One need only glance at the precariously leaning brick facade of the old Caton Place barn that houses the Kensington Stables to realize that the 1930s-era structure has seen better days.
And better days it has had.
In fact, nearly 60 years ago, that once-pristine barn that for so many Brooklyn youths was the place to get up close and personal with a gelding or mare, sparked the career of a young man who briefly dominated the equestrian art of show jumping in the United States, and popularized the sport in the same way Lance Armstrong would make bike racing a national sensation (well, minus the doping scandal).
“Benny O’Meara was absolutely instrumental in the world of show jumping,” Frank O’Meara said of his older brother. “He changed it and helped it to become more of a sport that people wanted to watch.”
“Brooklyn Benny,” as he was called in horse circles, began working as a stable boy in the 1950s, back when it was known as the Prospect Park Riding Academy. Like most Brooklyn kids, he had no horse-riding background, but the long hours scrubbing down the animals and maintaining the stables fueled his knowledge and aspirations.
Working at Harry Goldstein’s stable at the tender age of 12, O’Meara taught himself to ride, and he spent the summers of those halcyon days at Goldstein’s camp upstate, where he met his mentor, H.R. “Kappy” Kaplan. Kaplan took a shine to the young kid from Brooklyn, and soon had him shoeing the gentile giants while training him in the fine art of jumping.
O’Meara then borrowed money from his grandmother, bought a new truck, and shod horses all around the tri-state area.
By 1961, O’Meara had become keen on spotting and developing potential champions, so he entered the National Horse Show competition in Madison Square Garden astride “PD” — so named after being rejected by the New York City Police Department Mounted Unit — and rode the Cinderella steed out of obscurity and into the top ranks of the show’s jumper division.
O’Meara followed up the breakout performance the next year, winning the Professional Horseman’s Association’s Champion Jumper of the Year honors. According to a report in Chronicle of the Horse, a return visit to the National Horse Show saw O’Meara tie for first place, riding a legendary horse named “Jacks Or Better.”
He went on to a stellar career as a trainer of champion horses; developing studs, first at his Montville, N.J., farm, and later in Middleburg, Va., that would earn top marks at shows both nationally and internationally. His horse “Untouchable” competed in not only the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, but the Mexico City games in 1968.
But it wasn’t all fun and games and championships for O’Meara. Of course there was that time in 1964 — “The day the jumping stopped and the revolt began,” Sports Illustrated reported, when O’Meara got arrested and fined for mistreating one of his horses in Devon, Pa., to this day the home of the famous Devon Horse Show, when a donnybrook nearly broke out as members of O’Meara’s team seemed to be targeted for penalties. As the Sports Illustrated article puts it, O’Meara was charged with polling — a training practice of rapping a horse’s legs with a bamboo pole so that he thinks he has hit the fence and thus learns to jump higher and avoid injury in the ring. O’Meara and an American Stock Horse Association steward both said the rider had done no such thing, but the next day he was arrested and charged with cruelty. He pleaded not guilty and had to pay $38 in fines.
“He was smart,” Frank O’Meara said of his brother, who never rode with a helmet — instead substituting a handsome fedora. “He learned from the greats, and observed and rewatched films over and over. It’s scary to think of what he might have achieved had he lived longer.”
Sadly, he died tragically in 1966, crashed to his death in his second love — a refurbished World War II fighter plane he purchased earlier that year. He was just 27 years old.
Now, even as Kensington Stables appears to be poised to go belly-up and its Caton Place barn redeveloped, another former groom and rider there wants to have a memorial — perhaps an equestrian statue — to the legendary horseman erected in Brooklyn.
Arthur Goldberg, a founder of horse therapy provider Gallop NYC, said he is reaching out to local lawmakers seeking support for his plan.
“He was just a kid from Brooklyn,” Goldberg said. “He didn’t come from a horse background, but the horses kind of took us out of our circumstances and gave us a brighter future. And recognizing that is something that’s important to the history of Brooklyn, I would like to see if we can get a memorial in Benny’s name.”
And then Benny’s name would not be lost to history, something that certainly won’t happen to his more-famous brother-in-law, Vermont Senator and former Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who is married to the groom’s sister, Jane.
