Page 140 - February 2021

by Diane Rice
John Hammes’ nomadic career has brought him great friends and great success
John’s love for horses started at an early age.
Ittakes a special kind of man — and a supportive family — to follow the racing circuit from
Remington Park in Oklahoma to Prairie Meadows in Iowa, on to Canterbury Park in Minnesota and then back home to Holly, Colorado, in fifth- wheel trailers. But that’s just what John and Cathy Hammes and their son, Nick, do each year.
“I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” John says. “I’ve loved the lifestyle, and I’ve made some great friends through the years.”
HIS BEGINNINGS
John was one of the three sons and three daugh- ters born to Herb and Maxine Hammes in Harper, Iowa. He attended school there, then went on to Muscatine Junior College an hour’s drive east.
The multiple graded stakes-winning trainer’s introduction to horses came from his friend Jim Bader. “I grew up with the Bader boys,” he says. “We ran the bush tracks.”
From college, he entered the service. “The end of my second year of college, my grades weren’t good enough to keep me out of the draft, so I spent two years in the military,” he adds. He returned home in August 1972, in the days when you were better off not telling anyone you’d served in Viet Nam.
“One day my friend Don Rayner asked me if I wanted to go to the racetrack with him, so I went.”
That visit sealed John’s fate. “I’ve just always wanted to train horses, so I moved to Denver in January of 1974 and from there I just started picking up clients,” he says.
In 1976, he started wintering in Holly near Gateway Downs, about 250 miles southeast of Denver near the Colorado/Kansas border. In 1981 at a New Year’s Eve gathering, Dr. Richard and Judy Fell introduced him to Marvin Willhite’s daughter, Cathy. “I knew her dad and her brother but had never met her until then,” he says.
Marvin, a Holly native who was later in- ducted into the AQHA Hall of Fame and, along with local horsemen, founded Gateway Downs in Holly, was involved in farming and ranching, and in 1963 began raising Quarter Horses so that Cathy and her sister and brother could ride and show. “She showed in everything from rein- ing to pleasure to halter,” John says. “She had more trophies than I could ever accumulate!”
John and Cathy dated a while, then married in November 1981.
They had four children: Kalyn, a (human) embryologist who is married to Kirk Trowbridge and lives in Castle Rock, Colorado; Chelsey, a registered nurse who’s married to Canterbury Park veterinarian Zach Badura; Kylee, a teacher who’s married to Chase Brobst, whose father, Jeff, was a jockey and who works for John part of the year and as a jocks’ room valet at other times; and Nick, who works with John full time.
“I couldn’t do this without help from Cathy,” he says. “She’s the best hand you could ever get. And all the kids through their years have been a huge help as well. Even after they got married and went their separate ways, when we needed help the kids would always show up.
138 SPEEDHORSE February 2021