Dark Course

"The Dark Years at Saratoga Race Course,"
by: THOMAS DIMOPOULOS, The Saratogian
08/20/2006

SARATOGA SPRINGS - "NO."

The two letters that killed the summer of 1943 came on May 26 with the official announcement there would be no racing in the Spa City that year. The ban would eventually be extended to include the summers of '44 and '45, leaving many residents in fear that racing in Saratoga was gone for good.

"At the time, people thought it might never come back," recalled Michael O'Connell, who would later become mayor of the city.
"I was born in 1935, so I was a youngster at the time but I distinctly remember my father sneaking me into the backstretch," he remembered about that summer of '42.
"Kids weren't allowed at the track in those years, so I remember thinking, 'Wow, I'm in the forbidden zone.' And I specifically recall my father telling me to take a good look around the race track because it may never return again," O'Connell said.

In the years leading up to the war, the town was booming. It was the era of The Grand Union and United States hotels. The "Chamberlain Special" lumbered up the railroad tracks, bringing racing fans from New York City to Saratoga for the meet. In the summer of 1941, the Saratoga Harness Racing Association opened a track of their own, a hopeful sign of bountiful times ahead, but the dark clouds of war were floating in from across the Atlantic.

By the spring of 1942, sugar, rubber and gasoline were being rationed. In the summer, the War Bond Committee sponsored three booths at the Saratoga Race Course, generating more than $24,000 in bonds and stamp sales for the war effort during the August racing season.
National Rubber Administrator William Jeffers sent off a letter to New York Gov. Thomas Dewey asking for conservation of rubber. Dewey put executive assistant James Hagerty in charge of the matter. Among his recommendations was that the Spa meet be transferred to a metropolitan New York track in 1943.

In Saratoga Springs, a committee was hastily formed that included members of the county Chamber, Mayor Addison Mallery and a band of local citizens led by J.E. Roohan. They devised a plan to organize the city's 13,000 citizens to underwrite the 1943 season by pledging an "amount equal to the purchase of a $25 War Bond" to rescue the season. Despite their efforts, when the "pleasure driving" ban was instituted in Saratoga County in May 1943, it spelled the closing of the racecourse for the summer.

"It was a different town then," said Michael Sweeney, who worked as a water boy at the race course in the 1920s and would later serve as a judge for a quarter century.
"Saratoga needed the summer crowd and it wasn't coming," Sweeney said.

In May 1943, as city residents practiced air raid drills, the announcement came that the upcoming yearling sales in Saratoga were being moved by the Fasig-Tipton Co. to Kentucky. George Bull, president of the Saratoga Association, announced activity at the racecourse in Saratoga would be limited to one thing that summer: gardening. With the Saratoga meet moved downstate, what would have been opening day was a melancholy one in the city.

"Up on Union Avenue the gates are closed and the grandstand quiet," described Saratogian reporter Frederick Eaton, Jr., in his story that ran under the headline: "And They're Off - 180 miles from Saratoga."
Eaton described eerily quiet platforms on what were normally noisy railroad tracks, the absence of the smell of hay and horses, and empty visions along Nelson Avenue where entrepreneurs usually spent the summer hustling parking spaces for a quarter.

More than 1,800 Saratogians served in the armed forces during World War II. There were about 70 of them that didn't come home. Just about the scariest thing for those living in the city with family and friends oversees was seeing the Western Union man coming up the front porch with potentially terrible news.

Those that could afford distraction flocked to The Community or The Congress to escape onto the silver screen with Humphrey Bogart and Lana Turner. And when they weren't collecting cans for war effort salvage drives or taking turns standing atop the Lake Avenue Armory acting as lookouts for enemy planes, they shopped on Broadway at Central Markets, or at the Grand Union, where cold cuts were going for .29 cents a pound. They bought banana cream pies at Thomas' Bakery, their clothes at Laundau's and listened to programs broadcast over WGY radio while sipping on King Orange soda at a nickel a pop.

At the race course downstate, 1943 was becoming the year of Count Fleet. Jockey John Longden rode the colt to victory in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and at Belmont, winning by a record-setting 25 lengths.

On Saturday, Aug. 15, 1943, the 74th Travers was run at Belmont Park. Eurasian took the race by three lengths. George H. Bull presented the trophy to the victors as they stood in the winner's circle at Belmont Park.
While racing fans in the Spa City couldn't actually see the races up close, residents remember they could still play a part in the wagering process. Newspapers listing the upcoming races and bookmakers set up improvised gambling shops out of their cars and in the storefronts along Broadway.

"There were illegal rooms all over downtown," O'Connell said. "There was gambling at the lake houses and in the backrooms of a lot of the newsstands. They were like the original off-track betting places of their time."

History has a vague memory of what went on at the racecourse during the three years it was closed. Some remember Army trucks being brought in and stored beneath the field stand.
"Not only was the track closed down, but it was sealed off and abandoned," O'Connell said. "The general public didn't really know but there were military trucks being stored at the track at the time. There was that secrecy during wartime, but it was being used as a significantly sized storage facility."
It also had become unkempt during the three years it was closed.
No one was maintaining the grass or taming the wild growth of weeds that began springing up on the track.

The first glimmer of hope came in the clamor of church bells which rang out in the city to signal that the war was over. It was the middle of August in 1945, during the third dark Saratoga summer.

A year later, racing returned at 2:30 p.m. on the first Monday in August when 15,168 jammed the roadways and lined up at the entry gates to pay the $1.60 admission for the eight-race card.
It was, at the time, the biggest opening day in Saratoga history and kicked off the four-week season remembered in the newspaper headlines of the day that read, simply, "Back Home Again."

(Photo of Javier Castellano andBernardini in Winner's Circle at Saratoga Race Course after winning Travers Stakes, Aug. 26, 2006 by Thomas Dimopoulos)