THECereal King's Horses

The place is Cal Poly Pomona. Before it was a campus it was a winter ranch, and the ranch was a Hollywood hangout, a movie-horse stable, an Army war-horse depot and a landing spot for horses smuggled out of the end of World War II.

The horses never left. The W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Center is still on the grounds, the shows still run on Sundays, and you can buy a ticket for five dollars. This is the order of the show.

In 1925, Will Keith Kellogg, the Kellogg of the cereal box, from Battle Creek, Michigan, set up a winter home in Pomona and started what he'd always wanted: a serious Arabian horse breeding ranch.

He shopped at the top. Some of his foundation horses came from Lady Wentworth's Crabbet Arabian Stud in England, one of the most important Arabian breeders in the world at the time.

PLATE I. W.K. Kellogg with the stallion Antez, 1929. Special Collections & University Archives, Cal Poly Pomona. CC BY-SA 3.0, tinted.

The ranch became a stop for the Hollywood crowd: stars of the day came out to pose for publicity photos with the horses. Kellogg's house on the hill, now called Kellogg House, was designed by Myron Hunt, the architect who also designed the Rose Bowl.

Kellogg's horses went into the movies. The most famous was a grey stallion named Jadaan, ridden by Rudolph Valentino, the biggest heartthrob of the silent era, in The Son of the Sheik (1926).

It was Valentino's last film. He died that same year at 31. After that, people drove out to the ranch just to see the horse the Sheik had ridden.

In 1932 Kellogg gave the ranch to the State of California. There were strings. The gift came on the condition that the Arabian breeding programme and the Sunday shows carry on.

Will Rogers, the cowboy philosopher who was one of the most famous entertainers in America at the time, was master of ceremonies when Kellogg handed over the deed to California's governor, in front of a crowd of about 22,000.

Almost a century later, the condition still holds. A presidential advisory committee on the Arabians meets twice a year because the deed says so.

During World War II the Army took over the ranch and bred horses for the cavalry. From 1943 it was the Pomona Quartermaster Depot, a remount station.

In the spring of 1945, US troops pulled off Operation Cowboy: they got hundreds of horses out of a German Army stud farm at Hostau, in what was then Czechoslovakia, before the Soviet advance reached it. Among them were Polish Arabians the Germans had seized.

In 1946, twenty-one of those Polish Arabians landed in Pomona, including the stallion *Witez II. He had carried a rider through the escape. In 1948 the Army quit the horse business and much of the stock was sold off.

Long before anybody bred horses here, this was Tongva land, the people of the Los Angeles basin. Under Mexican rule it became part of Rancho San José. Then came the cereal king, then the Army.

In 1949, Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo took the ranch over as its southern branch and merged it with the Voorhis School, an agricultural school in nearby San Dimas. It went its own way in 1966 and became Cal Poly Pomona in 1972.

One tradition never split. Since 1949 the two Cal Polys have built a Rose Parade float together every single year, covered completely in flowers and other natural materials, as the Tournament of Roses requires.