In spirit, mood and reality, the backstretch of Hawthorne Race Course in west suburban Stickney is about as far from the chic swirl of Lake Forest society as Waylon and Willie are from the reed section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. So what in the name of social register is a woman originally to the manor born in Lake Forest doing amid the muck and mire of late autumn thoroughbred racing in Chicago?
“I’m making a living like everybody else, what do you think I’m doing?” joked Christine Janks, the one-time daughter of the North Shore who has emerged as both a top thoroughbred trainer and one of the most influential women ever in Illinois racing.
Since starting out with a one-horse stable as an eager 17-year-old at the old Arlington Park in 1967, Janks has gone from being a pioneer among women in local turf circles to her current tri-tiered status as a consistently successful trainer, the mistress (along with husband Barry, the master) of Emerald Ridge Farm in unincorporated west Lake County and, since last December, the first woman president of the Chicago division of the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association (HBPA), the major organization of owners and trainers in the sport.
“Because of her status as both president of the HBPA and as one of the top breeders in the state, Christine’s influence in the industry is very significant and seems certain to only continue to grow,” said Tom Carey, president of Hawthorne Race Course and one of the region’s foremost authorities on the business aspects of horse racing.
“Already, with less than one year in office, she has demonstrated a consistent effectiveness in representing the interests of the horsemen in a variety of areas. Besides her obvious talents with the racing side of the sport, she is an excellent business person.”
Added Lynne Snierson, most recently a member of the media staff at Arlington International Racecourse but also previously credentialed as one of the top women journalists in American racing for her work during previous career stops at the Boston Herald and the Racing Times: “When you consider that the glass ceiling is still very much in evidence for women in racing, the accomplishments of Christine Janks are quite remarkable. Factor in the inherent competitiveness of racing on a day-to-day basis and there is little question that her successes have defied some pretty long odds.”
Long odds never seemed destined to be much of a concern for young Christine Korhumel, who by her own account was “the spoiled daughter of a rich father” while growing up in the Lake Forest of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era.
“My father spoiled me shamelessly, but without question he has also been the biggest influence in my life,” she said. “I inherited a love of business and finance from him. And hopefully I’ve inherited his good health, longevity and drive. I owe an awful lot of whatever I’ve accomplished to him.”
Newton Korhumel, now an active 88-year-old multimillionaire who still goes to his Elk Grove office every business day, got his commercial start selling newspapers on the street corners of the Near North Side of Chicago to help support his family more than three-quarters of a century ago.
From that simple beginning, Korhumel went on to make a high-powered mark in steel, ultimately building his Korhumel Steel into a major concern before selling it to National Steel.
At age 65, he tried retirement for six months before returning to his current roost overseeing his family’s diverse holdings. “At every step of the way, he has embodied all that the self-made man in American business is supposed to be,” Janks said. “He is a person of unique and perpetual dynamism.”
Along the way, Korhumel and wife Irene had three children (in order: son Lee, Christine and son Marc) and moved the family from Evanston to a 40-acre farm in west Lake Forest when Christine was 5. Among the features of the new Korhumel home were riding facilities and an old French cavalryman from World War I who tended to the stable.
“On the farm, we inherited a fellow named Jean Poutz, who had ridden with the French during the First World War,” Korhumel said. “He taught our children about horses, and Christine was the one who really developed a knack for it. I can remember the first couple of times she got up on a horse. She must have only been about 6 years old because she looked like a little sack of grain up there. But one thing Chrissie has always had is an incredible tenacity, and that was in evidence from Day 1 with her and horses.”
Young Christine’s interest and tenacity with horses led to an early love affair with show horses, particularly after her father bought a riding stable in Northbrook.
“We had some hunter-jumpers, and they are normally recycled thoroughbred race horses,” Janks recalled. “I was riding show horses in some fairly big events by my early teens. One big influence in my early interest in horses-and I know this might cause some people to take back a bit-was Silas Jayne. He had tried race horses but wound up doing show instead. He was a friend to my family, and his knowledge of the business and of horses was second to none.”
(Jayne, a renowned breeder in local horse circles, died in 1987 at age 80, eight years after being paroled from his prison sentence for conspiracy to commit murder in the death of his brother, George, who was shot to death in 1970.)
By 1967, as graduation from Lake Forest Academy loomed, the teenaged Christine was subtly noting her father’s fascination with thoroughbred racing.
“For my father, racing was a great pastime,” she said. “For me, it seemed not only exciting and different but also something that I could find very fulfilling. For one thing, the Lake Forest thing wasn’t me then and certainly isn’t me now. I couldn’t see myself just going to an endless succession of cotillions, debutante parties and country club dances. There had to be something more to life. And I loved competition. Now combine that with the love of horses that I already had and you can see that going out to the track to sit with my father in his box on occasion doesn’t seem that far-fetched a thing to do.”
In her father’s box amid the post-and-paddock revelry of the old Arlington Park, Janks decided to try to get a job galloping horses and working around the racetrack’s stable area.
“At first I think my parents perceived it as a passing fancy,” she said. “I did go to Lake Forest College for one year, but after only a few weeks around the track, I knew that I wanted to be a thoroughbred trainer. Although my parents totally supported my decision almost from the start, when I first told them, there was kind of a feeling as if I had just told them that I wanted to go off and join the circus.”
Pete Gacicia, now a thoroughbred steward (or on-track official) for the state of Illinois but back then a trainer, recalled Janks’ early days on the Arlington backstretch.
“Chris had initially approached a few other trainers, and one of them, Pete DiVito, sent her over to me. I let her work a few horses, and it was obvious from the beginning that she was intelligent, dedicated and eager to learn. She jumped in with both feet and really applied herself. Frankly, I didn’t know then that she came from money because she was just such a good young person. If there was one word to describe her back then, I guess it would have been `inquisitive.’ “
Janks’ inquisitiveness, combined with her sense of confidence, finally made her decide to try for her trainer’s license late in the summer of 1967.
“The written exam was easy, and for the practical test, they sent me over to the HBPA trailer, where the idea was that veteran trainers would test the newcomer. My testers were two of the greats of the game back then, Hal Bishop and Joe Pierce. Mr. Bishop asked me if I knew how to take a horse’s temperature, and I said `yes.’ Then Mr. Pierce asked if I knew how to saddle a horse, so we went outside and I saddled one. That was it. At age 18, I was a licensed trainer.”
A short while later, she was also a winning trainer.
“I won my first race with the second horse I ever ran,” Janks said. “It was a horse that I had claimed (purchased out of a race in which any of the entrants can be bought for the same designated price, which is set before the race) or rather, one that my father claimed for me. My first horse had finished dead last, but then we claimed a horse named Varho, and the racing secretary at the time hustled me into an easier race than the one I had been set to enter. Varho won and paid $10 or $12 (on a $2 bet). I watched the race with my father and Si Jayne from my father’s box, and I was cheering and yelling all the way to, and probably past, the finish line. I floated down to the winner’s circle.
“Suffice to say, even though I was still a teenager, I suddenly knew everything there was to know about thoroughbreds. I’m still trying to know now as much as I did back then. Later that year, I took my two-horse stable and went down to Florida for the winter, racing at places like Gulfstream and Hialeah and Tropical Park. I was doing my own ponying (accompanying a horse to the starting gate) and galloping (putting a horse through light morning exercise), but the greatest thing was that I was totally financially independent. I was on my own, and I liked it. Even as a kid, I couldn’t wait to get my first job, to make my own money, and there I was 1,500 miles from home and self-reliant.”
By the early ’70s, Janks was firmly ensconced as an up-and-comer on the Chicago-Florida racing circuit. She also married a jockey, Hector Viera, which expanded her perspective on thoroughbred racing.
“I think she was well on her way to becoming an accomplished horsewoman when she married Hector but that their marriage moved her education along that much more,” Gacicia said. “He knew the game very well.”
The marriage lasted 10 years before ending in 1980 (“very amicably,” according to Janks). As a trainer, her most successful year also came during that period, in 1977, when she won 78 races. “Also around that time, I had my all-time favorite horse, a 3-year-old filly named Cycylya Zee, who won several stakes and equaled the world record for a mile by a filly one day at Arlington,” Janks said. “She had been purchased for $5,000 as a yearling and won several hundred thousand dollars. She was all heart.”
Janks was called on to display a little extra heart by the early 1980s after her first marriage ended and some business reversals made her father decide to get out of horse ownership.
“When he sold all of his horses, I truly was on my own. I still had a few clients, but I was going through a major period of change. I tried racing in New York for a while, but that wasn’t much for me, so eventually, by the winter of 1983, I was down to a two-horse stable and back in Florida by myself. It was a tremendous period of introspection for me. I had two dogs with me and would go for long walks on the beach contemplating my future. Finally I decided that I was going to go back to Chicago, hopefully renewed and refreshed, and really throw myself into all aspects of the horse-racing business.”
In 1983, thoroughbred racing in Illinois was in the embryonic stages of overhaul and expansion. Prompted by the sport’s growing attractiveness as a source of non-tax revenue for the state, lawmakers in Springfield were enacting the first wave of legislation enabling the Illinois Department of Agriculture to offer premium money to horsemen who would breed and race horses in the state.
New legislation allowing off-track betting was also increasing the purse money available to horsemen. And new ownership at Arlington in August 1983 (the first local ownership of that track in more than a decade) was signaling a new era of provincial pride, prosperity and prestige in Illinois racing.
“We (Janks with her father’s help) bought Emerald Ridge, which technically is in unincorporated Mundelein, in 1983, when I returned from Florida specifically to branch into Illinois breeding along with training,” Janks said. “When we bought it, it really was just unimproved land, and now we’ve built it up to 61 acres. It is a wonderful base of operation for all that we’re trying to accomplish with breeding, racing and other related areas.”
During her period of reinvention, Janks also had a very fortuitous meeting outside her barn at Arlington one afternoon in mid-1984. “Barry (Janks) was a jockey’s agent, and one day after the races he and his brother and a few others stopped by. They were going out for a few drinks and asked if I wanted to make it a sixsome. Although he was technically on a date that night, our relationship started soon after that. We were married less than a year later, on May 11, 1985. The reception was at one of the pavilion areas at the Brookfield Zoo, which we were able to do because my older brother was a trustee of the zoo at the time and trustees can pay a fee to use a portion of the zoo facilities for special events. An elephant greeted our guests. The wedding was memorable.”
Eight years into the marriage, Barry Janks still marvels at his wife’s firmness of purpose and considerable energy.
“When Chris knows she’s right, nothing gets in her way to get something done,” he said. “I’ve seen people tell her to do something some way that I know she doesn’t want to and this little look comes across her face that I know just means, `Yeah, right.’ She’s like her father in that she absolutely loves to work and she works very `smart.’ If something’s not right, she’ll search for an answer to make it right. And despite what she says, I think there is still some anti-woman stuff in racing. Only now no one will say it to her face because of the HBPA presidency.”
Christine Janks won an extremely hard-fought election last fall to take over the top spot at the HBPA. The incumbent president was a well-liked trainer named Jerry McGrath. In the end, Janks won by fewer than 100 votes out of more than 1,800 cast.
“The race was a tossup to the very end,” said Phil Georgeff, the legendary track announcer who viewed the HBPA election from a reasonably objective perch prior to his retirement last winter.
“I ran for the job not because I really wanted it and certainly not because I had the time but rather because there were things that simply weren’t being done right and had to be corrected,” Janks said.
“The HBPA oversees the interests of the horsemen and also administers the welfare programs for backstretch workers. It is the main bargaining and lobbying agent for horsemen in the state. It has an annual budget of close to $1 million. And everything about the operation was so antiquated. Jan Ely (another woman trainer) and I asked to see the books one day, and we were told we couldn’t because they weren’t up to date. That’s when I decided to run. And since I took office, we’ve updated the accounting, brought in new administrative people, put in an entire computer system, tackled the growing encroachment of riverboat gambling head-on. We’ve done a lot. But we’ve got a lot to get done.”
For his part, McGrath, who remains one of the better trainers on the Illinois racing landscape, said, “I said it while I was president and I’ll say it again: The presidency of the Chicago chapter of the HBPA is a thankless job, and you have to know that going in. Instant perfection is expected, and nothing less is accepted. Horsemen are by nature as independent a bunch of people as you’ll find anywhere in life, and the idea that somehow you’ll get them all to work on something together is really a long shot. I had to be coaxed to run for a full term last year, and when Christine expressed interest in the job, I had to be coaxed to stay in the race. I really wish her nothing but the absolute very best, and she knows that she has my cooperation any time she wants it.”
Between racing, breeding and the HBPA, Janks’ days start at 4 a.m. and don’t end until after 9 p.m. In addition to her and her husband, Emerald Ridge is also home to no fewer than 50 horses, including eight mares who are expected to foal shortly after the first of the year, three cats, a dog and a pet pig named Sadie Sadie the Porky Lady.
“My one daily luxury remains watching `All My Children’ at noon,” Janks confessed. “Whether I’m at home or at the track, I watch it, even if I have to do it in a tack room on the backstretch. And the really great days are when we don’t have a horse running in the afternoon and I can take a long nap. Those days are few and far between, but my father always insisted that a long nap in the afternoon is one of life’s true joys.”
Janks will race at Hawthorne through the conclusion of the Chicago thoroughbred season on Friday. “Then Barry and I will disappear for two weeks before coming back for the foaling season. And then the 1994 thoroughbred season in Chicago will open at Sportsman’s Park in Cicero in mid-February.”
Janks hasn’t reached her career destination yet.
“Now I am happy but not content. I feel that my career in the horse business has had curves, swings, rather than ups and downs. I think that Barry and I are poised right now to do very well again. We are among the top breeders in the state as it is, and our crop of 2-year-olds that will begin racing in 1995 presents some very exciting prospects. I have no regrets whatsoever about where my life has taken me. But there’s still so much to get done.”
Far, far away from the chic social swirl.
