Reports: John Hendrickson, Marylou Whitney’s husband, dead at 59

Several news outlets were reporting late Monday that John Hendrickson, the husband of the late thoroughbred horse owner and philanthropist Marylou Whitney, died earlier that day at age 59.

Whitney died in 2019 at age 93.

The Times-Union in New York reported that Hendrickson died at Saratoga Hospital in New York on Monday afternoon. Among those also reporting the death was the Thoroughbred Daily News, Spectrum News, The Daily Gazette, WYNT and WRGB.

The New York Race Track Chaplaincy posted on X formerly known as Twitter that they mourned his loss. The post said he and Whitney were “shining lights in the horse racing family.”

Hendrickson reported “feeling unwell just before lunch at Cady Hill, the Saratoga Springs home he had shared with his late wife,” the Times-Union newspaper reported.

“I was at the hospital holding his hand,” said Maureen Lewi, described as a friend of Hendrickson and Whitney. “I was talking to him, but he wouldn’t talk back — he was gone.”

Lewi told the Times Union that Hendrickson was “the best husband to Marylou, he was the best of friends to Ed” — Lewi’s late husband, the prominent publicist Ed Lewi, who died in 2015 — “and he was the best to the backstretch workers. All his waking hours, he was thinking about how he could give to others.”

Hendrickson helped develop a health clinic for track workers, as well as serving meals and providing entertainment for the employees throughout the Saratoga Race Course meet, the newspaper said.

Hendrickson also paid to revamp the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, where he served as chairman.

The Herald-Leader reported in 2019 that Whitney married her first husband, Frank Hosford, the heir to a fortune from John Deere farm equipment, in 1948. The couple had four children before divorcing 10 years later. She and C.V. Whitney married soon after and had one child together.

She married Hendrickson, a former aide to Alaska Gov. Walter Hickel, in 1997, after he proposed to her with a 13-carat ring at Buckingham Palace. Hickel had introduced the couple several years earlier, the Herald-Leader reported.

In Lexington, they were known for their donations to Cardinal Hill Rehabilitation Hospital and a cancer care center at the University of Kentucky.

This is a developing story.

This story was originally published August 20, 2024 at 12:32 AM.