Hollywood to Inglewood

At the Santa Anita race track, 30 minutes from Hollywood, over $100,000 a day goes into the till of its owners, the Los Angeles Turf Club. The Los Angeles Turf Club directors are rich and powerful. Since the day the track came into being three years ago (the year after betting at race tracks was legalized in California), Santa Anita has enjoyed a profitable monopoly in Los Angeles County. Its directors frowned on interlopers. And so, it seemed, did the California Horse Racing Board.

But bent on breaking this one-track monopoly was the Hollywood Turf Club, a syndicate originally formed in 1935 but more recently reorganized and capitalized at $2,250,000. Headed by politically powerful Jack Warner, sporty production chief of the $177,000,000 Warner Bros. Corporation, and a board of directors of impeccable backgrounds, the reorganized Hollywood Turf Club convinced the Racing Board of its financial and moral soundness, got permission to build a race track in Los Angeles County. But the Board shyly held up its allocation of racing dates. At long last, last week, the Racing Board granted the Hollywood Turf Club 33 racing days next summer.

At Inglewood, 15 minutes from Hollywood, the new racing plant was already well under way. Since, in the Hollywood credo, no production has any excuse for being undertaken unless it can be bigger & better than the last, Jack Warner and his associates had planned accordingly. Santa Anita cost $1,000,000. Inglewood will cost $2,000,000. Santa Anita can seat 20,000. Inglewood will seat 25,000. Santa Anita snuggles at the foot of the picturesque Sierra Madre Mountains. There Inglewood was momentarily stumped. Inglewood is close to the sea but not close enough to afford its paying guests a view of the twinkling Pacific. But Hollywood brains soon found a solution. Inglewood will have a man-made chain of lakes in the infield, with fountains and waterfalls for good measure. And then, just to make sure it will be the last word: a revolving paddock.

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