Clocker's Corner

Most with a story to tell regale audience and bystander around the dinner table or the campfire or at the bar. More disciplined souls sit at the typewriter to memorialize it in print. But what possesses someone to then take that memoir and distill it into a screenplay, fundraise a small retirement account for a movie of that screenplay that you'll direct yourself before premiering the finished product in a packed Los Angeles movie theater for a collection of SoCal racing glitterati? "The summer of my first year in college...

The new Eddie Truman Library, named in honor of the longtime trainer who died last month at age 77 and was a leading advocate for literacy, is the latest addition to the Santa Anita backstretch. The Eddie Truman Library was opened in Santa Anita's stable area in a dedicated space that's part of the recreation center and dining hall that serves backstretch workers. Truman donated many of the books in the collection, which includes educational materials, an array of fiction and non-fiction books and other assorted items. Titles are available...

His father had long since ceased training, but they still always stood at the same point by the Santa Anita paddock. "There was a spot there, where the horses come out from the saddling enclosure and make a right," Evan Ferraro recalls. "From there you could look at them straight on, so you could see their conformation, their joints, and my dad would point stuff out to me." And there was one filly by In Excess (Ire) that just blew the veteran horseman away: a Harris Farms homebred, saddled by...