R. E. (Rick) Fritts
Longtime California businessman and Thoroughbred breeder R. E. (Rick) Fritts passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack at his Riverside home on May 17. He was 67.
Together, with his wife Marie, Fritts established Solar View Farm in the early 1980s. A full service breeding, boarding and training facility located in the tiny town of Nuevo, Solar View is home to about 75 horses year-round and stands the stallions King Concorde, Due to the King and Ballistic Billy.
Fritts was born in Texas, but moved to California with his parents when he was an infant. During a 1996 interview for Thoroughbred of California magazine, he confessed he graduated from the school of hard knocks. Despite never finishing college and owning just a high school diploma, Fritts has had a hand in many successful businesses. He built Fritts Ford into one of the largest and most successful car dealerships in Southern California. He also owned Volvo and Chrysler dealerships and a bank, but sold those ventures.
A builder and developer, Fritts also built Solar View Farm from the ground up. He designed a water treadmill for the farm that earned a special award and is believed to be the first aqua treadmill installed at a Thoroughbred farm in California. For an experiment he was doing in heat retention, he built one of the barns out of Styrofoam. The building stays cool in the summer and warm in winter, cutting down on the need for electricity. It is also basically fireproof. The barn served as a prototype for three homes he built out of the same material in Palm Springs.
Fritts’ best runner was Nancys French Fry, a big gray son of French Legionaire who earned about $410,000 and owns victories in the grade III William P. Kyne Handicap at Bay Meadows and two successive runnings of the Phil D. Shepherd Stakes at Fairplex Park. He and his wife have also campaigned $200,000-earner Sea of Serenity and Nikki’s Baby. The latter was King Concorde’s first foal to race and earned more than $100,000. An active participant to the very end, Fritts was at the track on May 5 to watch his filly Maui Bopper win a race at Hollywood Park. They have several horses in training, including Miss Fleet Diablo, Grand Glorya and Nikki’s Native, a son of Nikki’s Baby.
In addition to his horses and business pursuits, Fritts also gave liberally to charity. He founded an event called Riverside Against Drugs Night, and the money raised at that charity event goes toward drug awareness and rehabilitation programs in the local area. He also started a local community group that honors the work done by law enforcement officers at an annual banquet and is actively involved with a program that trains signal dogs for the hearing impaired. He received the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award in 1997.
In addition to Marie, his wife of 37 years, his survivors include a son, Steven, daughter, Sherry, and three grandchildren. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Rick and Marie Fritts Animal Care Memorial Fund at the Inland Empire National Bank in Riverside, Calif.