Tenney, 86, Dies; Swaps’ Trainer : Horse racing: The California colt won the Kentucky Derby in 1955 for Hall of Fame handler.

Meshach (Mesh) Tenney, a Hall of Fame trainer who won the 1955 Kentucky Derby with Swaps after sleeping in the California colt’s stall at Churchill Downs for 10 nights before the race, died Saturday in Provo, Utah.

Tenney, 86, suffered a stroke earlier this year and moved from his home in Safford, Ariz., to live with his daughter, Janis, in Provo.

When Tenney and Rex Ellsworth, his lifelong friend and partner, arrived in Louisville with Swaps for the 1955 Derby, they astounded local horsemen with their personal style and training methods. Tenney, dressed in a wide-brimmed straw hat and cowboy boots with silver spurs, would personally ride the lead pony that took Swaps to the track.

Tenney slept in his car for the first few days there, then moved into Swaps’ stall because he didn’t trust the Churchill Downs security. “I had to move out of my car,” Tenney once said, “because that wasn’t good enough. In my car, I might not wake up if somebody sneaked in to throw something in there with the horse. I had no suspicion about anybody with any character. But who could say that some snake that just wanted to bet $2 wouldn’t do anything to your horse?”

Swaps had already won the Santa Anita Derby, but Tenney felt that the horse needed a prep race over the Churchill Downs track. A week before the Derby, with Bill Shoemaker riding, Swaps won by 8 1/2 lengths, running six furlongs in 1:10 1/5--one-fifth of a second slower than the track record.

In the Kentucky Derby, Swaps was the second choice behind Nashua, but Shoemaker broke Tenney’s colt on top, nursed him along through slow early fractions and had enough left to beat Nashua by 1 1/2 lengths.

Tenney and Ellsworth, who owned Swaps, were born a day apart and grew up together in Arizona. They were as close as brothers, riding the range and punching cows before they turned to the thoroughbred game. When Tenney married Sylvia Christensen in 1935, later in the day he saddled a horse owned by Ellsworth at the track in Phoenix. When the Tenneys left on their honeymoon, the horse occupied a trailer attached to their car, and they headed for the Caliente track in Mexico, where the horse was scheduled to run in a few days.

Tenney, elected to the Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 1991, was the leading trainer in the nation in 1962-63, his horses earning more than $1 million in each of those years. Tenney came out of retirement in the 1980s to train for a couple of years in California.

“He lived horses, and there was nobody like him, because he worked 24 hours a day,” Ellsworth said. “You could depend on him just like you could the sun coming up.”

Tenney tried to win the Derby three more times, but the closest he came was two third-place finishes, with Candy Spots in 1963 and The Scoundrel in 1964.

Besides his wife and daughter, Tenney is survived by a son, Tracy. Funeral services are incomplete. The family suggests donations to the Shoemaker Foundation and the California Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Foundation.