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When he was 16, folks wagged their heads mournfully and predicted that Benjamin would break his father. But Horace Jones, a covered-wagon man who got the choicest piece of land in northwestern Missouri, would take a lot of breaking. A shrewd, hard-bitten Welshman, he founded the town of Parnell, ran the Parnell bank, and knew more about raising cattle than anybody in Nodaway County. He wanted Ben to become a banker, but that wasn't in the cards.
Parnell really buzzed the day that young Ben, who had ridden cow ponies on his father's farm since he was four, thundered down Main Street in an impromptu match race for $5 a side. There also came the day when a riot was threatened after he single-handedly attacked a group of Italians and felled one of them with a stone; his father hustled Ben off to a logging camp until things cooled off.
Eventually, after pedaling a bicycle 500 miles or so from Parnell, Ben turned up at the State Agricultural College of Colorado (now Colorado A. & M.). There he met a kindred spirit, a rugged football player named Merlin ("Deacon") Aylesworth, whose father was the college president. They whooped it up together, on the gridiron and on & off the campus. But it wasn't long before Ben said goodbye to Aylesworth (who later became president of the National Broadcasting Co.) and pedaled back to Parnell. That was the end of his academic education.
Along the Pumpkin Circuit. It took him no time at all to figure out what he wanted to do. "Banking and horse racing wouldn't have went together," he decided. "Folks think all horse trainers are horse thieves."
Banker Jones remonstrated, but Plain Ben got himself a few horses and struck out. In between fairs, he kept his eyes open for a man with a horse and an urge to bet. Whenever he found one, a course was marked out and a match run, with the stakes sometimes as high as $400.
It was a tough league. In Oklahoma City, Ben once got hornswoggled in a match race against an Indian quarter-horse. The Indians dug a hole in the lane Ben's horse was to run in, filled it with straw and covered it with dirt. When Ben's horse hit the hole, she went sprawling and the Indians took his money. Since then Ben has been pretty thorough about inspecting tracks before a race.
His early wanderings took him along the "pumpkin show" circuit, from Tulsa to Lewiston, Idaho. Race meetings lasted one or two days, and purses were a piddling $100. About 30 vagabond horsemen roamed this circuit, and none ever got rich—or starved—mainly because of a secret mutual-assistance pact that no matter who won a race everybody with a horse in it shared equally in the purse.
South of the Border. Racing was then at its lowest ebb in the U.S.; a reform movement had closed the sport in Chicago, then blacked it out in Memphis, New Orleans, Seattle and San Francisco, finally shutting it down (for two years) in New York. The only two major racing centers that were not affected were Maryland and Kentucky.