The (Louisville, Kentucky) Courier-Journal is recapping Kentucky Derby winners in preparation for the 141st Kentucky Derby on May 2, and has noted the 1909 winner’s connection to filmmaker Orson Welles.
Wintergreen, the 35th Derby winner, was sired by stallion Dick Welles, named for Orson Welles’ inventor father, and owned by Ohio beer baron Jerome Respess.
While Wintergreen was a Derby winner, his sire Dick Welles was a bigger star in horse racing circles. Dick Welles was frequently compared to the famous Man O’ War, and was called the “swiftest thoroughbred ever seen on the American Continent” by the Lexington Herald in 1904. His bloodlines proved successful and he is mentioned frequently in industry archives of breeding associations, well beyond his death in 1923. Respess thought so highly of Dick Welles, that he installed a monument to the horse with a bronze marker on Highland Stock Farm.
In his essay My Father Wore Black Spats written for Paris Vogue in 1982, Orson Welles touched upon his father’s connection to horse racing, though he mixed Wintergreen’s success with his sire:
“(My father) had a famous name because of a cigar. The ‘Dick Welles’ cigar was a cheap and popular smoke named for a horse which had won the Kentucky Derby. The horse had been named for my father. Apart from this one doubtful honor, Dick Welles was mildly notorious as a man about town who dabbled in many enterprises including the six-day bicycle race which he brought to America.”
Sadly, Wintergreen, who raced from ages two to seven years old, was one of eight thoroughbreds killed in a barn fire at Latonia Race Track in Cincinnati in 1914.
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