Keeping Up With the PCQHRA Board Members at Los Alamitos Race Track, Los Alamitos, Ca - Chuck Treece
In the horse racing world, have you ever heard of Movin Brown Jug? No? Well, he was the famous World Champion 870 horse in 1989. How about Baychaino? No? He was the 870 World Champion in 1990. Does Trucklin Six or Brotherly mean anything to you? Both were California Champions. Let’s try a couple more. Hard Hitting. Sound familiar? It should. He ran out $400,000 in earnings. Artesia Specialchic? That was another World Champion in 1997.
There are five men at Los Alamitos Race Track who have won 2,000 or more races. Those men are Blane Schvaneveldt (who passed away on July 5, 2010), Paul Jones (whose uncle is racecar legend Parnelli Jones who won the Indianapolis 500 in 1963), John Cooper, and Charlie Bloomquist. That’s four. The fifth man has to do with all those horses mentioned in the first paragraph above. Chuck Treece.
Chuck Treece was born in Hawthorne, California, in 1958. He went to school locally at St. Hedwig grade school up to the fourth grade. Then his dad, a carpenter, moved the family back to southern Illinois in 1968 to a four acre farm where he himself had been raised during the Depression. They were there for one year. But in that year is when it all started. One day his dad offered Chuck every boy’s dream. He wanted to know if his son would like to have a pony. Boy, did he? He chose a sorrel Shetland pony for $50. That is as much horse as they could afford. But that investment was going to multiply exponentially in time. And not just financially. That little pony started a fire on the inside of that boy so that the only thing he ever wanted to do with the rest of his life going forward was spend it around horses.
Before long, dad moved back to California alone and bought back the same house he had sold a year earlier. The family soon followed. The pony stayed in Illinois, but the fire he ignited in Chuck’s heart made the trip West. So the family bought another horse from George Liblin, a trainer at Los Alamitos, out of a classified ad for $150. They kept the horse at Los Alamitos Race Track where there were boarding stables at the time.
By age 12, Chuck wanted more than just that horse. The horse mania inside him was eating him alive. So he started sneaking into the backside of the race track, unobserved, through openings in gates or however he could get in. Initially, he just wanted to learn how to clean stalls. But he learned far more than that from all the teachers who took him under their care and threw more kindling on the conflagration building within. This was the start of a lifetime of millions of details about horses that began sticking to him and that would accumulate into a reservoir of knowledge that would become the base for the life and the success he never knew was coming.
By age 14, he aspired to be a jockey. His mother was not keen on this idea, but dad kept encouraging and opening the gate for his son to explore his dreams. Without having any idea how one became a jockey, one day Chuck, his mother, and his seventeen year old brother got into a car and drove to Yuma, Arizona, to a race track where he waltzed in and announced to the stewards that he was there to get a jockey license. The track stewards quickly informed him that nobody became a jockey till he was at least sixteen. He was devastated.
Returning home, he eventually heard about racing opportunities at the Victorville Fair Grounds where he could jockey without a license. He was 5’8” tall and weighed 125 pounds. He was to learn that his weight and growth would eventually preclude any serious pursuit of a jockey career. When he was about sixteen, he competed in local match races with other horse riders along the railroad tracks. A boy could win $5.00 on a real runner. A former jockey and retired trainer named Curt Perner used to come by and watch these races. He spotted some inherent talent in Chuck and offered him a job breaking horses, the first job he had ever been offered doing the thing he loved. Chuck was in the eleventh grade at Los Alamitos High School at the time. Like many others who came before him, school was a chore that was hard to endure. While history and arithmetic were being scratched on the board, a movie of horses running rampant day and night through the corridors of Chuck’s mind played on an invisible screen that only he could see. That job offer with Curt Perner was the call of destiny for Chuck Treece. He marched to the school and promptly informed the principal that the post he held in study hall was being vacated immediately. He terminated his academic career then and there and started working at a horse farm in Stanton. When Curt found out his protege had just ended his formal educational career, he felt as if he had just ruined Chuck’s life. But in reality, Curt was merely the door that opened the way for Chuck to find himself in this world. In earnest, he gave himself to the thing he lived for and began the days and years of storing up horse wisdom that would boomerang back when he entered the heart of his working years. The horse trainer within was studying the eye, the stance, and every shade of subtlety that comes from years of handling, riding, and grooming.
At the legal age, Chuck finally obtained his jockey license. He won the first race he ever ran at Bay Meadows in San Mateo where he raced for three months at age sixteen. During this time, he had met Debbie (his wife of 30 years), who he corralled at the Long Beach Roping Arena. Like him, she too had a love for horses. After the season ended in San Mateo, he and Debbie hit the road looking for jockey work for a couple of years.They traveled all over California, Arizona, and New Mexico to other tracks looking for races to run, living in trailers and cheap motels, learning the ropes, paying his dues, and doing menial work with low wages. Money was the least of his concern. Somehow its that way with people who have something much larger than money burning inside them. They will pay somebody else, if they have to, to do the work they love. Chuck didn’t care for money. For Debbie, it a was always a concern. On one those days while working for an employer, Debbie came to Chuck and told him that they were flat out broke. So he trekked over to see the boss and ask for a raise. The boss sat there silently and listened to Chuck pour out his miserable tale of woe and then chimed back, “Everybody in the horse business is broke. Get used to it.” With that, the boss drove off. Even this was part of the process of becoming a horseman. Unbeknown to him, Chuck went to horse school every day, and on some of those days he paid tuition. He was learning every facet of the horse business along with every nuance of the horse.
Chuck and Debbie eventually hustled back to California. The need to be in the thick of Quarter Horse racing at Los Alamitos beckoned him. He was on the harness racing circuit for a while when it was at Los Alamitos. He worked for trainer Glen Holt in those days and took note of a white cadillac that used to show up at Los Alamitos almost every day. Glen eventually married the woman who drove that cadillac and came by to see some horses her family owned. Her name was Annette Funicello. Annette had ridden horses herself in a number of serials that Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club had produced about a bunch of boys on the Triple R Ranch in episodes of “Spin and Marty” in the 1950’s.
As a trainer, Chuck has worked for, and says he owes a debt of gratitude to, some of the most well-recognized names that have been associated with Los Alamitos and PCQHRA. He trained horses for George (past President of PCQHRA) and Shirley Loeb at their ranch in Riverside and learned much from Mr. Loeb’s trainer, John Cooper. He worked for Scane Ranch in Chino under Charlie Bloomquist. Keith Asmussen, a jockey friend, enabled Chuck to get his trainer’s license. Bob Melton backed Chuck with the money necessary to become a trainer at Los Alamitos, and Leonard Duncan took a chance on him and bought three horses for Chuck to train. The rest is history and is basically summarized in the first paragraph of this article.
Chuck is an easy going man, not pretentious, and has a big smile. He has been blessed with two children. Mandi, who is 28, is a dental assistant. Curtis, 25, is a recent graduate of Long Beach State University and is currently employed with Equibase charting the races at Los Alamitos Race Track. He has given back to the industry that has sustained him by serving as a board member on the Pacific Coast Quarter Horse Racing Association (PCQHRA) for fifteen years. Five men have the privilege of working for and with him and imbibing the knowledge he has gained from the ground up. His right hand man for the past 20 years has been Julian Morfin. It is always a pleasure to speak with a man who loves his work and to hear about the people who made invaluable contributions to his life on the way to what he has become. Chuck could not have said it better when he summarized it all with “I’ve never had a job, and I’ve never had a day off.”
There are five men at Los Alamitos Race Track who have won 2,000 or more races. Those men are Blane Schvaneveldt (who passed away on July 5, 2010), Paul Jones (whose uncle is racecar legend Parnelli Jones who won the Indianapolis 500 in 1963), John Cooper, and Charlie Bloomquist. That’s four. The fifth man has to do with all those horses mentioned in the first paragraph above. Chuck Treece.
Chuck Treece was born in Hawthorne, California, in 1958. He went to school locally at St. Hedwig grade school up to the fourth grade. Then his dad, a carpenter, moved the family back to southern Illinois in 1968 to a four acre farm where he himself had been raised during the Depression. They were there for one year. But in that year is when it all started. One day his dad offered Chuck every boy’s dream. He wanted to know if his son would like to have a pony. Boy, did he? He chose a sorrel Shetland pony for $50. That is as much horse as they could afford. But that investment was going to multiply exponentially in time. And not just financially. That little pony started a fire on the inside of that boy so that the only thing he ever wanted to do with the rest of his life going forward was spend it around horses.
Before long, dad moved back to California alone and bought back the same house he had sold a year earlier. The family soon followed. The pony stayed in Illinois, but the fire he ignited in Chuck’s heart made the trip West. So the family bought another horse from George Liblin, a trainer at Los Alamitos, out of a classified ad for $150. They kept the horse at Los Alamitos Race Track where there were boarding stables at the time.
By age 12, Chuck wanted more than just that horse. The horse mania inside him was eating him alive. So he started sneaking into the backside of the race track, unobserved, through openings in gates or however he could get in. Initially, he just wanted to learn how to clean stalls. But he learned far more than that from all the teachers who took him under their care and threw more kindling on the conflagration building within. This was the start of a lifetime of millions of details about horses that began sticking to him and that would accumulate into a reservoir of knowledge that would become the base for the life and the success he never knew was coming.
By age 14, he aspired to be a jockey. His mother was not keen on this idea, but dad kept encouraging and opening the gate for his son to explore his dreams. Without having any idea how one became a jockey, one day Chuck, his mother, and his seventeen year old brother got into a car and drove to Yuma, Arizona, to a race track where he waltzed in and announced to the stewards that he was there to get a jockey license. The track stewards quickly informed him that nobody became a jockey till he was at least sixteen. He was devastated.
Returning home, he eventually heard about racing opportunities at the Victorville Fair Grounds where he could jockey without a license. He was 5’8” tall and weighed 125 pounds. He was to learn that his weight and growth would eventually preclude any serious pursuit of a jockey career. When he was about sixteen, he competed in local match races with other horse riders along the railroad tracks. A boy could win $5.00 on a real runner. A former jockey and retired trainer named Curt Perner used to come by and watch these races. He spotted some inherent talent in Chuck and offered him a job breaking horses, the first job he had ever been offered doing the thing he loved. Chuck was in the eleventh grade at Los Alamitos High School at the time. Like many others who came before him, school was a chore that was hard to endure. While history and arithmetic were being scratched on the board, a movie of horses running rampant day and night through the corridors of Chuck’s mind played on an invisible screen that only he could see. That job offer with Curt Perner was the call of destiny for Chuck Treece. He marched to the school and promptly informed the principal that the post he held in study hall was being vacated immediately. He terminated his academic career then and there and started working at a horse farm in Stanton. When Curt found out his protege had just ended his formal educational career, he felt as if he had just ruined Chuck’s life. But in reality, Curt was merely the door that opened the way for Chuck to find himself in this world. In earnest, he gave himself to the thing he lived for and began the days and years of storing up horse wisdom that would boomerang back when he entered the heart of his working years. The horse trainer within was studying the eye, the stance, and every shade of subtlety that comes from years of handling, riding, and grooming.
At the legal age, Chuck finally obtained his jockey license. He won the first race he ever ran at Bay Meadows in San Mateo where he raced for three months at age sixteen. During this time, he had met Debbie (his wife of 30 years), who he corralled at the Long Beach Roping Arena. Like him, she too had a love for horses. After the season ended in San Mateo, he and Debbie hit the road looking for jockey work for a couple of years.They traveled all over California, Arizona, and New Mexico to other tracks looking for races to run, living in trailers and cheap motels, learning the ropes, paying his dues, and doing menial work with low wages. Money was the least of his concern. Somehow its that way with people who have something much larger than money burning inside them. They will pay somebody else, if they have to, to do the work they love. Chuck didn’t care for money. For Debbie, it a was always a concern. On one those days while working for an employer, Debbie came to Chuck and told him that they were flat out broke. So he trekked over to see the boss and ask for a raise. The boss sat there silently and listened to Chuck pour out his miserable tale of woe and then chimed back, “Everybody in the horse business is broke. Get used to it.” With that, the boss drove off. Even this was part of the process of becoming a horseman. Unbeknown to him, Chuck went to horse school every day, and on some of those days he paid tuition. He was learning every facet of the horse business along with every nuance of the horse.
Chuck and Debbie eventually hustled back to California. The need to be in the thick of Quarter Horse racing at Los Alamitos beckoned him. He was on the harness racing circuit for a while when it was at Los Alamitos. He worked for trainer Glen Holt in those days and took note of a white cadillac that used to show up at Los Alamitos almost every day. Glen eventually married the woman who drove that cadillac and came by to see some horses her family owned. Her name was Annette Funicello. Annette had ridden horses herself in a number of serials that Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club had produced about a bunch of boys on the Triple R Ranch in episodes of “Spin and Marty” in the 1950’s.
As a trainer, Chuck has worked for, and says he owes a debt of gratitude to, some of the most well-recognized names that have been associated with Los Alamitos and PCQHRA. He trained horses for George (past President of PCQHRA) and Shirley Loeb at their ranch in Riverside and learned much from Mr. Loeb’s trainer, John Cooper. He worked for Scane Ranch in Chino under Charlie Bloomquist. Keith Asmussen, a jockey friend, enabled Chuck to get his trainer’s license. Bob Melton backed Chuck with the money necessary to become a trainer at Los Alamitos, and Leonard Duncan took a chance on him and bought three horses for Chuck to train. The rest is history and is basically summarized in the first paragraph of this article.
Chuck is an easy going man, not pretentious, and has a big smile. He has been blessed with two children. Mandi, who is 28, is a dental assistant. Curtis, 25, is a recent graduate of Long Beach State University and is currently employed with Equibase charting the races at Los Alamitos Race Track. He has given back to the industry that has sustained him by serving as a board member on the Pacific Coast Quarter Horse Racing Association (PCQHRA) for fifteen years. Five men have the privilege of working for and with him and imbibing the knowledge he has gained from the ground up. His right hand man for the past 20 years has been Julian Morfin. It is always a pleasure to speak with a man who loves his work and to hear about the people who made invaluable contributions to his life on the way to what he has become. Chuck could not have said it better when he summarized it all with “I’ve never had a job, and I’ve never had a day off.”