Bud Delp learned lessons from stepfather Raymond Archer.

Bud Delp, the Laurel Park-based Hall of Fame trainer who died a few days after Christmas at age 74, was brash and outspoken, unpolished and unapologetic about any faults that others may have perceived in his way of doing business. And that’s a mild description.

But Delp was not always the blustery man who so famously proclaimed his Horse of the Year and near-Triple Crown hero, Spectacular Bid, as the “best horse ever to look through a bridle.”

After Spectacular Bid’s breakout victory in the 1978 Laurel Futurity, then a Grade 1 race that was on every owner and trainer’s list of most-aspired-to achievements, Delp shared the limelight in the old Maryland Horse magazine with his stepfather, longtime Maryland horseman Raymond Archer.

With the magazine deadline fast approaching, editor Snowden Carter (who also happened to be my father) hastily assembled a feature on Spectacular Bid and Delp, while I—busy at home in those days with a young son and infant daughter—was pressed into service to write something about Mr. Archer.
 
Of the many horsepeople I’ve interviewed over the years, he was perhaps the single most memorable. To this day, when I think about families and horse racing, and all of the tangled emotions that can come between the two, I get a mental image of Mr. Archer, sitting in his easy chair.

Archer, a gruff man who cultivated few friends and no top-class runners during his lifetime on the race track, was then 80 years old, and just managing to hold on to some semblance of a rural enclave surrounding his farmhouse that sat in juxtaposition to busy Route 1 in Bel Air, Md. A portion of his once 150-acre property had been taken for a highway bypass, and he had sold off the front acreage to an automobile dealership and a fast food chain.

This was the house where “Buddy” grew up—living there from ages 9 to 25, as a son of the second of Archer’s three (long-since divorced) wives.

Both Archer and Delp, reached by telephone that night, talked about how tough the work around the race track can be. Which might have explained why Bud received little or no direct encouragement from his stepfather: “He’d never wake me up in the morning to go with him,” Delp recalled of the times when, as a teenager, he yearned to spend time at the track. “If I wasn’t sitting in the car waiting for him, he’d drive off without me.”
Still, Delp worked for Archer for six years (1956 to ’62), rising from hotwalker to assistant trainer. Theirs was not an amicable parting after the two disagreed over Bud’s salary in the fall of 1962. “I had a wife and a baby and another on the way. I told him I needed a raise or I’d have to give it a go on my own,” he recalled for the story. Archer remembered that his stepson had taken some of his best clients—an accusation that Delp disputed.

On the day that Spectacular Bid won the Laurel Futurity, Delp brought Archer (whom he had not seen in several years) to the track, arranged for a box seat, and had a special photograph taken of just the two of them in the winner’s circle. It may have been Raymond Archer’s finest hour. But he chose to downplay the event. When interviewed for the magazine, he claimed to have forgotten the horse’s name.