For 17 minutes in 1959, no one at Churchill Downs knew who had won the Kentucky Derby. Tomy Lee took it by a nose in the final strides, but Sword Dancer’s jockey claimed a foul. A crowd of 100,000 spectators fell silent while the stewards reviewed the film. Willie Shoemaker, the great jockey aboard Tomy Lee, waited. So did the broad-shouldered wildcatter who had bought the horse without much thought.
The stewards let the result stand, and the trophy went home with Tomy Lee’s owner, oilman Fred Turner Jr., to Midland.
It sits today in a former guest room of the Turner Mansion, which the Museum of the Southwest has called home since 1968. The multidisciplinary museum has since grown from the Turners’ single residence into a 5-acre campus, adding a sculpture garden, children’s museum, planetarium, and art museum. Beside the 1959 trophy stands a second, won 28 years later by Alysheba, owned by the oilman’s daughter. Museum visitors can see both artifacts—alongside other Derby memorabilia like the 1987 winner’s silk Garland of Roses and a Norman Rockwell commemorative plate—on regular view at the mansion’s first-floor Turner Legacy Galleries. And this year, as the museum turns 60 and the mansion turns 90, a new Saturday tour leads guests through doors usually closed to the public, into the family’s private living quarters upstairs.
The tour moves through the kitchen, the butler’s pantry, a freezer porch, and several bespoke bathrooms “each with its own distinct character,” says Kristin Tacker, the museum’s director of development. A star motif recurs through the hardware and tilework of the house’s interior spaces. When it was built, this eclectic mansion was the most modern home in town, combining elements of Tudor, Colonial, and Mediterranean architecture. It joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.
One of 12 children raised on a Coleman County ranch, Turner found his fortune in vacancies. He was studying survey maps of the Permian Basin’s Yates field when he noticed land that early surveyors hadn’t recorded. After applying to the state for ownership, Turner spent years in litigation, and after winning a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, drilled that strip in 1933. The well became one of the country’s most prolific, and more followed in Andrews County and New Mexico.
He bought his first thoroughbreds to breed with his cow ponies but soon developed a taste for racing. “I like to travel,” he told Time in 1959, “but any place in the world becomes boring for me after a few days unless I have a purpose, and thoroughbreds are the answer.”
At England’s Newmarket sales in 1957, Turner’s agent paid $25,000 (around $297,000 today) for a well-bred yearling named Tuleg, then a fraction of that for a bay named Tomy Lee, only to keep Tuleg company. Tomy Lee’s pedigree suggested he had no business racing, but he soon outpaced Tuleg and later carried Turner into the winner’s circle as the first foreign-bred Derby champion in 42 years.
Dorothy Turner Scharbauer inherited her father’s fascination with the track. In 1985, she and her daughter Pamela bought a yearling and brought him to Kentucky. Down the stretch of the 1987 Derby, Alysheba clipped the heels of the horse ahead and nearly went down, then found his feet and won anyhow.
Both trophies came home to a brick estate built for show. Fred and Juliette Turner hired Dallas architect Anton Korn, known for his Highland Park residences, to design their mansion in 1936. It was Midland’s first house with a swimming pool, and the stables stood out back.
For decades, one door stayed firmly shut. A safe built into the wall of Juliette’s dressing room went unopened since the Turners’ time. Asked in 2023 what she thought was inside, former executive director Lori Wesley told NewsWest 9, “Millions and millions of dollars.”
Recently, a locksmith finally cracked it. Derby racegoers once impatiently waited minutes for a verdict. This one took decades longer. And this year, seeing both answers for yourself takes only a Saturday afternoon.
“We did gain something valuable,” Tacker says. “We now have the combination.”
