Excerpt from the 2009 spring program;

 

Ted Bassett: My Life, which has been published this spring by the university Press of Kentucky, is the autobiography of former Keeneland President and Board Chairman James E. “Ted” Bassett III. Co-authored by Bassett and two-time Eclipse Award winner Bill Mooney, the book chronicles the more than 40 years that Bassett has been associated with Keeneland, along with his U.S. Marine Corps service, tenures as director of the Kentucky State Police and president of Breeders’ Cup Ltd., and much more.

 

In the following excerpt, Bassett remembers the 1969 Blue Grass Stakes, which was won by Paul Mellon’s Rokeby Stable homebred Arts and Letters by a record 15 lengths.

 

The winner of the 1969 Blue Grass was Arts and Letters. He was bred and owned by Paul Mellon’s Rokeby Stable and was a third-generation horseman. Elliott’s grandfather, William Preston Burch, and his father, Preston M. Burch, had both been inducted into the racing Hall of Fame. And Elliott himself would become a Hall of Famer in 1980. He had been a teenage friend of (my wife) Lucy’s and had attended Yale before transferring to the University of Kentucky.

 

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