The 1985 Belmont Stakes was won by Creme Fraiche, bred by Pamela Humphrey Hanna Firman and her nephew on Firman’s Whileaway Farm in Lexington, Kentucky. She was committed to continuing the bloodlines of the Thoroughbred horses she inherited from her father, George M. Humphrey, a Cleveland industrialist who had served as Eisenhower’s secretary of the treasury. Born in 1913 in Saginaw, Michigan, Pamela moved to Cleveland as a child when her father joined the M. A. Hanna Company. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she married Howard M. Hanna III in 1935; a year later he would die of a brain tumor. She served with the American Red Cross as director of an Army Air Forces rest facility in England during World War II. It was at the headquarters of the U.S. Eighth Army Air Force that she met Lt. Royal Firman Jr. They married in 1944.

In addition to being a fine horsewoman and running a farm in Kirtland, Ohio, Firman devoted her energies to community service. She sat on the boards of the Cleveland chapter of the Red Cross, Planned Parenthood and Central School of Practical Nursing, and served as president and secretary of Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, trustee of University Hospitals and treasurer of what is now the Cleveland Botanical Garden. In 1951, she established the Firman Fund to provide support for hospitals, medical, higher and secondary education, cultural programs, youth agencies, community funds and land conservation programs. Pamela and Royal Firman divorced in 1970. She died in 1997 at age 83.