LEBANON — This is not to say it’s a commentary on her driving, but when Becky Woebkenberg gets behind the wheel of their white Ford F-150 pick-up, her husband Mike gets in the back seat, turns completely around and looks out the rear window. “I’m a true backseat driver,” Mike grinned.
But he wasn’t kidding.
And that’s what makes Becky and him one of the most unique husband and wife teams in sports.
While Becky steers the truck around harness tracks, Mike looks the opposite way, works the accelerator and operates the long, wing-like gates that stretch out from each side of the vehicle, making it look, in his words, “like a 747.”
As he does this, he begins to choreograph an equine kick line that quickly resembles a bugle-blaring cavalry charge.
Until recently he’s billed the unique view from his back seat perch as “the most exciting 30 seconds in sports that nobody gets to see.”
Mike, with Becky’s help, is the starter of harness races at Miami Valley Gaming in Lebanon, Hollywood Dayton Raceway at Needmore and Wagner Ford roads in Dayton and at 46 of the 66 county fairs in Ohio that have pari-mutuel racing.
Woebkenberg said he and his wife start some 3,000 races a year and they’ve been doing it for 25 years.
While he guesses there are fewer than 50 starters now working harness tracks in the United States, it’s a certainty that few, if any, are more immersed in the sport than he is.
He’s a former driver. He helps with blacksmith duties between races at the tracks. And there is a good chance some of the race bikes upon which the drivers are perched in his races were built by him at his nationally-known Superior Sulky shop in Farmersville.
Woebkenberg is also a tireless promoter of the sport, which is a why in 2011 the Ohio Chapter of the U.S. Harness Writers Association presented him with its Rambling Willie Award, an honor named for the famed Ohio-owned pacing gelding and given to an Ohioan who has done the most for harness racing over the past two decades.
And because Woebkenberg has not rested on those laurels, he’s had to amend that “most exciting 30 seconds” claim.
Thanks to him, the past two months or so at Miami Valley Gaming — where the race cards run through May 8 — other people have been able to share his up-close vantage point at the start of races.
He’s begun taking some fans along with him in the race gate (as the starter’s vehicle is known). They sit next to him and get an unbelievable and up-close experience of sight and sound and an appreciation of the drivers and those magnificent animals.
Learned from Dad
The other morning Woebkenberg was standing on the sidewalk outside his Superior Sulky shop in Farmersville. On one side of him was an aluminum training cart he had made. On the other was a smaller, sleeker race bike.
But at the moment his interest was directed across Jackson Street from the 1868 building that houses his business.
“That was once the high school here in town,” he said of the stately brick building that now proclaims Masonic Temple over the door. “And that yellow brick building over there was the blacksmith shop. That building and mine were owned by brothers. They’d build the buggies over here, then roll them over there and take them up to the second story to paint them before bringing them back here to sell.”
He then nodded to a building farther down the street: “That white brick place was the stage stop in town.”
Just then the postman came walking across the street. The two men called each other by name and exchanged pleasantries and that made Woebkenberg smile: “All this is small town personified.”
Inside his shop, where several horse carts and race sulkies were in various stages of assemblage or repair, you also found an eclectic collection of racing and horse-themed remembrances of times long past.
It made you realize just how deeply Woebkenberg has embraced the sport since he grew up in Lebanon in the 1950s.
He’s a third-generation horseman, and with a warm smile he said one of his first memories is being with his dad, John Woebkenberg, who had just driven home a winner at the Ross County Fair in Chillicothe:
“I have a picture of it. I was just three or four. My mom had made me a set of racing colors to match my dad’s. He’s in the Winner’s Circle and I’m setting up there on his shoulder in the race bike.”
His dad taught him everything from mucking stalls to how to handle various driving dilemmas on the track. And at age 16, Mike debuted in the sulky at the Warren County Fair.
Years later he began to realize there were other ways to make a living in the sport. He began to build and repair sulkies and horse carts and then one day he said a friend had him paint some mobile starting gates for him.
As payment the guy gave him a starting gate unit and suggested he try starting races at a couple of county fairs.
“I needed a driver to help me and Becky volunteered and it exploded from there,” he said.
Becky — who had grown up outside Gratis and shown horses when she was younger — was a natural. She had been helping run her family’s bulldozer business in West Alexandria, Mike said: “She’d run D-8 Cats (Caterpillars) and all that stuff, so it was just an extension of that.”
Over the years the pair has started races at various harness tracks across the Midwest, and with the resurgence of standardbred racing in Ohio, Mike has been able to stay deeply involved in the sport he champions whenever he can.
“I believe we have one of the most unique sports going,” he said. “Men and women race on equal footing and you may have drivers who are very young — kids can start at 16 — and, on the other end of the spectrum, a few years ago I started (Hancock County Sports Hall of Famer) 93-year-old Doc Schoonover.
“Pro football and pro basketball careers are short, but in our sport you can drive into your 40s and 50s and 60s and still be competitive.