Horatio Luro

Editor's Note: Bryan Krantz is an owner and breeder, as well as a former owner of Fair Grounds. He shares this story about Chris Owens, the longtime famed New Orleans entertainer and club owner who passed away Tuesday. Chris Owens was a regular Thanksgiving Day attendee for Fair Grounds opening day. Usually there were three in her group: Chris, her mom and boyfriend. She was a local celebrity and wanted to be seen. She usually requested a table across the dining room from the maitre d' stand. This insured she...

Nobody, we keep telling ourselves, remembers a time quite like this. And that's true even of John Williams, who has seen just about everything in our business. But he did once experience something pretty similar--worse, if anything, strictly in terms of the springtime routines of a stallion farm. That was when Caro imported a wildly contagious venereal disease from France to Spendthrift, and the Department of Agriculture wanted to put a chain on the gate. Williams imagined that he'd already fulfilled his most stressful task, in boarding a plane to...