Cicero Farm LLC (Barbara and Ron Perry) – Hope Road

Maybe it was karma. Or fate. Or pure coincidence. But when Hope Road, a daughter of Quality Road, was ready to go into the starting gate for the Gr.1 Ballerina Stakes at Saratoga, she was trying to accomplish something truly special. As the first foal of her dam, Marley’s Freedom, a daughter of Blame, she was attempting to win the same Gr.1 stakes her dam had won seven years earlier. If she made it into the starting gate.

Barbara Perry with Hope Road

Quality Road hadn’t in the 2009 $5 million Breeders’ Cup Classic. About to enter the outside 12 post under John Velazquez, Quality Road shook off the shoves to get him into the gate. Repeatedly and kicking. The gate crew blindfolded him and spun him around and that was a really bad idea. Quality Road went wild, bucking furiously, a threat to any human being near him. He was finally corralled by the gate crew and immediately scratched.

“One of the very first Breeders’ Cups we went to was that year at Santa Anita,” Barbara Perry, who began riding horses when she was five, said. “We got to see his antics. One thing I know about Hope is she’ll probably do anything you ask, but if you pull on her face, she gets pretty opinionated about it. I thought, `Oh, Lord, this is not going to go well.’ I’m thinking: `Please don’t act like your dad.’”

She didn’t. She loaded and then won the Ballerina by two lengths, punching her ticket into the Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Sprint. “Who knows how much faster she would have run if she hadn’t beaten up the poor gate crew?” Perry said.

Marley’s Freedom’s Ballerina victory was her fourth straight and she went off the 4-5 favorite in the 2018 Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Sprint. She closed powerfully under Mike Smith to finish fourth by just a half-length to Shamrock Rose. Marley’s Freedom retired with nine victories and four seconds in 18 starts and more than $1.2 million in earnings.

“The fillies look identical, oh my goodness,” Ron Perry said. “They look like the same horse.”

Both fillies are tied to famed singer Bob Marley. “Bob Marley lived at 56 Hope Road in Jamaica,” Ron continued. “They’d line up outside his house and he’d sit up on the stairs and help people. That is what we do: give hope and mercy if we can. That’s what we do with our horses.”

Music is important to Ron: “For me, it just gets me creative. I see patterns in energy markets and in life. It’s just a pattern. You watch a horse move. When you see a horse doing what they do best, there’s a rhythm, a flow. There’s a beauty to that. All our horses have their own race song. We come up with a name. What would the song be? I want to hear a song coming back to the winner’s circle when I win a race. During the race, fifty thousand people were cheering for your horse. If you get people singing your horse’s song, it would expand racing socially.”

Barbara has loved horses her whole life, at one point exercising horses for her father, Red Ranck, a Montana oil man who owned a string of racehorses. As a youngster, she would do anything to ride, even when she was injured. She fractured her tailbone when she was 15, but didn’t want her parents to know: “I actually had to pay my little brother and sister to help me get out of bed. My family’s tough.”

When asked if she kept riding after her injury, she said, “Keep riding? Are you kidding? There is nothing freer than riding a horse. The connection you can have with a horse is amazing.”

In 2005, Ron and Barbara bred and raced Atticus Pomponius, named for a wealthy Roman banker who befriended the famous statesman Cicero. The equine Atticus Pomponius won just one of 21 starts, a maiden claiming race at Golden Gate Fields. The Perrys did a bit of show jumping with him then retired him to their home in Rancho Santa Fe, halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. They named their racing stable Cicero Farms.

Ron and Barbara made a connection at a casino night fundraiser for a children’s hospital in New Orleans where she worked nights. During the day, she worked in the Human Resources Department at the American Bank and Trust. “I sent the guys at the bank some extra tickets for the gala,” Barbara said. “Ron was the sales person there for Automatic Data Processing.”

When he arrived, his friends told him he should meet Barbara. He said, okay, but the girl he really wanted to meet was playing Wheel of Fortune: “Black leather mini-skirt. Long hair. I said, `I want to meet her.’ They said, `That’s her.’” It was love at first sight.”

For him anyway. “I wasn’t really interested in dating,” Barbara said. “I had a very active life. He convinced me to change my mind. We’ve been married for 34 years, and together three more years. We’ve been together a long time. We know where each other’s strengths are.”

That plays well with their company, Commercial Energy, which opened on May 1st, 1997, in Barbara’s hometown, Cut Bank, Montana. Doing well, they moved their company office to Oakland, California, where It has evolved into a major company supplying and delivering electricity and natural gas to thousands of businesses. By 2017, they were operating seven utilities throughout the western United States.

With their success, they have given back to the communities they serve. Working with two-time National Basketball Association MVP Stephen Curry and his wife and author, Ayesha, they began Eat, Learn, Play for needy Oakland children and families. They’ve also donated to the Wounded Warrior Homes and Energy Share of Montana to help families get by. 

But they’ve worked hard to be successful. “Here’s the thing about owning your own business,” Barbara said. “You don’t get a vacation and you don’t get to retire.”

They do have an unconventional goal: “I don’t see leaving the company to our sons or any of our family. We have seriously thought about the company being an employee-owned business. We want to do so much for so many. Our first customers when we started commercial energy in Montana were all hospitals. I think at some point Ron and I have to figure out how we leverage a buyout or something for our employees to run the business.”

Their other business is horse racing, and they keep their 20 broodmares at Tom VanMeter’s farm near Westchester, Kentucky. “We’re building the value of our broodmare band,” Ron said.

They’ll be thrilled when Hope Road joins the band.