At Churchill Downs

The race took exactly 2 min., 5 sec. Omaha, the winner, bred for distance but usually a slow starter, broke faster than usual, took the lead on the far turn, stood off the challenge of Roman Soldier in the stretch, finished a length and a half in front. Roman Soldier closed strongly, four lengths ahead of Whiskolo who ran second to him in the Texas Derby. Nellie Flag, favorite when an intermittent drizzle started to put a skim of mud on the track, ran fourth. Other favored horses--Today, who bruised a heel day before the race; Boxthorn, who had a sentimental following; Plat Eye, who tired after a mile--were far back in the field of 18.

In the clubhouse were John D. Hertz, Jack Dempsey, Postmaster General Farley, Mrs. Isabel Dodge Sloane and J. H. Louchheim of Philadelphia, who bet $1,000 on his Morpluck and then contrived to lose his pari-mutuel tickets to a pickpocket who got no good out of them. A squad of National Guardsmen used clubs to keep the spectators in the infield under control. The spectators threw chairs at the guardsmen.

These last week were incidents of the most famed horse race in the U. S., the Kentucky Derby, run for the Gist year, watched by a crowd of 60,000, some standing on peach baskets and some in $50 seats, over a mile-and-a-quarter track at Churchill Downs, Louisville, Ky.

After the race Omaha's jockey, Willie (''Smoky'') Saunders. who chose his mount's name, beginning with ''O." in honor of its famed progenitor Ormond. said: "Omaha is the greatest horse I ever rode." Said Kentucky's Governor Ruby Laffoon. presenting the gold cup which, in addition to a horseshoe of roses and $39,525. was first prize: "The best horse won.'' Omaha's owner is William Woodward, honorary board chairman of Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co., chairman of The Jockey Club and probably the most influential owner currently active on the U. S. turf. His Gallant Fox won the Kentucky Derby in 1930. went on to become for a time the greatest U. S. money horse ($328,165) and, by siring Omaha, the third derby winner to beget another derby winner. Tall, quiet, courteous, Mr. Woodward grew so excited during Gallant Fox's three-year-old campaign that he lost co Ib. He plans to start Omaha on a similar campaign with the Preakness this week at Pimlico, near the Belair stud where Woodward horses are raised along Mr. Woodward's own studiously reasoned lines of breeding. So horse-minded is he that when his wife (one of Baltimore's famed Cryder triplets) bore him a son after four daughters, he jubilantly telegraphed his friends (after many of whom he has named horses): "Fine colt born this morning."

After last week's race he jubilated: "It was a damned good race won by a damned good horse."

At Churchill Downs last week, bettors wagered nearly $500,000 on the Derby. On an ordinary horse race, for every dollar that is bet at the track, $10 are bet elsewhere. Total moneys that changed hands on the Derby probably amounted to more than $10,000,000. Conspicuous by their absence in the crowd at Churchill Downs last week were the two bookmakers generally surmised to have handled a larger share of this than any of their confreres: Thomas J. Shaw of New York and Thomas Kearney of St. Louis, the only important bookmakers in the U. S. who make "winter books" (i. e. bets made long before the race, at correspondingly long odds, and forfeited if for any reason the horse named by the bettor fails to run) on the Kentucky Derby. Tom Shaw had such a busy summer at the New York tracks in 1934 that he took a holiday last winter, handed over his winter book to his longtime assistant Frank Shannon. A few weeks before the race, an attack of indigestion that sent Tom Kearney to the hospital was front-page news in St. Louis. Last week at the first Kentucky Derby he had missed for 30 years, he was represented by an employe, John Ticacy.

Dean of Manhattan's bookmakers, "Long Tom" Shaw, 6 ft. 3, grey-haired, with a diamond stickpin in his tie, a grey felt hat over his shrewd Irish face, has been taking bets at New York tracks since 1906. At Belmont Park and other New York tracks his stool is No. i in the. line of bookmakers in the betting shed. The odds chalked on his slate are highly respected by his confreres. A onetime New Orleans bicycle-racing champion, Tom Shaw, now 60, rides in an open Rolls Royce.

St. Louis' Tom Kearney is five years older than Tom Shaw, more famed among Midwest bettors than Shaw is in New York. In 1924, when Black Gold won the Derby, Kearney and Shaw cornered the winter-book business by paying their losses while almost all their competitors, who had laid odds as high as 100-to-1, felt forced to "welsh." At Tom Kearney's office--a large room in the rear of a 20-by-25 ft. wood-paneled cigar store opposite the Jefferson Hotel where he lives--nine clerks handle his business at five long tables. When in good health, Tom Kearney spends most of his time behind his cigar counter which, unlike those run as blinds in most bookmaking establishments, actually makes money. His private office is a lounge behind the counter furnished with easy chairs, a safe. Once a gunman entered the store to hold him up. Tom Kearney shot him dead.

There are two kinds of bookmakers in the U. S.: those who operate at race tracks and those who handle bets elsewhere for the convenience of their customers. Of the latter, there are about 10,000 in Chicago, 20,000 in New York, 100,000 scattered about the country, in cigar stores, poolrooms, newsstands, lunch rooms. Some are agents for big bookmaking establishments. The majority are independent. Since pari-mutuels--machine betting at race tracks through a general pool, in which the odds are determined by the amount bet on each horse and of which the state and track each get a share --have been legalized in 23 states, bookmaking has increased instead of declined. Big bettors and system bettors prefer to bet against bookmakers because their odds, unlike pari-mutuel odds, are stable and their bets untaxed. A list of major U. S. bookmakers would include, besides Shaw and Kearney, the names of at least a half dozen men who live handsomely on their bettors:

Kid Rags is Max Kalik, fiftyish, a suave, affluent bookmaker noted for his $200 suits, his good manners and his sporty English cashier, Sidney ("Sir Sid-ney") Gooch, who wears loud tweeds and speaks with a Cockney accent. A onetime Manhattan ragman, "Kid Rags" operates the biggest book at the smartest U. S. track, Belmont Park, finds most of his trade in Wall Street, specializes in bets from $1,000 to $10,000.

Cinema celebrities in Los Angeles and Hollywood, where Wallace Beery, Bing Crosby, Clark Gable and Al Jolson play the races even more assiduously than most of their profession, are likely to patronize Zeke Caress. He made future books this year on the Agua Caliente Derby and Santa Anita Handicap, readily takes bets of $25,000.

Frank Erickson, onetime waiter, is now the largest commissioner in the U. S. His business--derived mostly from agents in cigar stores, poolrooms and newsstands along the Eastern seaboard--is backed by about $4,000,000. When he goes to Belmont Park, he sits in the clubhouse among socialites who patronize the betting-shed bookmakers--of whom Frank Erickson finances four. Trusted implicitly by his enormous clientele, Bookmaker Erickson was reported to have lost $150,000 last summer, mostly at a Saratoga meeting which put many of his less substantial rivals out of business.

"High Odds" Hughes is the first important English bookmaker to invade the U. S. for a generation. He advertises his specialty by holding up his slate and jabbering: "I lay the 'igh odds. . . ."

Happy last week was Louisville's most famed bookmaker, taciturn Sam ("Dink") Dinklespiel, most of whose clients had bet on Edward Riley Bradley's Boxthorn. An amiable, round-paunched, ruddy-faced bachelor, Bookmaker Dinklespiel is the most phlegmatic member of his profession in the U. S. He says he cannot remember the biggest bets he has accepted because "those things make little impression on me."

Equally indispensable to bookmakers and their customers are racing sheets like Daily Racing Form, Morning Telegraph, Cincinnati Racing Record, which have made Publisher Moe Annenberg a millionaire, and which in New York City alone receive 200,000 telephone calls daily from bettors asking racing information. Most valuable ingredient in such publications is a feature, completely unintelligible to uninitiate readers, called a "past performance chart" which for every important race run in the U. S. reveals the complete competitive history of each entrant (see P. 56).

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