Golden Gate

In the twelvemonth just past, U. S. citizens legally bet $408,528,000 on the horses. That was $117,000,000 more than they bet in 1939. Bets placed illegally with bookmakers amounted to an unknown sum. What might the figure be this coming year, with "defense" money bulging railbirds' pockets? Race-track owners last week rubbed their palms.

Seven years ago horse racing was a summer sport. But since the opening of California's Santa Anita Park and its $100,000 Handicap, winter racing has attracted all the top-notch U. S. stables, most of their top-notch thoroughbreds. Santa Anita's opening, on the Saturday after Christmas, has become as red-letter a date on the U. S. racing calendar as the opening of Belmont, Pimlico or Saratoga. Santa Anita, despite its rich purses, has not had the winter field to itself. Florida's Hialeah Park, with its $50,000 Widener Cup race, gets many of the East's best horses. This week, when Santa Anita opens its seventh season, for the first time it will face competition from a track in its own neck of the woods.

Fifteen minutes from San Francisco, between the Bay and the Berkeley foothills, a new $2,000,000 race track called the Golden Gate Turf Club has been opened by a group of California turfmen, headed by President Harry Brown of the Interocean Steamship Corp. Three years ago such a venture would have been considered quicksand suicide: there were scarcely enough high-grade thoroughbreds in the U. S. to keep two big California tracks going during the winter. But Californians have recently gone in for breeding in a big way.

In the '90s--the era of Lucky Baldwin, James B. Haggin and Leland Stanford--California was second only to Kentucky in the business of breeding horses. Every summer, Breeder Haggin used to ship 300 thoroughbreds to the Saratoga yearling sales. When public indignation against gambling outlawed racing in California, its stud farms went to rack & ruin. With racing's revival in 1935, thoroughbred breeding became more than an industry, it became a mania.

Oldtime turfmen like Poloist Carleton Burke (only Far Westerner ever admitted to the Jockey Club) and Boston-born Charles E. Perkins, who had kept on raising polo ponies and show horses during California's lean years, began to enlarge their stud farms. Newcomers like Cinemagnate Louis B. Mayer, Lawyer Neil McCarthy and Automan Charles S. Howard imported the best English thoroughbreds that money could buy.* Crooner Bing Crosby imported expensive South American horses. Between Los Angeles and San Francisco, 200-odd stud farms sprang up, ranging from backyard paddocks like Clark Gable's to $1,000,000 ranches like Harry Warner's--where a mountainside was moved to give his pets a whiff of ocean air. California rebuilt its breeding business into a $40,000,000-a-year industry.

This week, when Santa Anita and Golden Gate ring up the curtain on California's winter racing season, every stall will be filled. Santa Anita's purses will be larger (averaging $20,000 a day), will therefore attract more high-grade horses. But an increasing number of California turfmen complain that Santa Anita has snubbed their homebreds to make room for big-name Eastern stables. For them, Golden Gate will be a horseman's heaven.

To manage its new plant, the Golden Gate Turf Club has hired silver-tongued Edward P. ("Slip") Madigan, longtime football coach at St. Mary's College. Slip Madigan knows no more about horse racing than the average $2 better. But neither did Dr. Charles H. Strub, the ex-dentist whose managerial genius made Santa Anita the most fabulous race track in the U. S. If Madigan can do as good a job for Golden Gate Park as he did for little St. Mary's, he will be well worth his $15,000-a-year salary.

Like a Fuller Brush salesman, Mr. Madigan has been canvassing the little towns behind the Berkeley hills, touting his track to Lions clubs and other horse-hungry groups. Among the novelties he touted: a towering, three-tiered grandstand (only one in the U. S.), with a clear view of the finish line from every one of its 13,000 seats; a saddling paddock in front instead of behind the grandstand; a circular bar (with free hors d'oeuvres at 4 o'clock sharp) overlooking San Francisco Bay; "elephant trains," salvaged from the Exposition's dismantled Treasure Island, to transport latecomers from the far end of the vast parking area. Instead of tractors to haul the huge starting gate around, California's latest track sports 16 beautifully matched, blue-ribbon Percherons (eight greys, eight blacks)--undefeated at California horse shows for the past two years. "There'll be a horse show as well as horse races every day at Golden Gate Park," hawked Manager Madigan last week.

*In the past six months U. S. turfmen have imported the cream of English thoroughbreds (nearly 200), 120 of whom are of racing age.

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