A Trip to the Winner’s Circle

There is no nice way to say this. When i was growing up in the 1960s, I thought my Uncle Fred was sort of a loser. He was likable, with a great sense of humor. He was eccentric in ways that were amusing. But Uncle Fred’s Horatio Alger-like older brother--my dad--was his boss.

Today, at 72, Fred Stone is arguably the world’s greatest painter of racehorses. Enormous murals of his work are displayed from Moscow to Hollywood Park. Queen Elizabeth keeps a set of dinnerware that he designed. A poster of one of his paintings is being used in a nationwide fund-raising drive for the families of the firefighters who died at the World Trade Center. In his own peculiar, late-blooming way, he is one of the most successful people I know.

Painting wasn’t the first love of my uncle’s life. Family lore has it that he could have been a major league baseball player but he hurt his arm at age 16. His last game was against a team of adult professionals. Fred pitched a no-hitter through eight and two-thirds innings, and then he either won or lost the game depending on whether you trust his or my father’s memory.

So Uncle Fred turned to the other great love of his life: painting and drawing. My grandfather, who worked two jobs to keep the family poor but not destitute through the Depression, couldn’t afford to buy good drawing paper, so he bought his son rolls of butcher paper. (Fred has said he was happy to have anything to draw on.)

In the late 1940s, he went to the Art Center School, now the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and then tried to make it as a commercial artist. “But I couldn’t cut it,” Fred says now. He was too slow, “too meticulous.”

After that, he got a job painting sets for movies and TV shows, including “Studio One,” “Playhouse 90” and “Rawhide.” He loved it, but he suffered from the same ailment: He couldn’t work quickly enough to satisfy the deadlines.

Fred then started a mural business with a partner named Harold Kramer. “He was an irascible guy,” my uncle says, “but I considered him a great artist.” Kramer would do sketches and paintings, and Fred would sell them to architects as murals. “We were doing pretty good,” Fred recalls, “but then Kramer got squirrelly. He was always fighting with the clients. If they wanted figurative, he wanted abstract. Then we got a job to do an outdoor mural for a savings and loan. It was supposed to be the history of motion pictures. So Kramer paints it, and it was the most magnificent, totally pornographic mural. He insisted we give it to the client. We did and they threw us out.”

Fred quit the mural business.

By this time, the late ‘50s, my uncle was married with two kids, so when my father offered him a job, he accepted. “I thought I was giving up art forever, and felt that now I was just going to be taken care of by my brother.”

It was a strange turn on the career path. Monogram Industries was a diversified conglomerate, but its core business was producing toilets for airplanes. The Culver City company started a division selling “marine self-contained sanitation systems”--boat toilets that didn’t just dump the waste into the water--and Fred became its chief salesman.

The Clean Water Act was still a long way off and self-contained toilets for pleasure boats were a tough sell. No one was going to buy them unless forced to. So Fred spent years lobbying state governments and environmental departments for laws restricting the dumping of waste into waterways. By the time he was finished, the marine division was one of the company’s most successful.

My uncle the artist was a terrific toilet salesman.

Finally, in 1976 at the age of 46, with his self-confidence restored by his success in sales and his bank account full enough to provide a buffer for a year or two, Fred quit Monogram, grew a mustache and went back to art.

First he tried the galleries, but he couldn’t paint fast enough to satisfy the commercial requirements of exhibition. (Gallery owners wanted at least 12 paintings ready within six months; Fred averages about one a month.)

Then his daughter, my cousin Laura, who had just started work at Santa Anita Park, said: “Why don’t you come out to the track and paint the racehorses?”

Fred was dubious. “My first ever commercial job was to paint the Lone Ranger and Tonto riding across the desert for a coloring book. I had no problem with the Lone Ranger and Tonto, but the horses were so bad that I kept delaying the job. Finally I had to turn it in and my boss said, ‘These guys look like they’re riding rabbits.’ ”

But this time Fred got the horses right. “That’s the way a horse looks,” says Robert Bradley, a veterinarian for the Los Angeles Equestrian Center.

At first Fred painted horse portraits for their owners, but the work was slow-going and he wasn’t making much money. Then he heard about the limited-edition print market--a way, he says, “to create a painting with legs.” So he painted in watercolor and issued limited editions of prints. He traveled to print shows looking for a publisher and was told that no one buys horse prints. He became his own publisher. Then he went to shows to find dealers and they, too, said that no one wanted horse art. That’s how my Uncle Fred got into the mail-order business, taking out ads in horse magazines and releasing his work in the “horse community.”

In 25 years Fred has produced 80 editions, each ranging from 400 prints in the early years to 1,500 prints in the last 15 years. All but two or three of those editions are sold out.

Caroline Burgeson, owner of the Paddock Room Galleries in Ocala, Fla., recalls hearing that Fred’s print commemorating the jockey Bill Shoemaker’s 8,000th win, issued in an edition of 400, sold on the secondary market for $10,000. She sold one for $7,500. Fred’s original paintings seldom come to market, although Burgeson once offered one for $12,000. She believes some of his other paintings, of more famous horses, would sell for a great deal more.

Fred also has produced a couple hundred thousand collector’s plates, a couple hundred thousand posters and a limited-edition book. He got back into the mural business, making wall-sized digital reproductions of his work. The Paris Las Vegas hotel has one--it’s 120 feet long. Fred’s murals hang on the walls of racetracks all over the U.S., in Canada, Austria, the Czech Republic and Russia. His work also hangs at Hollywood Park, Del Mar and Santa Anita.

When my uncle was growing up, the most important influence on his artistic life was Norman Rockwell, and Fred isn’t happy about the way Rockwell was treated by the art world. “He used to say he was just an illustrator. He wasn’t a real artist. He was never accepted. Now, how many years later, they are finally allowing him in a museum. A Rockwell retrospective opened at New York’s Guggenheim last fall.”

Fred will never have a retrospective in a major art museum, and you can tell that bothers him a little. But he is not, and never was, a loser.