Bill Pearson, 82; Jockey and Dealer of Art and Antiques

“I’m reconciled to the fact that I will never get out of this life alive. And while I’m still breathing, I’m going to live it up.”

-- Billy Pearson to Parade magazine, 1959

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He was a small man -- 5 feet 2 inches and 105 pounds -- yet larger than life. He wrote his autobiography, “Never Look Back,” in 1958, but added so many adventures over the last 44 years that he stacked up enough material for a whole series of sequels.

Bill Austin “Billy” Pearson, world-traveling jockey, megabucks quiz show winner, self-taught art connoisseur and dealer who made fortunes and gambled and partied them away with such high-living friends as director John Huston and actors Sterling Hayden and Burl Ives, has died. He was 82.

Pearson, who straddled horses from Santa Anita to Siam but preferred a well-stitched quilt to a thoroughbred, died Thanksgiving Day in Kingston, N.Y., where he lived in a 1730s stone house with his sixth wife, Margaret.

The inveterate chain-smoker and heavy drinker of the best that money could buy ended what his daughter Sarah Luck Pearson called his “magical life” by dying of pneumonia, after suffering from emphysema and heart disease.

Pearson was always a good story -- for the sports pages that recorded his 826 track victories; for television where he wowed viewers of “The $64,000 Question” and “The $64,000 Challenge” with his arcane knowledge of art; and on the pages of Architectural Digest, which raved about the 17 historic homes he refurbished and decorated with his eclectic art collection.

Fortunately for interviewers, his mouth was as good as his eye.

“It doesn’t take a college graduate to appreciate a painting or a symphony, and it’s proved by the fact that a snot-nosed 5-foot-2 ex-delinquent like me can be an art authority,” he told a writer for a 1967 Times article. “And that’s the way it should be.”

As for what he really thought of horses, he told the San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen in 1986, “I hate horses. They’re dumber than canaries and don’t know a thing about art.”

In the early 1950s -- when Pearson was still riding at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park and tracks in Athens, Milan, France, Britain and Ireland, and in the former Ceylon, Malaya and Siam -- sports columnist Ned Cronin announced that he planned to make his fortune writing a book about Pearson.

“Nothing,” the columnist wrote, “seems to happen to Pearson in the ordinary way. If he started out for a ham on rye at the corner drugstore, chances are he’d wind up on a floating carpet eating goat’s ears with ... Valentino.”

The jockey and art dealer dedicated his own book to the IRS, which, he wrote, “had watched over me closer than my mother, knew me better than my wife, one who, even after I was dead, could ‘remember.’ ”

Huston, who once helped Pearson get back on his feet by obtaining pre-Columbian art from Meso-American tombs, wrote in the autobiography’s foreword: “What a rare combination of big times, tough breaks, wild dreams, handsome payoffs and bad falls served to make up this book. I marvel at it, just as I shall forever marvel at Billy himself.”

Pearson was born in Chicago but didn’t stay long. He moved to Pasadena with his mother, a nurse, when he was 5, and stayed there until he started roaming the world, first on horseback and later with the jet set.

He dropped out of school to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, established by during the Depression to provide work for the jobless. There Billy became a much-defeated flyweight fighter until the CCC athletic director cautioned: “Try something else, kid, before you get killed. You’re about the right size for a jockey.”

So Pearson got a job as stable boy and “hot walker” at the Le Mar Stock Farm at Santa Anita, and learned to gallop thoroughbreds at Charlie Cooper’s San Luis Rey Ranch. He rode in the California county fair circuit in the late 1930s and broke into the big time at Santa Anita in 1940. He immediately became the top apprentice rider in America.

In 1941, Pearson was the leading rider at the Hollywood Park meeting until fate set him off in a new direction. The horse he was riding plunged through a fence, and Pearson wound up hospitalized for nine months with a concussion, eight broken ribs, and a fractured shoulder, thigh and ankle.

Fellow jockey Jackie Westrope tried to needle him by sending him a book on quilts “because it looks like you’re going to spend the rest of your life sewing.”

But the joke backfired. That book sparked Pearson’s fascination with quilts, antiques and various kinds of prehistoric and folk art. He bought a quilt he liked at a San Francisco Goodwill store for eight dollars and then learned it was worth $2,000. The design was Independence Hall, and Pearson later donated the quilt to the Smithsonian Institution, which valued it at $20,000. He quickly bought up every quilt he could find -- 150 or so at up to $100 each -- only to discover the whole lot was then worth a mere $11.

“That started me thinking,” he said in 1986. “Why should one quilt be worth $2,000, and 150 others worth nothing? So I really began studying the design, the needlework, the stitches, and became an expert. And that opened my eyes to other art objects.”

Pearson read scores of books on art. Huston taught him about pre-Columbian and African art. His friend, watercolorist, art educator and administrator Millard Sheets, became another teacher. In France, Pearson raced for Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who introduced him to classical and modern art.

Pearson kept riding -- except for a couple years in the Merchant Marine during World War II -- but his earnings as a jockey were now directed toward buying art.

“Unlike money,” he often said, “art gives lasting pleasure.”

In 1956, he put his newly acquired knowledge to work on television -- becoming the fourth person to win $64,000 on “The $64,000 Question,” choosing Great Art and Artists as his category.

In typical fashion, he partied all night, cashed the check, put the cash in a hatbox, and with his friend Ives walked up New York’s Fifth Avenue to a gallery and bought an early version of Edward Hicks’ “The Peaceable Kingdom.” Pearson later donated the painting to Scripps College in Pomona.

In equally typical fashion, he stopped off in Las Vegas on the way home to Pasadena and lost most of what was left of his quiz show winnings.

“Then I went on ‘The $64,000 Challenge,’ ” he told syndicated columnist Art Buchwald in 1958, “to make enough money to pay taxes on the money I’d won on the ‘The $64,000 Question.’ ”

He won a total of $170,000 on the two shows and retired from the track. He was making more money than some leading Hollywood producers he told Buchwald but added ruefully: “I had obligations to bookies, dice tables, Ferraris, imported wines and friends I had never met before.”

Huston bawled him out for squandering his winnings, but then staked him to open an art gallery in La Jolla. He later moved the gallery to San Francisco, where he started refurbishing antique houses.

Pearson dealt in pre-Columbian, primitive and tribal art; American folk art and quilts; Hungarian painted dowry furniture; model steam trains; and World War I photographs and artifacts.

In 1996, he was recognized as one of the top 100 collectors in the United States by Art and Antiques magazine. He helped develop the Oakland Museum and often lent parts of his collection to museums for exhibition.

Pearson is survived by his wife, Margaret; and four daughters: Mia, Enrica, Sarah and Cody Pearson.

A memorial service will be planned next month in San Francisco. The family has asked that any memorial donations be sent to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.