Mary Bacon

In pain from lingering riding injuries and cervical cancer, Bacon committed suicide at the age of 43 by self-inflicted gunshot in a motel in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 7, 1991, the eve of the Belmont Stakes. While discovered shortly after the gun was discharged, she died in the early morning hours of June 8 at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth.

On June 10, 1982, Bacon went down in a spill at Golden Gate Fields in Northern California. She was unconscious and bleeding from the head when she was taken to the hospital. Preliminary examinations indicated a serious head injury and she remained unconscious for eight days.

She was married to jockey Jeff Anderson in 1981 and remained with him until her death.

In May 1979, she was seriously injured in a starting-gate accident at a small track in East St. Louis, Ill. Her mount flipped. The horse landed on her.

She rode for a week in November 1978 at Japan's Oi Racecourse and enjoyed success with the mounts she received. Per an article for Stars and Stripes magazine she had by mid-week ridden 12 horses, put three of them across the finish line first and one second-place finish and picked up more than five million yen ($26,344 plus change) in purses.

In April 1975, while riding at the Fair Grounds Race Course in New Orleans, she attended a Ku Klux Klan rally in Walker, Louisiana. Asked to speak, she was introduced to a crowd of 2,700 by the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke.

In June 1974 came a Newsweek cover for a story on women emerging in sports. The news magazine used 14 photographs inside to help illustrate its story. Bacon's was the only face to appear more than once.

Almost immediately, her endorsement contracts were canceled with Revlon and Dutch Masters. Trainers looked for riders carrying less baggage. She had 323 mounts in 1974; the next year, she would get only 143; by 1976, her total fell to 38.

Bacon appeared in a Playboy magazine pictorial in June 1973 titled "Woman's Work", which featured women who worked in predominantly male occupations.

At the Detroit track Mary Steedman met jockey Johnny "Pug" Bacon. They married soon afterward. They competed together at Hazel Park, now defunct, in Michigan. In 1972 the track ruled that husbands and wives could not ride against each other. Combined with added marital difficulties Bacon divorced her husband in 1972. Pug Bacon died in a 1977 auto accident.

In March 1969, Bacon gave birth to a daughter, Suzie, only hours after riding horses in the practice gate. She returned to riding two weeks after giving birth. Bacon won her first race June 5, 1969. She won 55 times in 396 races that first year. She finished in the money 160 times. In 1974 two weeks into the spring meeting at New York's Aqueduct Racetrack Bacon for the first time ranked among the track's top ten jockeys.

Mary Steedman Bacon Anderson (January 1, 1948 – June 8, 1991) was an American Thoroughbred jockey and model. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Toledo, Ohio, by her father, a one-time big band pianist later involved in construction, and her mother who was a stay at home mother. She had one sister and brother.