Carnegie Mellon University alumnus Jerry Bozzo is enjoying life at the racetrack.
Bozzo, who will be 97 on Oct. 25, owns a thoroughbred stable, and three of the horses he trains have made nearly a dozen starts in 2017. In a maiden race, he watched his horse Cotton Tooyah stretch out a 4 1/2-length victory at Florida's Gulfstream Park. The win on June 3 made him the oldest U.S. thoroughbred trainer to win a flat race.
He also set the record for being the oldest licensed horse trainer at 96 to win a stakes race, when his horse Flutterby won the 2015 Sea Lily Handicap.
"People say to me, 'What the heck are you doing out there at that age, standing at the rail?' I say I'm enjoying it, that's why," Bozzo said after the victory.
Bozzo, who earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering in 1942, said he gets his greatest thrills watching his thoroughbreds sprint around the track. His own journey from being a civil engineer to owning and training thoroughbreds was more circuitous.
After graduating from CMU, he earned an aeronautics degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and served in the military, where he helped expand the Navy's air corps during World War II. He started his career as an aeronautical engineer and later bought into ownership of the Pierce Glass Company, a bottle manufacturer in northwest Pennsylvania. It was that role that ultimately triggered Bozzo's need to find a diversion.