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The flexible mettle of Shamrock’s Steele
In 1976, Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney sought
a quarterback for his Carroll County, Md., farm. The guy he signed
has become the consummate all-purpose player.
by Joe Clancy
Harry Harvey, main man to the Rooney family’s horse businesses,
called his friend Joe Taylor at Gainesway Farm.
“ We need a farm manager over here at Shamrock Farm in Maryland,” Harvey
said. “Three hundred acres, some mares?–? Standardbred and Thoroughbred?–?and
we’d like to stand a stallion. But you know, Joe, we don’t want somebody
who just knows horses. We grow crops, we’ve got some cattle. We need an
all-arounder.”
Taylor knew just the guy, a stallion groom at Gainesway with a farming background,
a college degree and aspirations to be a veterinarian. Thirty-two years later,
Jim Steele still works at Shamrock.
Kentucky hard-boot turned Maryland horseman, Steele built a career, a family,
a life at the Carroll County farm near Woodbine?–?all on the decision
to interview with Harvey back in 1976.
“ When I came here, I was still going to go to vet school; I wasn’t
going to stay forever,” Steele said in late March. “But now, this
is home. When I get up in the middle of the night, I don’t need to turn
the light on. I know where the bump is, where the doorway is. It’s home.
It’s been a nice fit for me. I like agriculture. I like horses. I like
the farming aspect. I like the cattle aspect.”
Steele met his wife, Christie, at Shamrock, and they raised five sons?–?Britt,
Michael, Christopher, Jonathan and Timmy?–?in the house built for his
predecessor and periodically visited by the farm’s founder (family patriarch
Art Rooney, who died in 1988).
Rooney founded the Pittsburgh Steelers with money he earned betting horses
and became a legend in his hometown while spreading goodwill through a lifetime.
He bought Shamrock, then a dairy farm, as a retreat/escape in 1948 and made
it home base for an operation that included standout homebreds in Standardbred
and Thoroughbred racing and evoked a “working-farm” mentality that
pervades Shamrock still.
Now more than 600 acres, Shamrock houses stallions, mares, foals, yearlings,
some layups, acres of hay, straw and soybeans and the Steele family. Farm equipment
gets parked between the fence lines. Extra hay gets sold to local cattle farms.
The fences get repaired during down time between busy seasons. The horses stay
outside, weather permitting. When Christie isn’t at her desk as farm
secretary, often because she stayed up late on a night-watch shift, Steele
answers the phone with a simple “Shamrock” and uses old-school
sayings like “Good enough” toward the end of the call.
The Steelers are known for generations of success, a no-nonsense approach to
the business side of football and loyalty when it comes to coaches, players,
fans and the city of Pittsburgh. If that combination helped lead to an unmatched
six Super Bowl victories, so be it. The standard would have been the same,
win or lose.
Shamrock has produced several Standardbred champions and sustained Thoroughbred
success going back 60 years, through Maryland-bred champion Christopher R.,
longtime Delaware Park track record holder St. Bonaventure and stakes winners
Reception Queen, Joan R., Good As Diamonds (Ire), Teeming Shore and Molly.
On the Standardbred side, the farm’s contributions include the amazing
mare Lismore (whose 19 foals earned more than $4.5 million), Lisheen (a winner
of $500,000), Super Bradshaw, B.G’s Bunny and more.
Shamrock also gets credit for giving Maryland Jim Steele. With the Rooneys’ leadership,
Steele steered the farm through a variety of incarnations?–?Thoroughbreds,
Standardbreds, cattle, crops, semen collection for visiting Warmblood
stallions?–? whatever was needed. No mere loss leader in a Rooney empire
that includes Yonkers Raceway, Palm Beach Kennel Club Greyhound track and more,
Shamrock pays its way and improves itself via economic success.
“ I was a Thoroughbred guy, and [former Shamrock farm manager] Arnold Shaw
was a Standardbred guy, so the farm took on a Thoroughbred trend when I got here,” said
Steele. “But a horse is a horse, and we’ve made it work. The farm
has changed and evolved in all kinds of ways since I first came.”
So has Steele. In his 32 years as a Marylander, he has worked on more than
Shamrock Farm. He is president of the Maryland Horse Breeders Association and
chairman of the Maryland Horse Industry Board, has served Standardbred groups,
state agriculture commissions and the Carroll County Farm Bureau, among others.
He helped draft a state equine census to give the horse industry data to illustrate
economic impact, and still supports the idea of a Maryland Horse Park. Above
all, he has worked hard to link agriculture and horses?–? driving home
the point that farmers and horse breeders are part of the same industry.
Changing planes
Like a horse trying to get into a crowded maiden field, Steele wound up on
the also-eligible list for Auburn University’s veterinary program. He
worked at Gainesway and took graduate courses at Western Kentucky University
and the University of Kentucky while eyeing the scratch board, then jumped
at the chance to interview for the Shamrock job.
Perhaps Kentucky’s most respected farm manager, Taylor recommended Steele.
The young man called Harvey and set up an interview and a tour of the farm.
A novice regarding air travel and the Baltimore-Washington area, Steele booked
a flight from Lexington to Baltimore with a layover in Washington, D.C., in
December 1976.
“ I had been to Washington one time in my life, on a class trip as a 12-year-old
or something,” he said. “How was I supposed to know you could drive
to BWI in 30 minutes?”
No matter. Steele made good use of his time and saw the King Tut exhibit before
catching the plane for Baltimore. He met Harvey, toured the farm and liked
what he saw. Next came a trip to New York and an interview with Tim Rooney
(Art’s son and Steele’s boss today) at Yonkers early in 1977.
Steele fit Shamrock’s job description. He’d learned farming from
his father and grandfather. A groom for stallion Crimson Satan and others at
Gainesway, Steele knew the breeding business. In addition, he had foxhunted,
ridden show horses, owned a Tennessee Walking Horse and operated a small breaking
and leg-up business.
“ I knew a little bit of everything, and that really helped,” he
said. “I talked with Mr. Rooney, and we went through what he wanted and
how it would work. A month later, I was offered the job.”
He started on April 1, 1977 (after a long ride with a U-Haul trailer) and never
left. The first night included the drama of Christopher R.’s dam Rita
Marie looking like she was ready to foal?–?though she gave her new farm
manager a few days before actually delivering.
Tim Rooney knew he had made the right call with the young man from Kentucky.
Christopher R. stood his first season at Glade Valley Farms in Frederick, so
Steele shuttled mares back and forth while learning on the fly, delivering
foals and trying not to work days and nights.
Word was out about the new guy, and Shamrock hosted a steady stream of salesmen?–?feed,
hay, straw, pesticides, supplies. Steele ran them all off until he finally
heeded one man’s “but I’ve been selling to this farm for
years” approach. Steele answered, “Fine, just send me whatever
we ordered last year.” The 55-gallon drums of pesticide lasted years.
The highlight of the new job came on a 1979 Super Bowl trip with the Steelers.
Steele flew on the team’s plane, stayed in the team’s hotel, signed
autographs as he and future NFL Hall of Famer Jack Lambert and other stars
sat at the owner’s table at a party after Pittsburgh defeated Dallas,
35-31.
“ It was culture shock for me, but the whole thing was an experience,” said
Steele. “Mr. [Art] Rooney made me feel like a big guy, an important part
of it all, and he was always like that. I used to think I was special because
he treated me great. Over the years, I found out I wasn’t special. He treated
everybody like that. God, what a great guy.”
Shifting winds
Home to a herd of Angus cattle and a majority of Standardbreds when Steele
started, Shamrock shifted toward Thoroughbreds once Christopher R. moved to
the farm for his second season at stud. A four-time Maryland champion, including
Horse of the Year in 1975, Christopher R. won 22 races and more than $400,000
for Shamrock and trainer Tuffy Hacker. The horse serviced the Rooneys’ mares
and lured outside clients, and the farm boomed with the rest of the industry,
peaking at 120 foals per year.
Shamrock also stood Dancing Count, Thirty Eight Paces and others through the
years. The Rooneys purchased two adjoining parcels, and Shamrock gradually
added another mare/foaling barn in the mid-1980s, a bigger stallion barn and
a nursery area for yearlings on the far side of the farm.
Along the way, Steele put his stamp on Shamrock. He built a wall of Kentucky
limestone at the end of the driveway. He planted maple trees along the drive,
expanded paddocks and fields, eventually stopped people from using roadside
acreage as parkland. At its most successful, Shamrock was mentioned by many
as second only to the legendary Windfields Farm in Chesapeake City among Maryland’s
breeding-farm elite.
Then the industry changed, the farm’s stallions got old and the farm
evolved again. At the end of the 1980s, Shamrock felt the pinch of fewer mares,
fewer foals, fewer commercial successes. Unlike many horse farms, however,
Shamrock adapted, making money from livestock, crops, Standardbreds, other
breeds. When the Rooneys first expanded the farm, there was some rough land
out back. Steele filled it with cattle.
“ I got up to 80 cows at one point, then got it back down to 40, then I
got it down to 20,” he said. “Twenty was a great number, because
I could feed them without doing anything extra. They ate hay that wasn’t
suitable for the horses. When I got up to 80, I started growing silage just to
feed them.”
As a cattle farm, Shamrock provided the cow exhibit for the Greater Westchester
County Fair and Exposition at Yonkers Raceway. The fair hosted hundreds of
thousands of visitors each year, and the attractions included Shamrock’s
cows, calves, even a bull.
“ We sent a purebred Devon bull with a great big set of horns up there
one year,” said Steele. “Well, some kids got to messing with him
and were throwing darts at him. The bull got mad, busted out of the stall and
started running through the midway. I got this 15-minute call screaming at me.
They blamed it on the bull, but it could have been a cow; it could have been
anything. If you’d have thrown darts at me, I would have broken loose and
run through the midway.”
Steele never sent another bull, and the cow exhibit included a wall and a security
guard the next year.
From the start, Shamrock grew more than horses and cows, and Steele’s
job now includes caring for 60 acres of wheat straw, about 100 acres of hay
and 40 acres of soybeans. While an outside farmer handles the soybeans and
combines the wheat, the nine-member Shamrock crew bales the timothy and alfalfa
each year. In good years, the farm grows enough to sell. In bad years, it buys
a little.
In its latest state, Shamrock stands stallions Cherokee’s Boy, Greek
Sun and Rock Slide for the Maryland Stallion Station, plus M Eighty and Purple
Passion. Steele expects to foal about 50 mares, some owned by the Rooneys,
others for outside clients.
Standardbred mares are treated much like Thoroughbred mares, and
the yearling field might include both breeds turned out together. Shamrock
recently trimmed the staff of 12 to nine when business slowed over the winter
but may add more people as the work returns.
Leading by example
In his unique position as the manager of a Thoroughbred, Standardbred, crop
and cattle farm, Steele put himself in line for any number of positions representing
and leading those industries. First came posts with the Standardbred breeders,
via the introductory work of Harvey, then with the Maryland Horse Breeders
Association board of directors (he’s been the treasurer and plans to
end a three-year stint as president this spring).
Outside of racing, he’s best known as president of the Maryland Horse
Industry Board and the man behind the 2002 equine census that gathered crucial
statistical information about the state’s industry.
Maryland Horse Industry Board executive director Rob Burk called Steele a key
ingredient to the agency’s success.
“ He has done more for the recognition of the equine industry within the
agricultural industry than any individual in the sport,” said Burk. “He
can always present a reasonable voice for the industry to agriculture, to farmers,
to politicians, to anyone.”
Burk and Steele both work to ensure a seat at the table for Maryland’s
horses in any state agriculture issues – land preservation, nutrient
management, etc. To go with his hands-on nature at Shamrock, Steele knows how
to work a room.
“ The first time I met him. . . I remember thinking, ‘This guy? How
can he help?’?” said Burk. “He’s got such an easygoing
personality that you don’t give him credit. Now I realize he’s got
lots of vision, and people look to him. When he makes a point about something,
people listen.”
Facing pressure from a weak economy, competition from neighboring states, a
bankrupt race track owner and a seemingly underproductive slots law, Maryland’s
Thoroughbred industry has stagnated, feeding pessimism.
Not so fast, Steele says. He figures the slots will come and will support racing.
The economy forced some bidders to propose fewer machines than were approved,
but that won’t stop the creation of viable slot machine locations.
“ Think about it from a business sense: Who wants to take the maximum number
of machines?” he asked. “In this economy? Why not start small and
build from there? That will work, and it will help the industry, and we will
see results.”
From a breeding standpoint, Steele sees a pending shift in the market. Breeders
will need to consider racing their foals, planning matings accordingly. He
would love to see a return to the days of race tracks forming a circuit of
shorter meets.
Long-term health of the industry is the goal, and with it will come a preservation
of the way of life.
“ Racing was always a cycle, a circuit. There were a lot of tracks that
ran short meetings, and you followed them,” Steele said. “You looked
forward to it starting and ending; it had movement. It’s a lot like life
on a farm?–?you can’t wait for the first foal, you can’t wait
for the last foal, you can’t wait for the hay to be ready, you can’t
wait for the seasons to change. You live for those things.”
Steele sees Maryland as the leader in the Mid-Atlantic, even as breeders, owners,
stallions and farms turn to Pennsylvania and its slots-fueled breeders’ program.
The progress over the border meant new farms, new stallions, new interest?–?often
at the expense of similar development in Maryland.
To Pennsylvania’s new, Steele counters with Maryland’s old.
“ We have established farms with established horsemen [whom] people trust
and who know what they’re doing,” Steele said. “Shamrock Farm
today is not the one I came and saw back in the 1970s. It’s changed and
evolved, and so have all the farms in Maryland. We’ve had a chance to make
mistakes, change, adapt and ride the ebb and flow. We have the better stallions,
the better farms, the better horsemen. Will the industry be what it ought to
be? I don’t know; that depends on other things. But we’re a big factory
that knows how to make things. We’re just waiting to go back to work.”
The family Steele
Back in the 1970s, when Jim Steele was running salespeople out of Shamrock
Farm, he showed particular ambivalence toward a Purina Feed representative.
She wanted to sell to Shamrock, but Steele wasn’t buying. Three times,
she came to the farm. Three times, Steele sent her home. No sale.
When they crossed paths again, at a Fasig-Tipton sale in Timonium, things changed.
They worked for neighboring consignors and struck up a conversation between
visits from would-be buyers.
“ You don’t know who I am, do you?” the Purina rep finally
said. “I’ve been trying to get on your farm to talk to you about
using Purina feed, and you won’t even listen to me.”
Steele started listening, eventually, and that Purina Feed salesperson became
his wife a short time later. He and Christie have five sons, the youngest a
freshman at Frostburg University, and have been together 28 years.
His life at Shamrock blossomed into their life at Shamrock, as the house
Art Rooney built for his previous farm manager overflows with Steele family
memories. A wall of photos shows the typical family portraits at Olan Mills,
a pony-race jockey, a sloppy cupcake eater, a flight of young surfers, a University
of Maryland football player, a horse and buggy (Jim at the reins) clopping
up the driveway, a collage from the boys’ trip to Europe (they visited
everything from the Heineken brewery to the Leaning Tower of Pisa) and more.
Outside, the farm once hosted bonfires for the kids, staged impromptu go-cart
races and included a riding ring for the ponies. Now, it’s quieter. The
boys have grown; the bonfires have given way to a single golf hole (with another
on the way); the go-carts have been traded for cars, the ponies with trips
to Atlantic City.
Steele relishes that family life and can’t resist giving a little advice
to parents. Boys will be boys, he says, but that doesn’t mean you stay
out of their lives.
He took each of his sons, individually, on a trip to England. They drove,
they talked, they ate, they chose bed and breakfasts (sometimes wisely, sometimes
not) on the fly, they saw history. Mostly, they bonded.
“ It was great, and I would recommend that everyone do it,” said
Steele. “One on one, we got a chance to talk, to be together without the
other boys, without me thinking about the farm and without them thinking about
school or something. It doesn’t have to be England, it could be anywhere,
but going away really was worthwhile. We all got something out of it.”
Each Steele son has a photo album of “his” trip to England and,
judging from father’s quick recall, the books frequently get pulled off
the shelf.
There’s more to Jim Steele than Shamrock Farm. The would-be veterinarian
and ex-Kentuckian talks about mares, foals, stallions, cattle, hay and straw
because it’s his job. He discusses the Maryland equine industry and its
place within the state’s agriculture community because it’s his
passion.
But he would rather talk about his kids, his wife, his relationship with the
Rooney family and how fortunate he feels. Thirty-two years ago, he left home
a young man with his belongings in a U-Haul. Now, he presides over a farm,
a family, a life.
“ It’s been rewarding to raise five sons here; I chose the job, and
I love it,” he said. “Look what I’ve got. Look where I live.
I love what I’m doing. I traded off a little of the money I might have
made in another job for the life I have. I’m not the greatest horseman,
not the greatest cattleman, not the greatest hay man. . . I’m more of a
man for all seasons I guess.”
And just the man Harry Harvey was looking for.
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