Arthur Sidney Grace, a veteran horse racing columnist for the Miami News and contributing writer to The Blood-Horse, died April 17 in Tallahassee, Fla., at age 88.
Grace, who was born in Rockland, Maine, and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He graduated from the University of Miami before going to work for The Miami News from the early 1950s until it closed in December 1988. In addition to horse racing, Grace was the boxing columnist and the paper's television critic in the late 1950s. After the News folded, Grace wrote for the Daily Racing Form and the Associated Press until he moved to Tallahassee in 2012.
"He never came into the office," Howard Kleinberg, the News' managing editor, told the Miami Herald. "Legend has it for the three tracks—Tropical, Gulfstream, and Hialeah—he'd change his residence to be near each track as its season opened. That's how Art was."
"He served the community for all those years with his newspaper columns and he cared about the city and the people in it," Brian Grace, one of Grace's two sons, told the Herald. "He was never afraid to voice his opinion even if it was not popular."
