horse Racing Association to horsemen, track personnel and track management.
SPEEDHORSE, January 2019 89