John Cheever Cowdin (March 17, 1889 – September 16, 1960) was an American financier and polo champion who was a head of

Universal Pictures Universal Pictures (legally Universal City Studios LLC, also known as Universal Studios, or simply Universal; common metonym: Uni, and formerly named Universal Film Manufacturing Company and Universal-International Pictures Inc.) is an Ameri ...

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, and was chairman of Ideal Chemicals.

Biography

Known as J. Cheever Cowdin, he was born in

on March 17, 1889 to John Elliott Cowdin and Gertrude Cheever. In 1936, Cowdin's Standard Capital was part of the lending group who had to exercise their rights to the shares held as loan collateral of the financially strapped Universal Pictures Corp. from

Carl Laemmle Carl Laemmle (; born Karl Lämmle; January 17, 1867 – September 24, 1939) was a film producer and the co-founder and, until 1934, owner of Universal Pictures. He produced or worked on over 400 films. Regarded as one of the most important o ...

. Cowdin would serve as Universal's President and Chairman of its Board of Directors until 1946. Comedian Groucho Marx played a lawyer based on Cowdin in the 1939 film ‘At the Circus’. The character was named “J. Cheever Loophole”. A director of

Curtiss-Wright The Curtiss-Wright Corporation is a manufacturer and services provider headquartered in Davidson, North Carolina, with factories and operations in and outside the United States. Created in 1929 from the consolidation of Curtiss, Wright, and v ...

, Cowdin was considered a leader in aviation financing, notably associated with fellow financier George Newell Armsby in the investment house of Blair & Co., which merged with BancAmerica to form Bancamerica-Blair in 1931. Through Armsby, Cowdin was associated with aviation pioneer (and friend of Amelia Earhart)

Floyd Odlum Floyd Bostwick Odlum (March 30, 1892 – June 17, 1976) was an American lawyer and industrialist. He has been described as "possibly the only man in the United States who made a great fortune out of the Depression". Life and career After strug ...

. Cowdin served as chairman of the Committee on Government Finance of the National Association of Manufacturers. Cowdin was married three times in the course of his life. He married his first wife, Florence Hopkins, in 1912; they divorced in 1926. Their union produced a son, John Cheever Cowdin Jr. who in 1946 committed suicide at age 33 while in Nassau, Bahamas. According to the New York Times, Cowdin later married Katherine Andrea Parker Berens on December 30, 1941, in Yuma, Arizona. As a prominent American, the ''

TIME Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...

'' magazine reported Cowdin's 1929 marriage to Manhattan socialite divorcee, Mrs. Katherine McCutcheon Abbott, in

Bristol, Maine Bristol, known from 1632 to 1765 as Pemaquid (; today a village within the town) is a town in Lincoln County, Maine, United States. The population was 2,834 at the 2020 census. A fishing and resort area, Bristol includes the villages of New Har ...

during a cruise on his yacht, ''Surf''. He died on September 16, 1960.

Equine sportsman

J. Cheever Cowdin served as president of Aqueduct Racetrack in

Queens, New York Queens is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York. Located on Long Island, it is the largest New York City borough by area. It is bordered by the borough of Brooklyn at the western tip of Long ...

. In 1941, the track renamed its Junior Champion Stakes

Thoroughbred horse race Thoroughbred racing is a sport and industry involving the racing of Thoroughbred horses. It is governed by different national bodies. There are two forms of the sport – flat racing and jump racing, the latter known as National Hunt racing in ...

to the

Cowdin Stakes The Cowdin Stakes was an American Thoroughbred horse race held annually from 1923 through 2005 at Aqueduct Racetrack and at Belmont Park which at one time was a Grade 1 event. Background The Cowdin was first run in 1923 as the Junior Champion St ...

in his honor. He was termed by

Esquire Magazine ''Esquire'' is an American men's magazine. Currently published in the United States by Hearst Communications, it also has more than 20 international editions. Founded in 1933, it flourished during the Great Depression and World War II under t ...

not only one of the best-dressed men of his era, but "one of the Big Four of polo from the time of the great Tommy Hitchcock." The International Polo Club Palm Beach lists him on a 1927 team with W. Averell Harriman and Tommy Hitchcock. He also played in 1925

Biography

Equine sportsman

References

Further reading