| Name |
Mary Bacon |
| Height |
|
| Naionality |
American |
| Date of Birth |
1-January-1948 |
| Place of Birth |
Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Famous for |
Acting |
Mary Bacon was an American thoroughbred jockey and model. She was 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.
While having no horses of her own as a child she did have interaction with them from a neighboring farm. In high school, Mary found work as an outrider, helping in morning workouts and accompanying horses to the starting gate at Toledo's Raceway Park. She 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 hunt club outside of Detroit. However the lure of the track was in her and returned to it by galloping horses on mornings at Detroit Race Course. It was at the Detroit track that Mary Steedman met jockey Johnny "Pug" Bacon. They married soon afterward. They competed together at Hazel Park, now defunct, in Michigan however in 1972 the track ruled that husbands and wives could not ride against each other. Combined with added marital difficulties Bacon divorced her husband in 1972. Pug Bacon would later die in a 1977 auto accident.
In March 1969, Bacon gave birth to a daughter, Suzie, only hours after riding horses in the practice gate. She returned to riding two weeks after giving birth. Bacon won her first race June 5, 1969. She won 55 times in 396 races that first year. She finished in the money 160 times. In 1974 two weeks into the spring meeting at New York's Aqueduct Racetrack Mary for the first time ranked among the track's top ten jockeys.
