John Cheever Cowdin

John Cheever Cowdin (March 17, 1889 – September 16, 1960) was an American financier and polo champion who was a head of Universal Pictures, Standard Capital Corporation of New York City, and was chairman of Ideal Chemicals.

Cowdin was married three times in the course of his life. He married his first wife, Florence Hopkins, in 1912; they divorced in 1926. Their union produced a son, John Cheever Cowdin Jr. who in 1946 committed suicide at age 33 while in Nassau, Bahamas. According to The New York Times, Cowdin later married Katherine Andrea Parker Berens on December 30, 1941, in Yuma, Arizona. As a prominent American, the TIME magazine reported Cowdin's 1929 marriage to Manhattan socialite divorcee, Mrs. Katherine McCutcheon Abbott, in Bristol, Maine, during a cruise on his yacht, Surf.

He died on September 16, 1960.

Equine sportsman J. Cheever Cowdin served as president of Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York. In 1941, the track renamed its Junior Champion Stakes Thoroughbred horse race to the Cowdin Stakes in his honor.

He was termed by Esquire Magazine not only one of the best-dressed men of his era, but "one of the Big Four of polo from the time of the great Tommy Hitchcock." The International Polo Club Palm Beach lists him on a 1927 team with W. Averell Harriman and Tommy Hitchcock. He also played in 1925