THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406060233
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEC KLEIN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940605 LENGTH: NELSON COUNTY
He wears a Panama hat and black jeans with a hole in the left knee. He throws down a beer and stores Winston cigarette butts in his shirt pocket. Only this particular man also happens to be a millionaire who made his fortune running a Suffolk industrial landfill with his father.
{REST} And now John C. Holland Jr. may very well become the first to build a thoroughbred race track in Virginia, nestled on his sprawling, turn-of-the-century estate at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains about 35 miles south of Charlottesville.
``I'm just a glorified garbage man,'' says the 38-year-old entrepreneur, who at 6-foot-1 and 235 pounds possesses a shade of Jackie Gleason about him. ``Everything we've done, we haven't had the slightest idea what we're doing.''
Yet already he has in hand a letter of intent from the state racing commission, which means this unlikely horseman is just a few hurdles from being issued a limited license to stage up to 14 days of live racing a year, complete with betting.
That's more than can be said about a bunch of corporate big shots representing six applicants who are jockeying for the sole right to build a multimillion-dollar track. Unlike Holland, they are trying to break into the big leagues, calling for months of racing at tracks proposed in Portsmouth, Virginia Beach and three other sites across the commonwealth.
But by the time they sift through all the paperwork, Holland's humble track could be up and running - for a three-day meet perhaps as early as October.
``It'd tickle me to death,'' says Gayle Franklin, one of Holland's three older sisters in the family business. ``It's almost like we're in a race already.''
For more than a year, investors from Ohio to Maryland have trotted out engineers, lawyers and consultants to tout the benefits of their plans for a track that would dwarf Holland's. Beginning Monday, they will enter the final round - the racing commission is holding a three-day informal fact-finding session before naming the winner of an unlimited license as early as mid-July, no later than September.
Meanwhile, Holland has quietly gone about his business, tooling around his 21-bedroom, 11-bath Oak Ridge mansion, which is fronted by a stately portico. Every now and then, he saddles a bulldozer to clear the site of a race track that was once a part of the 1920s grandeur of the 4,800-acre estate.
``I'm not overly concerned about it,'' says Thomas L. Aronson, a consultant to Kentucky's Churchill Downs, which wants to build a Virginia Beach track. Still, Holland's modest proposal did provoke a response: ``one eyebrow, semiraised,'' Aronson says. ``You have to take seriously everything that's going on.''
Holland has doled out nearly $70,000 just on paperwork, surveying and clearing. He expects to spend $300,000 upfront, and that doesn't include building a pavilion and viewing stand based on the track's original architectural renderings.
``If it doesn't work, the only person I've made a fool of is me,'' he says. ``I'm not competing with them. I wish them the best.''
Even so, Holland may have a leg up. The estate left the remnants of a 1-mile dirt track surrounded by lush foliage with a man-made pond in the middle. The legacy also includes 58 buildings, all on an expanse of hills, plains and greenery.
``Doesn't this look like horse country?'' says Holland's wife, Rhonda, the lady of the manor.
Actually, the estate looks more like a cross between the homes of the Great Gatsby and Mrs. Havisham: grand in the style of the Roaring '20s but haunted by neglect, like Charles Dickens' Victorian relic.
Wrought-iron gates adorned with the initials ``TFR'' hint of another time. Thomas Fortune Ryan, an orphan turned Wall Street tycoon, made this his personal playground. When guests arrived, the hired help reportedly had to hide behind trees to keep the view unmarred.
The estate was a city unto itself - with a formal Italian garden, domed greenhouse, grass airstrip, golf course, teahouse, piggery, blacksmith and carpentry shop, smokehouse, gas station, power plant, ice plant, dairy office and test labs, even a mausoleum for his final resting place. The race track was just one of Ryan's fancies.
``Oak Ridge provided (Ryan) the roots that had been missing since his childhood,'' says Lee Marmon, the estate's historian.
For Holland, the restoration has come to represent a return of sorts to his own youth, when he helped his father salvage raw materials, then build homes out of scrap and demolition debris.
``I think he wants to create something himself,'' says JoAnn H. Nesson, his oldest sister.
All but abandoned, Oak Ridge had been left to the elements for decades until the Hollands bought it for about $7 million, moved there four years ago with their three children and began the slow process of restoration.
An entourage followed: among them, a floral designer who lives on the grounds, a part-time mechanic who is a descendant of the Wall Street magnate, and a sharecropper in overalls who looks like he could have been there as long as the nearby 382-year-old oak tree.
Busloads of tourists get to see more than history. Holland scraps are scattered throughout the estate, including piles of cinder blocks, a coffin and a rusty statue of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders - tipped over. ``I know exactly how he felt,'' Holland quips.
Yet the salvage man, born in Portsmouth, raised in Chesapeake, is clearly at ease here. There is work to be done - resurrecting a race track from another era. ``It's there. Let's see what happens,'' he says.
``I was talking to Rhonda one night, and I said, `All my life, I've been trying to figure out what I want to be . . .' I said I wanted to be a robber baron.'' He laughs easy. ``It's living a dream.''
by CNB