Mace
Siegel dies at 86; stable owner and booster of California horse racing
The Beverly Hills
resident was also a leading developer of regional shopping centers. His company
worked on the redevelopment of Santa Monica Place.
The
best-known was Declan's Moon, who went undefeated in 2004 in his debut season
and received racing's Eclipse Award as the champion 2-year-old.Other
major race winners include Rail Trip, who took the prestigious Hollywood Gold
Cup in 2009, and Urbane, who won races in the mid-1990s in Florida, Maryland
and Delaware, earning more than a million dollars for the Siegels.
"Mace
was a very sage man, had a lot of wisdom and really, really understood the
horse racing business," said Jack Owens, chairman of the Thoroughbred
Owners of California, an organization that Siegel helped found in the early
1990s to help protect owners' interests. Similar groups later formed in other
states."He
wanted to do things for the sport to make it better for everyone," his daughter
said, "not just on a state level but on a national level."
In
the early 1980s, Siegel also founded Thoroughbred Owners Against Drugs to press
for equine drug testing and other measures to ensure a fairer playing field.
"He
spent a great deal of money bringing very, very good horses to the Southern
California circuit from all over the country," Owens said. "He also
gave back enormously to the industry, often through charitable contributions
that he did not take credit for."
Beyond
racing, Siegel's philanthropy included the City of Hope cancer center, where he
pledged more than $1.5 million in 2008 to endow a professorship. His wife, who
had cancer, died at 69 in 2002.
By
the late 1980s, Siegel had given the reins of the family's Jay Em Ess Stable to
his daughter.
"The
game is a constant puzzle," Siegel once said. "But a satisfying
one."
He
was born Sept. 1, 1925, in Jersey City, N.J., and served in the Navy during
World War II.
After
the war, Siegel attended Columbia University, earning a bachelor's degree and a
master's in business, according to a Breeders' Cup biography.
By
1962, he was a habitue of the races, as was his future wife, a big band singer
he met on a blind date spent at New York's Aqueduct racetrack. They married
three months later.
With
Richard Cohen, Siegel founded a shopping-mall development company in 1964 in
New York City. Combining their first names, they called it Macerich.
When
the firm relocated to Santa Monica to oversee the rehabilitation of an outdated
mall in Lakewood, Siegel also moved west, in 1976. Macerich
found a niche as a redeveloper of shopping centers, including Santa Monica
Place, which it acquired in 1999 and finished overhauling last year. Siegel
retired from the company in 2008.
His
affinity for wordplay was reflected in a daily ritual — doing the New York
Times crossword puzzle in ink — and in the names he invented for his horses.
They included Eighty Below Zero, a son of It's Freezing and Alps, and Hedonist,
a daughter of Alydeed and Play All Day.
In
addition to his daughter, Samantha, of Beverly Hills, Siegel is survived by his
son, Evan, of Simi Valley, and a granddaughter.
Services
will be at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills, 6300 Forest Lawn
Drive, Los Angeles.
