Mary Bacon

Mary Steedman Bacon Anderson (January 1, 1948 – June 8, 1991) was an American Thoroughbred jockey and model.

Early life She was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Toledo, Ohio, by her father, a one-time big band pianist later involved in construction, and her mother who was a stay at home mother. She had one sister and brother.

Early career While having no horses of her own as a child, she interacted with them at a neighboring farm. In high school, Steedman found work as an outrider, helping in morning workouts and accompanying horses to the starting gate at Toledo's Raceway Park.

Steedman saved her money and after graduation went to school in England, where she earned an instructor's degree from a riding academy. When she returned to the United States, she taught riding at a hunt club outside of Detroit. She galloped horses on mornings at Detroit Race Course.

In June 1974 came a Newsweek cover for a story on women emerging in sports. The news magazine used 14 photographs inside to help illustrate its story. Bacon's was the only face to appear more than once.

Ku Klux Klan participation and media downfall In April 1975, while riding at the Fair Grounds Race Course in New Orleans, she attended a Ku Klux Klan rally in Walker, Louisiana. Asked to speak, she was introduced to a crowd of 2,700 by the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke.

Further, she told the publication that the Klan was not racist and that she was not either. "All the records I buy are Motown records," she says stoutly. "Some of my best friends are blacks."

Injuries and a career end In May 1979, she was seriously injured in a starting-gate accident at a small track in East St. Louis, Ill. Her mount flipped. The horse landed on her.

Personal life At the Detroit track Mary Steedman met jockey Johnny "Pug" Bacon. They married soon afterward. They competed together at Hazel Park, now defunct, in Michigan. In 1972 the track ruled that husbands and wives could not ride against each other. This combined with added marital difficulties Bacon divorced her husband in 1972. Pug Bacon died in a 1977 auto accident. in a motel in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 7, 1991, the eve of the Belmont Stakes. Discovered shortly after the gun was discharged, she died in the early morning hours of June 8 at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth.

Sixteen days later, her body was returned to New York and Belmont Park, where she had enjoyed much of her early success. Her cremated ashes were spread over the grave of Ruffian, perhaps the greatest female thoroughbred in history.