Reminiscences of Mom on the 103rd Anniversary of her Birth, by Kate Tweedy
January 27, 2025
When I think of Mom’s birthday, I think of how she experienced getting old: she hated it. Always fiercely independent, she disliked needing other people’s help. When you age, as I am discovering to my chagrin, you need help with the little things more and more.
The thing was, she was very self-sufficient well into her 90s. But even someone as indomitable as my mother began to show her age. Slowly her walking grew unsteady, yet she resisted letting me hold her arm to guide her up steps.
“I’m fine,” she would growl, and pull her elbow away. I would just roll my eyes and grin. “Classic Penny!” I would think. When she eventually began to use a walker, she was happier because she could move more quickly and less cautiously. Patience was never her forte.
But I also remember her determination to do the things important to her as long as she could. One of those things was to attend the Belmont Stakes in 2015, the year of American Pharoah’s Triple Crown. She had a strong feeling in her gut that he might be the one to take the crown, the first in 35 years. It had not been won since 1978 with Affirmed, an even longer gap than the 25 years between Citation and Secretariat. Once again people were starting to doubt it could happen again.
By then Mom was 93, and travel had become very tiring for her. Heck, it’s tiring for me now and I am over 20 years younger than she was then. But she insisted and we knew she would have her way if she could. Normally we would travel with her, but none of us was free that year so she found a younger companion to help with logistics so we knew she was in good hands.
Traveling to a big race with Penny Chenery was an exercise in crowd management as I learned when I went to a couple of Kentucky Derbies with her. She was swamped with fans as soon as she set foot on the track. Sometimes she resorted to a wheelchair as a defense mechanism. One year we tasked a friend who was a big burly guy and a former police captain to escort her. He played the bodyguard, calling out “Penny Chenery, coming through!” The crowds parted like the Red Sea.
I don’t know how she managed the long trek from the track entrance to her box at Belmont but afterward, I did hear this story from her, which she told me with a devilish grin. When American Pharoah came thundering across the finish line as the crowd was roaring in approval, Bob Baffert, the trainer, was threading his way through the crowd of well-wishers from the owners’ boxes down to the winner’s circle.
He stopped by Mom’s box to accept her congratulations, a very thoughtful gesture from a man who had just reached the top of his game. Mom told him how thrilled she was for him, and then couldn’t resist adding dryly—in a classic Penny quip—“But too slow.” She was referring to the fact that American Pharoah had crossed the line in 2:26.65, more than 2 seconds slower than Secretariat did. I don’t know what Bob’s reaction was, but he probably laughed. No one ever expected to beat that record.
©Kate Tweedy
Penny Chenery at Belmont Park in 2015.
Photo credit: Michael Clevenger, Courier Journal
