Bryan Wagner

Background

Wagner was the younger of two sons of the late Wiltz W. Wagner, Sr., and Helen Bell Wagner (c. 1913–2004), who taught English at the University of New Orleans. Helen Wagner graduated from H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College and Tulane University. She represented Louisiana as the "Acadian Girl" at the Paris World Exposition of 1931. A parishioner of the Episcopalian Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans, she also served on the vestry and altar guild. Wagner's brother, Wiltz Wagner, Jr. (born July 7, 1939), of Fairhope, Alabama, is a Ph.D. professor and lung specialist at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine in Mobile.
Wagner attended Isidore Newman School, New Orleans Academy, and Tulane University. He operated an insurance agency on Carondelet Street in New Orleans.
In later years, Wagner became heavily involved in horse racing. He often spent summers in Del Mar, California, to be near the famed racetrack. Wagner won the 2009 National Handicapping Championship Tour, as it was then known, and qualified twelve times to the National Horseplayers Championship, during which he earned $101,000. He was part of the NHC since its founding in 1999. For two years, he could not qualify because his wife and the mother of their three children, the former Judy White (born June 9, 1950), sat on the board of directors of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association.