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John left high school intent on a profession and a dream. The dream was not to become another James Dean, whose voice and gestures John had learned well. The profession we had noted in the yearbook—pharmacy. He enrolled in St. John’s University to study pharmacy, but his senior year at Sea Cliff he had become interested in trotting horses. “I’ve always had a love of horses, animals in general,” John says, but trotters also offered the sport of the race and “a certain amount of pageantry”. Not far from Sea Cliff the biggest names in training turned out the best trotters at the world’s largest harness track—Roosevelt Raceway. “I had to go over there and beg. These low end trainers will hire you.” They did. Beginning as a ‘hot walker,’ John began to learn both pharmacy and trotting, and he studied hard enough at Roosevelt to become an assistant to the “master horseman” Howard Beissinger and began working on his trainer’s license. But harness racing, for John, was always about love, not money.
For money he took a job selling baby food to Long Island stores for Beechnut . He also chose to join the National Guard for a three year stint as a tank driver with the 142nd Armor. After 6 months of active duty he began selling business forms. And he married Anna Makowski (’58). In 1964 they had a daughter.
John and Anna vacationed in Farmington, New Hampshire in 1969. Ten miles away in Rochester was a trotting track, and in Maine trotters could run in a new fair every week. They moved to New Hampshire in 1974. “We came up here with nothing going for us and Anna got a job running a paint distributing company. I was pursuing my horse racing career. Unfortunately there’s no money in harness racing up here. The best year I had I actually broke even.” John worked as a part time truck driver for the paint distributor. Two years later the owner needed a salesman. “I said I’d give it a shot, and it worked out very well.” Meanwhile John’s daughter also took an interest in harness racing. “It was a nice family affair sort of thing. We’d go up to the fairs and she had a ball.”
The horse breeding business that John tried, turned out to be a “disaster.” He bet a lot on a colt he had bred from a sire that had been the fastest three role trotter in the country. The colt died mysteriously. Another broodmare failed to produce, and John abandoned the project, but not horses. When the Humane Society called and said they had an abused racehorse, John adopted and nurtured it and 20 years later it continues to graze in his pasture.
John accepts life’s failures and challenges. “You’re faced with yourself and you say ’this is it, boy’ and there’s no turning back and you have to deal with it. That’s when you really grow.”
John’s experience with the paint company gave him an idea for his own company, Wood Finishing Supplies where he produced lacquers and peripheral products. He built it up successfully. “Briefly in 1990 I flirted with the idea of putting up a new building and expanding, but if I had expanded at that point [in the recession] I would have gone down with them [others who failed]. That was my lesson in not being too greedy.” He sold the business to a big distributor. “If it wasn’t for my wife, I probably wouldn’t have made it, because I don’t like the bookkeeping thing,” John says. He retired on Jan. 1, 2008. His daughter and son-in-law live a few houses away, and John and Anna are proud to have a granddaughter who is a ballerina, actress, and member of the National Honor Society.
“We all think we could have been better in our lives if we’d done it differently . . . I’ve done all the things I wanted to do in life. I wanted to be a successful horse trainer, and I think I was. And I wanted to own my own business. “
John and Anna traveled to the places they considered beautiful and intriguing. They cruised to Alaska and around Florida. They began exploring northeastern Maine and Canada and John wanted to visit the Allagash Wilderness in Maine. Their favorite place, however, was Bermuda and its dolphins. John, the animal lover says of the picture above, “The dolphin is smiling because of all the money he makes from the dumb tourists.”
Anna Makowski
395 Chestnut Hill Rd
Farmington, N H 03835
woodfin@metrocast.net
