Chuck Schott thanked for years of service to Iowa horse racing

Sprezzatura was name the Italians gave to a quality of character they judged essential to a renaissance courtier. It is a hard word to translate into English, but Perry appears to have a living embodiment of the idea in the person of Chuck Schott.

Schott was inducted Friday night into the Prairie Meadows Hall of Fame. The praises he received from speakers at the ceremony touched on some of the ideal character traits of a courtier, although no one used the word courtier or sprezzatura.

Horse racing was once called the sport of kings. Owning, keeping and racing horses was an upper-class affair, and anyone wishing to hold a place in the court of a rich man — America’s kings — had to be an accomplished horseman.

As Friday’s induction showed, Schott is a consummate horseman. Doug Bruce, who has known Schott for at least six decades and who is himself no mean horseman, put the matter briefly at the Prairie Meadows ceremony: “Chuck is a good man,” he said. “He’s a good horseman and an excellent technician.”

But equine science was not the courtier’s only stock in trade. He also had to have skill with a sword, an ability to sing, dance and play stringed instruments and to speak off the cuff with wit and wisdom. Eventually, these traits became those of a British and later still of an American gentleman.

There is no evidence that Schott cannot thrust and parry or trip the light fantastic, but there is abundant evidence of his considerable musical gifts. His cantoring at Easter Vigils have been known to reduce strong men to tears, according to witnesses.

Born in 1942, Schott graduated from St. Patrick’s High School in Perry in 1960 and studied at the Iowa State Teachers College in Cedar Falls, now known as the University of Northern Iowa. He was married in 1967 — to Katie, now his wife of 48 years — and held the position of service manager of Burk Ford Sales in Perry from 1967 to 1982.

His love of horses began much further back in his history.

“Horses were always my life,” Schott said. “Anything that was related to horses was always my first passion. From the time I was a little kid, I can’t ever remember not being super involved with horses. I started riding and showing my own horses when I was 10, 12 years old. As soon as I was old enough, my folks bought me a nice horse, and I had some talent. I was able to train them and ride them and show them and did well around the little Midwest circuit here.”

Schott was later able to turn this boyhood passion into a steady wage. While home from college and in need of a part-time job, he saw an ad in the Perry paper: W. H. Osmundson, son of the founder of Osmundson Manufacturing, a factory west of Perry, was looking for someone to help him take care of his horses.

“I went to work for him, breaking and training some young horses he had and taking care of his horses on a daily basis,” Schott said.

He later took a job at Burk Ford but still managed to feed his first passion with part-time work for Osmundson’s daughter and son-in-law, Ruie and Don Bruce, who “traveled a lot to Kentucky and were looking for someone dependable to take care of their brood mares and feed their babies while they left town.”

A married man needs full-time work, and Schott’s steady job was at Burk Ford. As luck would have it, however, I. J. Burk, owner of the Ford dealership in Perry, happened to own a string of show horses, and Schott soon found himself not only managing the service department of the car dealership but also training Burk’s horses and helping his son, Jim Burk, show them.

While Schott’s years at Burk Ford were involved with horsepower of a more modern kind, his love for the power of real horses was always prominent, a point made by his son, Tim Schott.

“Dad made sure horses were part of his life even when they were not part of his job,” Tim said. “Because of this, I spent my youth on a horse, spent my teen years mowing pastures and cleaning stalls and spent my adulthood enjoying the backside and winner’s circle of Prairie Meadows. We really were ‘raised in a barn’ and are better people for the work ethic and commitment to the animals, and their humans, that dad modeled.”

Horses became Schott’s full-time job in earnest when he took over the management of Bruce Thoroughbred Farms in Perry in 1982.

“During the glorious Bruce Thoroughbred Farm years,” Tim Schott recalled, “our family functioned via a couple of pervasive themes. The first was that horse sex was usually the major topic of dinner conversation since dad’s livelihood depended upon breeding. You could say we had our own version of ‘the talk’ at our house. The second was that everything dad owned would end up taking on the smells and stains of the barn eventually.”

The Bruces wound down their horse breeding operation in 1998. In that year Schott became horsemen’s liaison at Prairie Meadows Racetrack and Casino in Altoona, a position he held for 16 years, retiring in November 2014. But the horse world was not quite done with Chuck Schott, who was “absolutely delighted” when he learned of his nomination for the Prairie Meadows Hall of Fame.

“I was absolutely amazed a couple of weeks ago,” he said, “when I got that call from Derron (Heldt, director of racing at Prairie Meadows). I certainly did not expect it. To the best of my knowledge, I think I’m the first Prairie Meadows employee who has ever been inducted into their Hall of Fame. And for a long time I was on the committee that brought the nominations to upper management in these situations, so I’m pretty familiar with it.”

He said inductees have typically been drawn from “the real racing world, trainers, owners and breeders of very good race horses that have been at Prairie Meadows, very good trainers who have been at Prairie Meadows, breeders who have farmed and set up breeding industries in Iowa.”

Modesty is also part of a courtier’s or a gentleman’s breeding. In fact, Schott is no less eminent than other inductees into the race track’s pantheon. Along with his 15 years spent managing Bruce Farms — “by far the largest breeding farm in Iowa for thoroughbreds,” he said — Schott also served for 10 years as president of the Iowa Thoroughbred Breeders and Owners Association.

What is most significant, however, was Schott’s work in the 1980s with Iowa Governor Terry E. Branstad — in his first executive incarnation — and with state and local legislators. He had a hand in the passage of a 1989 Iowa gambling law expanding pari-mutuel betting and making Prairie Meadows possible.

The sport of kings, like kings themselves, has waned in popularity in recent years. Country living and the agricultural lifestyle, in which horses had a natural place, are far less common now. Safety regulations keep children out of stables and off training grounds. More commercially lucrative sports have arisen to capture the popular imagination. Schott feels these changes, but for him the thrill is not gone.

“The sport of horse racing is a great game,” he said. “It takes money. You never want to do it with money that you need. It’s always got to be disposable income because you’re just as likely to lose it as to make it, but it’s a great sport, and raising horses and owning that stuff, following your choices and making them run good, getting into the hands of a great training and seeing your baby take off and win a good race — it’s a thrill.”

It is said a gentleman is never a hero to his valet, but Chuck Schott is something more than a gentleman, as shown by the words of his son: “Dad has led an interesting and non-conventional life and as a result is one of my heroes.”

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