Before there were Angels in Anaheim or Dodgers and Lakers in Los Angeles, there was Quarter Horse racing on the West Coast at Los Alamitos Race Course.
On Friday, August 3, the famous racetrack marked the 60th anniversary of the first public races hosted by Frank Vessels Sr on his ranch near the small town of Los Alamitos. What started out as informal match races on the Vessels Ranch training track in 1947 has grown into year-round Quarter Horse racing in California. In 2007, horses will race for more than $20 million in purses – a Quarter Horse record.
The Orange County oval is the only racetrack of any breed in the US that annually hosts four races with purses of $1 million or more. In December, Los Alamitos will hold the $2 million Los Alamitos Futurity, as well as the $1 million Champion of Champions.
This year also marks the seventh season of year-round Quarter Horse racing at Los Alamitos. A winter season that began on December 28, 2006, will continue with racing four days a week through December 23, 2007.
Frank Vessels, Sr moved to California from Kentucky in 1920 and started a small construction company that specialized in building drilling platforms for the oil business. Two decades later, he built a one-half-mile oval on his 435-acre Orange County Quarter Horse ranch.
The first pari-mutuel meeting at Los Alamitos in 1951 was an 11-day rain-soaked affair. Undeterred by a wet first meet, Vessels sank $100,000 into track improvements and convinced the California Horse Racing Board to grant him 16 days of racing the following year. That 1952 meeting saw business double over the previous meet and Quarter Horse racing in California had found a home.
In 1955, Los Alamitos hosted its first super star; a brilliant 2-year-old colt named Go Man Go, but dubbed “the Roan Rogue” by his fans. His appearance drew notice from race fans and sportswriters who had never heard of Quarter Horse racing, let alone Los Alamitos Race Course, and large crowds gathered at the track on the days that he raced.
Over years, Los Alamitos has been the home of countless champions including Vandy’s Flash, Jet Deck, Kaweah Bar, Charger Bar, Dash For Cash, Sgt Pepper Feature, Dashs Dream, Corona Chick, First Down Dash, Refrigerator, A Ransom, Whosleavingwho, Be A Bono and Ocean Runaway.
For the first 35 years of its history, Los Alamitos remained under the ownership of the Vessels family. In the mid-1980s, the track changed hands several times, but in the 1990s it was purchased by longtime race breeder Ed Allred, who fell in love with Quarter racing when he visited the track as a student in 1956. Allred, the leading breeder of Quarter Horse earners, remains today the sole owner of Los Alamitos Race Course.
Franks Vessels’s grandson Scoop Vessels owns Vessels Stallion Farm in Bonsall, CA, home of First Down Dash, Quarter racing’s all-time leading sire of earners of more than $60 million, as well as winners of 3,000 races, including 400 stakes races.