Deceased August 30, 2020
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In Memory
Gene lived in two worlds. Not long after Amherst, he became prominent in South Florida as president of the family-owned and nationally known Hialeah Park Race Track. (The family also controlled Garden State Park in New Jersey.) Later, Gene became a citizen of Monaco, where he kept a large yacht on the French Riviera about equal in size to his other in Florida. Gene was also quite an international skier and race car driver.
In 1961, he broke the Hialeah clubhouse barrier against Black admissions. One day when Gene was at lunch, a Black man at the gate asked to see the president. After learning the Black man had an appropriate coat and tie, Gene invited him in for lunch—he was Cab Calloway, the well-known bandleader. Gene got recognition for allowing the famous flamingoes in the infield to grow back their clipped wings and added shrimp to their diet so as to regain their beautiful color.
Gene went to The Lawrenceville School. He became a member of Theta Delta Chi at Amherst. Ben Linton ’50, a fraternity classmate who worked with Gene off and on over the years, remembers him as “a loyal friend and shrewd business operator.”
Following Amherst, Gene went into the U.S. Navy and served as an officer on a destroyer. Unexpectedly, his destroyer and mine pulled into tiny Midway Island on the same afternoon during the Korean war. That night, we had to leave the officers’ club to break up a fight between our crews.
After the horse racing tracks, Gene became a real estate investor and backed entrepreneurs.
He never married and died Aug. 30, 2020, at the age of 92.
John Priesing ’50