IT STARTED WITH A BING : Del Mar Track Has Retained Pleasant Setting and Theme While Undergoing --Del Mar Theme Song

Years of Change

Where the turf meets the surf, That’s the place to go, Take a plane, take a train, take a car. There’s a smile on each face And a winner in each race, Where the turf meets the surf At Del Mar. On a recent Sunday afternoon in North San Diego County, a winning combination of thoroughbred racing and splendid weather attracted almost as many people to the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club as the beaches of this resort town.

The spectators crowding an area in front of the grandstand and milling in the infield of this seaside track, in fact, looked a little like a beach crowd and a lot like a bunch of Cub fans from the bleachers of Wrigley Field. On this bright, sunny, breeze-cooled day, most of them were semi-dressed in shorts and tank tops, T-shirts or halters.

They were part of a crowd of 28,539, at the time the largest ever to watch horse racing in the 48-year history of Del Mar. The record turnout--it was broken the following week when 29,079 attended--was due partly to the increasing popularity of the track and partly to the additional space that became available when the infield was opened to spectators for the first time at the start of the meeting.

The picnic atmosphere of the infield, where spectators can stretch out among palm trees and lakes and work on their sun tans, has made the track a more attractive place to spend a summer afternoon and turned it into even a more informal place than it was when Bing Crosby first recorded the theme song.

Some things have not changed at “The Saratoga of the West” in 48 years. Crosby’s record is still played over the public-address system twice every race day, before the first race and after the last one. And adjectives such as picturesque, intimate, cozy, informal and relaxed are still used to describe the track where the turf meets the surf and most of Hollywood used to play.

As was evident on this record-breaking Sunday, however, that humans and horses come here in much greater numbers than they used to, and virtually all of the humans come by car, either on Highway 101 to the West or Interstate 5 to the East.

Hollywood stars stopped coming in large numbers years ago. Jack Klugman is about the only steady customer today. Elizabeth Taylor ran one of her horses here the other day but the actress was not seen.

In the old days, the Del Mar Hotel was loaded with stars. Built in 1905, the hotel, a playhouse for such celebrities as Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, Douglas Fairbanks and Jack Dempsey, closed in 1962 and was torn down in 1969.

The setting here has changed some, too. It’s a change for the better.

The infield is no longer a bunch of rocks and salt flats, although the track is less secluded. The once-pretty hills to the north and east have sprouted condos like weeds, and from the stands, cars can be seen crawling in a stream along I-5.

“Tightwad Hill,” where free-loaders once watched the races through binoculars, has disappeared. The stable area, once a few adobe-brick barns, stretches for hundreds of yards behind the shrubs on the backstretch.

Although it is more popular and successful than ever today, Del Mar has had many lean days, a lot of owners and financial problems and some bad management in its 48 years. Success did not come easily.

But on July 3, 1937, the day the track opened while San Diego newspapers were headlining “Amelia Earhart Missing in Pacific,” success seemed assured for Bing Crosby’s new Del Mar Turf Club.

On opening day Crosby, casually dressed in slacks, a floppy sports shirt and yachting cap and smoking a pipe, greeted his first customers at the gate. Later, after changing into a powder-blue sports coat, white slacks and straw hat, he appeared before a crowd of 15,000 and told them, “We hope you all enjoy the meeting--and have a measure of success at the payoff windows.”

Only $183,015 was bet that day. On the Sunday the attendance record was broken, $4,557,706 passed through the pari-mutuel windows, much of it on such things as exactas and the Pick Six, bets that were unheard of in 1937. On a typical weekday in 1985, the mutuel handle is about $3 million.

It seemed appropriate that High Strike, a horse owned by Crosby, won the first race ever run at Del Mar. It went off at 3-1.

The first meeting ran 22 days with attendance averaging 4,654 and the mutuel handle $101,104. It was a modest beginning but at least owners and trainers had another track, one that would become their vacation retreat, to run their horses on in Southern California. Santa Anita had opened on Christmas Day, 1934, but it would be another year before racing began at Hollywood Park.

Voters hard hit by the Depression returned pari-mutuel wagering to California in 1933, opening the door for thoroughbred racing. The theory in those gloomy days was that racing would create a big breeding industry in the state and provide jobs.

During the 1930s, Crosby spent a lot of time in the Del Mar area, using his home on the Don Juan Osuna Ranch as a hideaway from Hollywood and playing golf at Rancho Santa Fe, where he also sponsored his Crosby Clambake.

The 22nd Agriculture District Assn. was formed in 1936 to stage a San Diego County Fair. A site at San Diego’s Pacific Beach was first considered, then rejected in favor of Del Mar’s San Dieguito River valley. The race track, historians say, was added as an afterthought, the idea of William A. Quigley of La Jolla.

Quigley took his idea to Crosby, who liked it, and in May, 1936, the Del Mar Turf Club was formed at a meeting at the Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank. Crosby was named president, a job he kept until 1945. The first board of directors also included Pat O’Brien, who was elected vice president, and comedian Oliver Hardy. The executive committee included Gary Cooper and Joe E. Brown.

Crosby and O’Brien put up the money, interest free, for the track, which was built by Work Projects Administration labor.

The architecture is Spanish. The tower and main entrance of the stands were copied from San Antonio’s Mission San Jose, and other sections were duplicates of the San Gabriel Mission and San Francisco’s Mission Dolores. The adobe for the stands and barns was cut out of nearby hills.

Crosby, O’Brien and their Hollywood friends also provided the track with glamour. Hollywood, through the influence of Crosby and studio bosses Joseph M. Schenck of 20th Century Foxand Louie B. Mayer of MGM, was as much a part of Del Mar in the early days as the daily double.

The track’s opening day was like a Hollywood premiere. NBC carried it live on radio for 45 minutes and featured Crosby, O’Brien, comedian Bob Burns and announcer Clem McCarthy. Oliver Hardy was the day’s honorary steward and Barbara Stanwyck presented a trophy to the winner of the feature race. Robert Taylor, Bette Davis and Una Merkel were Turf Club guests.

Mayer and Schenck ordered their stars to be seen at the track on weekends. Crosby often broadcast his Kraft Music Hall from the track, and Paramount Studio staged the premiere of his movie, “Sing You Sinners,” here in 1938.

Crosby’s Saturday night parties in the Turf Club were famous, often lasting until dawn. He had an impressive list of entertainers, among them Bob Hope, the Ritz Brothers and Donald O’Connor. Kay Kyser’s orchestra supplied the music.

The press parties, which preceded the opening of a meeting, were equally impressive. They featured such stars as Al Jolson, Jimmy Durante, Danny Thomas and, of course, Crosby.

Durante once broke up a piano on the stage. A frequent track visitor, he always sat at a table on the finish line and joked that he could get his nose over the line before the horses.

On Aug. 5, 1938, the track staged a “Motion Picture Day.” The races were named The Exhibitors, The Actors, The Producers, The Screen Writers, The Directors, the Cameramen and the Motion Picture Handicap. The handicap was won by Clarcarole, named for Clark Gable and Carole Lombard.

Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford were frequent guests at the track. So were Victor McLaglen, Edmund Lowe, Buster Keaton, Eddie Cantor, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Edgar Bergen, George Jessel, Walt Disney, Harry James and Betty Grable.

James and Grable owned horses. One, Big Noise, was named after James’ famous trumpet.

Bob Hebert, a former Times handicapper and race writer who covered Del Mar in its earliest days, recalled that on the day of the 1951 Del Mar Futurity, Big Noise was entered and James, who had an engagement on Balboa Island that evening, ran out of time and had to leave as the horses were about to race.

Heading north on 101, Hebert said, James stopped on “Tightwad Hill,” parked his car and, as prearranged, watched Grable through binoculars. “Big Noise won and Grable flashed James the thumbs-up sign and off he drove toward L.A.,” Hebert said.

Prince Aly Kahn, one of the wealthiest men in the world, showed up at the track in 1952 and had to borrow money to bet on Moonrush in the San Diego Handicap. The horse won.

J. Edgar Hoover was once a regular visitor. Among other famous guests were King Faisal of Iran, King Michael of Bulgaria, Gen. Omar Bradley and Walter Winchell. Maurice Chevalier, celebrating his 75th birthday as a guest in the Del Mar beach home of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, made his first visit to a U.S. race track and was introduced by track announcer Joe Hernandez as “Morris Chev-a-leer.”

Don Smith, who ran the track for 25 years, once was asked to pin a flower on Betty Grable before she was to present a trophy in the winner’s circle. Grable, he recalls, was wearing a tight, strapless dress. He handed the flower to her, he said, and told her: “I know those great legs of yours are insured, but I’m not sure about the rest of you. You pin this on yourself.”

When Del Mar opened, the green fee at Rancho Santa Fe was $1 and a round-trip plane ride from Los Angeles was $10. Some celebrities arrived by planes that landed on a runway near the track. But most fans from the Los Angeles area, which at one time, Hebert said, provided about 80% of Del Mar’s business, came by automobile or on a special train that ran each race day.

The Santa Fe railroad put in a spur to the track from its main L.A.-San Diego line. If the train was late, the first race was delayed until it got there. “The horses would come onto the track as soon as the engineer gave his whistle,” Hebert said. “Once the train parked at the siding, the fans rushed for the betting windows.”

Hebert said: “The atmosphere at Del Mar was really nice, relaxed and congenial. There was not much pressure.”

A camera invented by an optical engineer named Lorenzo del Riccio, who once headed Paramount’s technical research laboratories, was used for the first time at Del Mar and photo-finish pictures became a part of racing.

“The camera was put on the grandstand roof and officials were not sure of the accuracy of the pictures at first because the stomping of the cheering fans shook the camera,” Hebert said.

The camera was thought at first to favor the outside horse, or the one closest to it, Hebert said. The solution to satisfy the doubters: A mirror was put on the inside. One is still used in a similar fashion today.

In 1949, a 19-year-old apprentice jockey named Bill Shoemaker began riding at Del Mar and won 52 races in his first meeting. In 1970 Shoemaker rode winner No. 6,033 at Del Mar, breaking a record that had long been held by Johnny Longden. Oddly, Longden had broken Sir Gordon Richards’ record by riding his 4,871st winner on the same track on Labor Day, 1956.

When Shoemaker first rode here, Hebert said, every one of his horses was heavily favored. “He won five and six races a day. He influenced the odds so much, he started riding in the East.”

Some of Calumet Farms’ stars raced here, and the great Native Diver won the San Diego Handicap for three straight years, carrying 131 pounds in 1965. But a race on Aug. 12, 1938, did almost as much as Crosby and Hollywood to make Del Mar famous.

A match race between Seabiscuit and Ligaroti, a South American horse, drew 18,000 spectators and attracted nation-wide attention. Racing for a purse of $25,000, Seabiscuit carried 130 pounds, Ligaroti 115. Crosby and O’Brien broadcast the race from the roof of the grandstand.

Seabiscuit won by a nose in a race that became noted for the behavior of the jockeys--George Woolf, on Seabiscuit, and Spec Richardson. “There was more talk after the race than before it,” Hebert recalled.

The bizarre finish was detailed in the stewards’ statement after the race:

“Coming to the sixteenth pole, Seabiscuit started to move on, but jockey Richardson (on Ligaroti) reached out and grabbed Seabiscuit’s saddle cloth and held onto it until he got practically to the 70-yard pole, where Ligaroti moved up considerably.

“At this point he (Richardson) let go of the saddle cloth and tried to grab Woolfe’s wrist. Woolf fought to get his arm loose and about 20 yards from the finish reached out and grabbed Ligaroti’s rein and held onto it from there to the finish.”

The jockeys were suspended but later reinstated because of a loophole: There was no betting on the race.

Charlie Whittingham, 72, and Noble Threewitt, 74, have adjoining offices in the adobe barns on the backstretch at Del Mar. They are the only trainers around today who worked at their trade here in 1937. Stablehands said they are among the first trainers to arrive at the barns every morning, sometimes as early as 4:30 a.m.

The trainers were asked what Del Mar was like in the early days.

“It was a much smaller business then,” Whittingham said. “Those were Depression years and bucks were hard to come by. A lot of trainers had their own horses here.”

Whittingham worked for himself in those days, too. He had two horses. One, Over Stimulate, won a couple of races. Whittingham had been racing his horses at Caliente and when Del Mar opened, he moved them here after the Tijuana meeting.

When he first came here, he said, “There were a few cottages and the old Del Mar Hotel on the beach.”

There was so little to do in Del Mar then, the trainers, jockeys and stablehands played softball at nearby Solana Beach. “Each stable had a team,” Whittingham said. “I played for Crosby’s team. He played, too, and was a pretty good player.” On Saturday nights, Whittingham attended Crosby’s parties.

“We used to take our horses down to the beach and let them walk in the the ocean,” he said. “You could take them all the way to Carlsbad. Today, there is not even enough room for the seagulls.”

Despite all the changes, Whittingham still enjoys his visits to Del Mar. “This is like going to Saratoga,” he said. “The weather is much better here. It’s kind of like a working vacation.”

To Threewitt, the biggest change at Del Mar has been its growth. “It’s so big now,” he said. “In the early days there were only about 600 horses here.

Now there are about 2,200 and there is room for 2,400.”

When the track opened, Threewitt trained for C. B. Coit. One of his first winners was a filly named Kumsis who won a $400 purse at the county fair meeting. The fair races followed the Del Mar meeting.

Threewitt did not go to Crosby’s parties or even socialize much. “I was kind of a peon, a gyp (for gypsy) trainer,” he said. “The gyps did a lot for racing in those days.”

He trains 26 horses here today and said, “I still love it.” He is not so sure he likes Del Mar as much. “A lot of people feel it is a vacation town,” he said. “But it is not as relaxing today as it used to be. The game has almost outgrown the size of the track.”

After getting out of the gate successfully, Del Mar ran into lean years in 1939 and 1940. Attendance dropped so low that exhibition steeplechase races were held in the infield in an attempt to boost it. In 1939, historians recorded, the track made a profit of $69 for a 24-day season.

Business picked up in 1941 when aircraft plants in San Diego started operating around the clock. A horse named Falso Clue and owned by comedian Eddie (Rochester) Anderson won a race that season and paid a record $239.60.

World War II halted racing and the track became quarters for Camp Pendleton Marines taking amphibious training on the Del Mar beaches. Later in the war, the Del Mar Turf Club Aircraft Division was formed to make bomber parts on assembly lines set up in the grandstand.

Racing resumed in 1945 and the announcement of Japan’s surrender on Aug. 14 was made by Pat O’Brien on the public-address system. The next day, a national holiday celebrating the end of the war, 20,324 spectators bet $958,476 at the track. Crosby and O’Brien got their money back in 1946 but Crosby then sold his interest.

After that, Hebert recalled, “The track changed hands almost every other year.” Viewing the rapid turnover of owners, L. A. columnist Ned Cronin labeled the track “Capital Gains Downs.”

The track, in fact, changed hands four times in six years and five times in eight years.

In 1954, Texas financiers Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson bought Del Mar for a non-profit corporation called Boys Inc. of America. A former Marine Corps general, Holland (Howlin’ Mad) Smith, was named president but resigned when he learned that no funds were available to build a Boys Club in the San Diego area.

Crosby returned to Del Mar in 1977 for the first time in 30 years. He said he was impressed by all the changes. He probably would have been surprised, too, the other day to see the heavy traffic on Jimmy Durante Boulevard leading into the track and the thousands of sunbathers in the infield.

It is less certain that he would have been impressed. In such a crowd, he would not have been able to stroll around the stands, accompanied by guitarist Perry Bodkin, singing to his customers.