Kyne name lives on in horse racing world

The name Peter B. Kyne isn’t mentioned throughout Tracy these days with the changing of the name of the Tracy High football stadium from Peter B. Kyne Field to Wayne Schneider Stadium.

But onetime Tracy Press sports editor Ron Flatter has come across that name in his duties as managing editor of the website Horse Racing Nation in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ron, who always reminds anyone he had been introduced to that his name is Flatter “not Rounder,” recently reported that he was working on a story that the struggling Golden Gate Fields race track in Albany just north of Berkeley was being closed for good in five months.

During his research into the Horse Racing Nation archives, Ron discovered that Peter B. Kyne was related to a guy named Bill Kyne, who in the early 1930s was very active in reviving horse-race betting in the California and opened the Bay Meadows race track in a field near San Mateo in 1934.

Peter B. Kyne, whose relationship to Bill Kyne was never fully explained, became president of the California Jockey Club.

“So there you go,” Ron wrote. “Racing may be dying, but the Kyne name is everlasting.”

As author of the Cappy Ricks adventure novels centered in Alaska, Peter B. Kyne was an active member of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco. Kyne was part of a group of Bohemian Club members who in 1927 adopted the re-established Tracy High football team. Their leader, A.J. “Gus” Russell, was president of the San Francisco-based Santa Fe Lumber Co. which operated the Tracy Lumber Co. and provided the Tracy connection.

After building a fence around the field, the Bohemians named it and the trophy for the team’s most-valuable player for their friend Peter B. Kyne.

Although the Peter B. Kyne name has mostly disappeared from use, it isn’t completely gone from the Tracy High football scene. The outstanding player trophy is still named for him, and though the football stadium bears the Wayne Schneider name, the playing field itself is still officially named Peter B. Kyne Field. That designation, as far as I know, is never used, and the name of the author and the early California horse-racing promoter continues its fade into Tracy’s past.