Page 32 - December 2020

SPEEDLINES
ownership. “Shortly after that I bought a horse. Dee Hubbard had actually raced her at Ruidoso Downs in the time trials for the All American. The mare was Hurry On Now, an Easy Six mare. I bought her and she broke her maiden at Del Mar when they were running some Quarter Horses down there. It was probably in September of that year. We won a few races with her, so I was hooked. Went from there to having a horse here and there and sometimes with partners.”
Hurry On Now made 38 starts with four wins, five seconds and eight thirds earning $30,462. Her record shows that she was sixth in the 1980 Pacific Stakes. She earned her ROM and a Superior in racing. She was sired by Easy Six and out of the Thoroughbred mare Aspen Bell by Negroni.
He continued, “Shortly after that I had a career change and I stepped away from it for
a while. I had an executive position in New York, and I was there from 1983 to 1991. When I came back to California I got involved again with a little more activity. Curtis Perner was training horses for me at Los Alamitos and he moved back to Oklahoma to, I believe, take care of his mother. I told him I would like to raise some horses myself and buy some land. So, he found some property for me
and I went on from there and developed the farm. That was in about 1997 that I actually bought the land and developed the farm. I had some Thoroughbreds I had been selling
at the Del Mar sales with my partner Nancy Yearsley. But I was moving more and more toward the Quarter Horses and we had won a lot of stakes. Almost every year we were lucky enough to have a stakes horse. So anyway, that was how we progressed.”
Kelly has now taken on a new partner, “I also had another partner in sort of a minor way with Lloyd Yother. We weren’t doing much together, but eventually he came on board more, and last year Lloyd came in as a partner on my farm. He also bought Nancy’s interest in a lot of the mares that we owned with her. She was not as interested in the breeding aspects and to go forward with the added expense, Lloyd came in so we could expand the program. We are expecting 56 foals in the spring.”
The new partnership has Yother managing day to day operation of the farm, while Kelly is handling the breeding and mating aspects of the program. This took us to Kelly talking about the broodmares. He credits three
mares as the base of his breeding program, “Sheeza Lil Val and Sky Chicks were our
two big mares. Almost everything we have
on the farm has some connections to those two mares. The other mare was Three Dee Dreams and I claimed her for $8,000 at Los
Kelly credits three mares as the base of his breeding program: Sheeza Lil Val, Sky Chicks and Three Dee Dreams.
Sheeza Lil Val is the dam of stakes winners such as Value The Man, shown winning the Los Alamitos Million Futurity.
Sky Chicks is the dam of stakes winners such as Spike It And Fly, shown winning the Southern California Derby.
Three Dee Dreams is the dam of stakes winners such as Answer The Dream, shown winning the Junos Request Stakes.
30 SPEEDHORSE December 2020