Horse Ranch Sale to Mark Era’s End

We bow low and give a sweeping doff of the hat to Kentucky for its many great breeding farms such as Calumet, Spendthrift, Idle Hour, et al., but when it comes to mixing glamour with the breeding business we’ll take a back seat to no one, not even Kentucky . . . .

Let’s talk about California.

The time was January of 1949. The editors of California Thoroughbred magazine were busy pressing their case that the state’s upstart thoroughbred establishment was every bit as good as Kentucky’s.

They could almost have said, “Let’s talk about the San Fernando Valley.”

For nearly three decades after World War II, the Valley was home to many of the state’s most illustrious thoroughbred breeding farms.

The paradise of citrus groves and alfalfa fields less than an hour’s drive from Hollywood Park in Inglewood, and Hollywood itself, brought together an unlikely society in which show business personalities and wealthy industrialists mixed company with the state’s authentic thoroughbred ranchers.

Stars Owned Ranches

Sometimes, stars like Betty Grable and Harry James, who owned the Baby J Ranch on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills, earned that distinction for themselves.

“And don’t think for a moment that they merely own this ranch and their horses for publicity purposes. They’re in it because they love it,” exuded a writer for the magazine.

At the peak of its thoroughbred era, the Valley was crisscrossed by hundreds of miles of white fence, from Valdez Training Stables on Whitsett Avenue in North Hollywood to Howard Stock Farm in Moorpark. At least two dozen Valley ranches advertised in California Thoroughbred.

Some of them were vast. Movie mogul Harry Warner owned 1,200 acres that California Thoroughbred declared, “a credit to any section of the country, in the plush bluegrass of Kentucky or the wide-open spaces of Texas.”

Others produced fine bloodlines as well.

Horse Sale

A sale of horses at Northridge Farms in 1956 brought this enthusiastic notice in The Times:

“The dispersal looms as one of the most important in Far Western history. Included in the choice brood mare band are daughters of Alibhai, War Admiral, Hunter’s Moon IV, Bold Venture, Brevity, Whirlaway, Bull Lea, Tiger, Reading II and other top-flight sires.”

Harry Falk, a retired drug manufacturer from Illinois, sought a humble distinction for the 20-acre thoroughbred ranch he bought on Lassen Street, a few blocks west of Balboa Boulevard.

“We proudly call ourselves ‘The Biggest Little Ranch in the West,’ ” he proclaimed in a 1953 advertisement in California Thoroughbred.

Falk’s little ranch would gain another distinction, though. It would be the last working thoroughbred ranch in the Valley, an isolated stand of white fence surrounded by streets and houses.

It remained that way until Falk’s widow, Elizabeth, died in 1983. After an 18-month waiting period specified in her will, the 13 remaining acres of her ranch went on sale this February for $1.9 million, a price that is not expected to attract any horse breeders. There appears little chance that this frail link with the past will survive long.

Strangely, this ephemeral chapter of the Valley’s history is best documented in an unexpected place.

Monte LeNoir, a writer for California Thoroughbred, made frequent trips to the Valley during a decade in which he produced a series of concise and witty articles on California’s thoroughbred ranches.

In August, 1953, LeNoir wrote:

“Back in the late thirties, when the country was just beginning to emerge from the great Depression and racing had been re-established, there were quite a few motion picture people who became enamored of breeding and raising thoroughbreds. Among these were Barbara Stanwyck and Zeppo Marx, who combined to buy a plot of ground in the then-wide expanses of the San Fernando Valley, and proceeded with a great flair of enthusiasm to build up Marwyck Ranch on Reseda Boulevard at Devonshire. . . . It wasn’t long until the place was teeming with horses.

“But along came World War II, and what with the blackout of racing and the attendant letdown in breeding activities, the Stanwyck-Marx combine lost interest and in 1943 they sold out, lock, stock and barrel, to J.H. Ryan, prominent sportsman and breeding enthusiast.”

Ryan changed the name to Northridge Farms, which became one of the state’s leading breeding centers, boarding as many as 300 horses.

It remained at the top for a decade.

‘Nothing in Northridge’

“There was nothing in Northridge then,” said Matt Griffin, an Irishman who at the time was a ranch hand and now is manager of a thoroughbred ranch in Chino. “I think they had a post office and a laundry.

“Don Ameche’s brother, Louis, had a place in there where we used to get drunk called the Stables. At that time you could go from Devonshire Boulevard down to the Ventura Freeway and there was nothing.”

Griffin got his last paycheck from Northridge Farms in June, 1961.

“They just sold it out. Mr. Ryan died and the women didn’t want to carry it on,” he said.

LeNoir of California Thoroughbred recorded the emotional conflicts that preceded the death of a horse ranch. In April, 1960, he wrote:

“Northridge Farms continues to be one of the wonders of the California Thoroughbred breeding industry. There it sits, right in the middle of the incredible building boom that has engulfed the entire San Fernando Valley, a boom that has seen one after another of the Valley’s many breeding establishments of the past 20 years and more succumb to the inevitable pressure of subdividers.

“According to its owners, Mrs. A.W. Ryan and Miss Mary Strnad, the farm will continue to operate as a public boarding, breeding and training center into the unforeseeable future, and that should set at rest any rumors to the contrary that may have cropped up during the past few months.”

The next April, the 98 acres of Northridge Farms were sold to developers.

Conclusion Evident

In that year, however, thoroughbred ranching was still so prevalent that California Thoroughbred suggested the Valley as the base for one of its four bus tours of the California breeding industry.

The tour was to feature Northridge Farms, H H Farm, Howard Stock Farm, Conejo Ranch, CLH Ranch and Rolling Hills Ranch.

But the conclusion of the story was evident by then.

“The developers, the subdividers, the builders, the speculators had sprung forth and the land values had jumped to much more than they were really worth except to build cracker boxes,” said Albert Yank, one of the Valley’s few home-grown thoroughbred ranchers.

Yank grew up in Sylmar during the Depression. After World War II, Yank bought land in Sylmar and started Altandor Farm.

He was one of the last to hang on. But in 1970 he sold the farm for development.

Today, Yank keeps an office across the street from Santa Anita and runs a lushly landscaped thoroughbred stable in the hills near Perris.

Yank offered a bittersweet epitaph for the Valley’s short-lived fling with thoroughbreds.

“The people that went in the horse business in the San Fernando Valley really made a fortune in the horse business because they became extensive land owners of very expensive property,” Yank said. “Some of the people became old and died and heirs of estates like cash-e-pooh.”

Ranch an Exception

History will note that that wasn’t the case at the little Falk Ranch.

After Falk died in 1956, his wife, Elizabeth, quietly stayed on. She had fallen in love with the animals.

“It was hers,” said her longtime housekeeper and companion, Lou Young, who still lives on the ranch. “She was very selfish in that way. It was hers.”

In recent years, Elizabeth Falk converted the ranch to a kind of maternity ward for foaling mares and an infirmary for injured race horses.

In her will she ordered that proceeds from the sale of her ranch be set into a trust fund to benefit animals.

Her son, Steve, will administer the fund.

Young will follow the diaspora of the thoroughbreds from the Valley. She will move to Solvang to live on the Curragh stock farm. She got to know its owners when they were in the West Valley, but years ago they sold out to a high technology firm.