HERTZ

Posted by Cathy Gowdy on Friday, June 28, 2013 at 06:25:22 :

Novato Advance
Wednesday, November 29, 1967
Section A, page 7

DOUGLAS G. HERTZ

Douglas G. Hertz, 84, the founding director of the sprawling Atherton Club and the Atherton School of Riding here, died yesterday afternoon at Novato General Hospital, of an apparent heart attack.

According to a family associate Hertz was stricken at about 2:30 p.m. at his 546 Atherton Avenue home and was taken to Novato General, where death came at 3:21 p.m.

Hertz organized the Atherton Club in the open lands northeast of the city five years ago and had operated it ever since, breeding horses and offering riding instruction there.

A man noted locally for his believe in “thinking young,” Hertz led an adventurous and venturesome life that had a dashing storybook quality to it.

Born April 16, 1883, at Sutton, some 13 miles south of London, England, Hertz had a lifelong love of horses. He served as an officer with the British Cavalry and was stationed at times in the Far East.

Upon his retirement from military service in 1919, he emigrated to the United States and, through the years, was involved in a series of sporting and commercial enterprises.

He was associated in his first years in this country with the Pegasus Club at Rockleigh, N. J., which he once described to an Advance reporter as “the outstanding polo club in the world.”

He claimed to be the inventor of the Cornish Game Hen, now considered a gourmet’s delight, and for a time he operated a plant in Oakland to process commercially the delicacy for nation-wide distribution.

Hertz was long a champion for the integration of the Negro into major professional sports. He once told the Advance that he urged Branch Rickey to break the color bar in major league baseball by signing Jackie Robson (sic), the first Negro to play in the big leagues, to a contract with the then Brooklyn Dodgers.

A photograph in Hertz’s scrapbook shows him present with Rickey at the Robinson contract-signing session.

He was a survivor of the 1915 sinking of the liner Lusitania and, 20 years later, was the winner of one of the oddest wagers ever made in this country. On a bet, he rode a relay of horses from the Tanforan race track in San Mateo County to Chicago, in an attempt to travel the distance in the same time as the Pont Express riders of old.

He came to California in 1953, settling in Marin County. During his years here, he organized the Bolema hunt club in West Marin, operated a financial consultancy firm in San Francisco, and opened the Atherton Club and the Atherton School of Riding.

Hertz was a member of the Black Point Improvement Club and the Novato Horseman’s Association.

He is survived by his wife, Jean, at the family home; and by a sister in the London area.

Funeral services will be held at 1 p.m. Friday at the Redwood Chapel funeral home, followed by private interment.

Memorial contributions to the Marin County Heart Association are requested in lieu of flowers.