Boots & Saddles

A onetime shoeshine boy died in Brooklyn last week and, by way of mourning, a $2,500 plater named Sunny Al was scratched in the eighth race at Tropical Park that afternoon. The former bootblack was Anthony Aste, 88, founder of the Griffin Manufacturing Co. (the world's largest makers of shoe polish) and owner of the old Ascot Stable. In six decades on the American turf, Sportsman Aste, "the King of the Bootblacks," had made his mark with a colorful personality and many a better horse than Sunny AI.

$50,000 or Nothing. While still in school, Tony Aste, born in lower Manhattan, began shining shoes in the streets. Before he was old enough to vote, he was renting indoor space, putting stands in lobbies and aboard ferryboats, hiring other bootblacks. Dissatisfied with existing shoe polish, he hired a chemist to develop a new formula, and made his own--first for his stands and then for sale. He chose his trademark carefully. "I got the name out of a book," said Aste proudly. "A griffin is half-lion and half-eagle--king of the beasts and the birds."

He developed Griffin partly with the profits from another beast, named Nasturtium. Bought by Aste as a yearling for $4,300, Nasturtium bloomed into the best two-year-old race horse of 1901. "The bluebloods must have got worried," Aste related with relish, decades later: "A bootblack with a champion!" William C. Whitney, one of that period's great turfmen, wanted to buy Nasturtium. Aste demanded a price then considered outrageous--$50,000--and set a deadline of noon the next Saturday when this offer would be withdrawn.

Saturday morning Whitney showed up at the Aste home and continued to argue about the price until Aste, looking at his watch, said coldly, "You have two minutes to make up your mind, Mr. Whitney." At noon sharp, Whitney bought the horse, paying $50,000 in crisp new $1,000 bills, which helped to build the Griffin Co. Shipped to England for the Derby, Nasturtium failed to win.

100 Years or Belmont. Aste won enough with a horse named Jack Point to pay for his Sheepshead Bay home ("the house that Jack built"). He considered bookmakers his natural enemies. "It is no secret," the learned racing journal, the Morning Telegraph, once said, "that he fashioned some of the most devastating racing coups in this hemisphere." His two ambitions: to live to 100 or to win the Belmont Stakes. Aste cared much less about the Kentucky Derby. In 1913 he had the Derby favorite, Ten Point, a son of Jack Point. But the race was won by Donerail, at 90 to 1, the longest shot ever to take the Derby. The defeat of Ten Point was a catastrophe for the bookmakers, those old enemies of Anthony Aste. Although he achieved neither of his two ambitions, his was a breathtaking career, based upon a brilliantly simple innovation made at the age of 19. In Rome and Paris and Madrid and Cairo, men still have their shoes shined standing on the street, one foot up on a box. The posture is not easy for the kneeling bootblack or dignified for his customer. Anthony Aste pioneered with the U.S. gift to shoe-shining: the chair on a raised stand. By enthroning the customer he became "King of the Bootblacks" and a rival to Whitneys.

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