Gwynn Wilson Was There at the Start, Helping to Make Santa Anita a Success : A GAMBLE PAID OFF

A tradition that began in 1934 when Santa Anita offered the nation’s first $100,000 handicap horse race will continue Sunday when horse racing’s first $1 million handicap is run at the Arcadia track.

A million dollars is all it took in 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, to put together the entire package that became the Los Angeles Turf Club.

Now it will go for one race, the 49th Santa Anita Handicap.

Gwynn Wilson, who will be 90 next month, was there on opening day, Christmas 1934, as general manager and treasurer of the new track, and he’ll be there two or three times this year. Wilson retired in 1962 but still enjoys a day at the track he built.

Wilson remembers when $1 million was so hard to come by that it took a compromise with Dr. Charles Henry (Doc) Strub of San Francisco to bring horse racing back after it had been legislated out of business in California for nearly 25 years.

“We were stuck for money down here, and Charlie was stuck for a site up north, so someone said, ‘Let’s get together,’ ” Wilson recalled during an interview in the den of his apartment in the Park La Brea Towers in West Los Angeles. “That’s how Southern California, and not Northern California, got the track.

“Hal Roach headed a group trying to build a track in 1933 in Southern California, but after we raised about $500,000, mostly from the movie colony, we got stalled,” Wilson said. “We were selling memberships at $5,000 each but couldn’t get 200 members. Nobody had any money those days except the movie people.”

The newly formed California Horse Racing Board insisted that a million dollars be in the bank before a license would be granted for a race meeting.

“Charlie had plenty of financial backing, but he wanted his track in the St. Francis Woods in San Francisco. The board granted a license to his St. Francis Jockey Club, but he couldn’t get the zoning changed to build his track. He was frustrated, and when we suggested getting together, he came south.”

Los Angeles had barely more than a million people at the time and San Francisco was the financial center of the West.

Roach, a motion picture magnate whose knowledge of horses was limited to polo ponies, was president of the LATC and wanted the new track in Culver City. Carleton Burke, who was chairman of the racing board, had other ideas, and he was the man who had to give the OK.

“Burke didn’t care what we did as long as we built our race track on the old Lucky Baldwin ranch,” Wilson said. “He thought that would be carrying on the traditions of racing Baldwin had started earlier.”

Elias Jackson (Lucky) Baldwin, one of California’s most prominent horse owners and breeders several decades earlier, had purchased Rancho Santa Anita in 1875 and built his own public race track in 1907, approximately where the Santa Anita golf course now exists. A mile oval, just like Santa Anita today, Baldwin’s track opened on Thanksgiving 1907 and operated for two years before Baldwin died on March 1, 1909.

Horse racing was banned in California shortly thereafter, and it was not until 1933, when pari-mutuel betting was legalized, that racing returned.

“Taxes were hurting Anita Baldwin (Lucky’s daughter), so it was easy for us to get the property we wanted,” Wilson said. “Most of it was planted in grapes, so we decided to save the old Baldwin winery.”

The winery, located about halfway down the backstretch, is still one of the memorable landmarks of Santa Anita.

“The first thing Charlie insisted on was a $100,000 race, a big handicap. He felt we needed it to give the new track some sparkle, to make it legitimate, especially in the eyes of the New York crowd where racing was big. People told him he was crazy, that he didn’t need such extravagance, that $25,000 would be enough, but Charlie stuck by his guns.”

The purse for the Kentucky Derby that year, by comparison, was $30,000.

Once the race was announced, Strub and Burke went East to persuade owners to bring the big horses West for the first time. Their success was remarkable. The stalls of Santa Anita that winter became a virtual Who’s Who of Racing: Kentucky Derby winners Twenty Grand, from the Greentree Stable of Mrs. Payne Whitney, and Cavalcade, from the Brookmeade Stable; C.V. Whitney’s Equipoise and High Glee, A.G. Bostwick’s Mate, A.A. Baroni’s Top Row, Dorwood Stable’s Statesman and F.A. Carreaud’s Time Supply.

“The first handicap was a unique field, undoubtedly the finest field, as far as names were concerned, ever put together,” Wilson said. “Not all of them were in the best of shape, but they were here.”

Azucar, a lightly regarded former steeplechase horse bred in England and owned by Fred Alger of Detroit, won the race with a stretch drive that overtook Ted Clark. Ladysman was two lengths back, with Time Supply third and Top Row fourth. The favorite, Equipoise, a 7-year-old, wound up seventh and Ted Clark, after leading by six lengths, faded to fifth.

An infection kept Cavalcade, the ’34 Derby winner, out of the race, but his presence at Santa Anita was a big prestige boost.

Azucar, ridden by George Woolf, who would be killed in a racing accident at Santa Anita 11 years later, paid $26.80 for a $2 ticket.

“We’d been struggling, no doubt about it, but that day put us on the map,” Wilson said.

Racing was a new toy in Southern California, and L.A. writers were wide-eyed at what they saw.

Bill Henry, sports editor of The Times, wrote: “The Turf Club was so classy, if you scratched someone they would bleed purple.”

Racing writer Paul Lowry, describing the atmosphere as Azucar swept from 14th to first: “Men’s hands shook as with the palsy. Women fainted.”

The 1935 Santa Anita Handicap actually wasn’t the first $100,000 race, but it was the first to be run continuously. There was a $100,000 match race in 1923 at Belmont Park between Kentucky Derby winner Zev and Epsom Derby winner Papyrus, which Zev won, and there were several Hundred Granders held in Tijuana. The Coffroth Handicap, which began in 1917 at the old Tiajuana track, and its successor, the Agua Caliente Handicap at the new Caliente track from 1930 to 1934, both had $100,000 purses on occasion. In 1932, the Caliente race was won by the great New Zealand-born and Australian-trained thoroughbred, Phar Lap.

Strub’s first $100,000 race directed public interest to Santa Anita, but Wilson believes another of Strub’s ideas was more significant in the day-to-day success of the track.

“When Charlie went East to talk to the big stables about horses for the handicap, he also told them about his $800 minimum purse for all the races. It was an unheard of amount, and when the Eastern owners came to Santa Anita with their big horses, they brought their whole stables. This gave us horses to fill the cards all through the season.

“This made Santa Anita, in our first year, comparable to the New York tracks. It put distance in the distinction between Santa Anita and the Northern California tracks like Tanforan, Bay Meadows and Emeryville. The $800 purse minimum jumped us into a class of racing never seen before in California.

“Without those eastern stables, we probably couldn’t have filled the fields. We were running eight races a day, six days a week and after having no racing in California for nearly 25 years there weren’t many horses around. There were some owners, like Carleton Burke and Norman Church and Charles Howard, who ran their horses at Caliente, but there wouldn’t have been enough for a daily meeting. I think that was Charlie’s most important idea.”

Both Tanforan, in San Bruno, and Bay Meadows, in San Mateo, opened in 1934 before Santa Anita’s Christmas opening.

Another Strub innovation that shocked the racing establishment was the elimination of free passes. It was the custom of the era to hand out passes at hotels, restaurants and bars to get patrons out to bet their money.

“Charlie believed a person ought to have enough money to buy a ticket if he wanted to gamble,” Wilson said. “All the freeloaders really screamed when we announced there would be no passes.”

On opening day, there were 30,777 spectators who wagered $258,916.

By contrast, this season’s opening day, Dec. 26, 1985, attracted 49,475 who bet $7.35 million.

Wilson and Strub were impressed by their track’s debut, but even though it was in the midst of the Depression, other sporting events in the area were better attended that same week.

The day before Christmas, 50,000 were at Mines Field--now the site of the Los Angeles International Airport--to see Kelly Petillo win a 200-mile automobile race. And on New Year’s Day, the Rose Bowl was filled to capacity for the first time to watch Alabama’s Dixie Howell-to-Don Hutson passing show defeat Stanford, 29-13.

“We thought it was a terrific day,” Wilson said. “It was Christmas, the sun shone and we’d taken in nearly $260,000. We were all smiles when we left the track that day.”

The Times’ Bill Henry caught the pulse of the bettors on opening day: “They stampeded into the betting rooms, falling all over each other in their excitement with the result that there were usually more people standing in line trying to place a wager when they closed the windows than actually got up there in time to place their money.”

The next week, however, was a downer. Crowds fell off to less than 5,000--only 2,918 on a rainy Wednesday--and less than $100,000 was wagered. Strub’s detractors had a field day.

“Everyone said we had to give out passes, that people wouldn’t come and pay to gamble, but Charlie said, ‘I’ll tear all the fences down and let everyone in free before I do that,’ ” Wilson said.

“One concern we had was what if the stockholders wanted out. There were 80 people who bought the 200 shares and despite our concern, not a single share changed hands. Not a single one wanted out. Charlie took that as a solid vote of confidence. He kept saying that once the public understood the way it was, they’d be back.

“One guy who’d turned down an opportunity to buy in earlier, came to us and said, ‘Charlie, if you don’t start giving out passes, I’ll be back in two weeks to buy you out at 10 cents on the dollar.’

“But Charlie wouldn’t compromise. It was about the fourth Saturday before we had another good day. We were just starting to get healthy when the 54-day meeting ended. We were still in hock about $250,000, so we petitioned the racing board for two more weeks. The board had stipulated that Southern California could have 100 days of racing and Northern California 100. We were the only Southern California track, so they granted us an extra two weeks. Those were golden days. We had two beautiful weeks, and the ball was rolling. Everybody in Arcadia was happy, too, because we’d stirred up the economy.”

Arcadia was a sleepy little town of fewer than 5,000 people, many of whom worked in the vineyards or potato fields, when Burke and Strub decided it was the place to build a race track.

Gwynn Wilson became involved in horse racing after having been associate general manager of the 1932 Olympic Games. Before that, he was graduate manager of USC’s athletic department, where his most significant accomplishment was putting together the USC-Notre Dame football series.

“When Hal Roach began his efforts to get a racing license, he needed a general manager. Bill Henry, who had worked with me on the Olympic Games, was the only newspaperman who closely followed Roach’s plans, and when Roach asked him about a general manager, Bill said, ‘Get Wilson.’

“I was in the hospital at the time with an appendectomy when Henry contacted me about the job. A couple of weeks later I met Roach and found out what they needed most was someone to sell memberships for $5,000 apiece. It wasn’t until Charlie Strub came down from San Francisco that we were able to get the money to start the track.

“Charlie built the show, and I built the track and operated it. One of the smartest things I did was in selecting Gordon Kaufmann as the architect.”

Before construction began, Wilson and Kaufmann toured race tracks in Texas, Florida, Maryland and New York for ideas. Kaufmann was honored for his work in 1937 when Santa Anita won a prize at the Paris Exposition for its architecture.

“The thing we were most proud of, and the thing Bob Strub has maintained to this day, is that Santa Anita is more than a race track, it’s like a great park, a place to visit even if you don’t gamble.

“Neither Charlie nor I were gamblers. He was a baseball man, I was in amateur athletics.”

Strub had been president of the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League for 18 years, where he had produced such future major leaguers as Willie Kamm, Paul Waner, Frankie Crosetti, Lefty Gomez and Earl Averill.

In his role as graduate manager at USC, Wilson got together with Notre Dame Coach Knute Rockne to put together the first Trojan-Irish football game in 1926, which became the game’s finest intersectional series. Later, Wilson and Zach Farmer ran the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

“Charlie wanted a park-like atmosphere, with an emphasis on entertainment and recreation. He knew the gambling made it go, but he wanted another dimension,” Wilson said.

“One thing he wanted was an open infield for the public to enjoy. That first year we didn’t have a tunnel, so we had to close the track off and on during the day to let the spectators walk across the track.

“Santa Anita became a showpiece, not only for racing but also as a tourist attraction for Southern California. It stands for something more than racing.”

Two other innovations to U.S. racing introduced by Wilson and Strub were a public address announcer calling the races and a photo-finish camera.

“Caliente was the first track to announce its races all the way around the track, and they had a young high school kid named Joe Hernandez doing the calling. We went down there and heard Joe and decided he was our man. It was another right move.”

Hernandez became the most famous and respected announcer in horse racing history. The Voice of Santa Anita called 15,587 consecutive races until he collapsed in the announcer’s booth on Jan. 27, 1972. He died six days later of heart failure.

“We had used the photo-finish camera during the Olympic Games, and I suggested to Charlie that we ought to try it at Santa Anita,” Wilson said. “The stewards didn’t like the idea, but we had a camera developed anyway and kept taking pictures of every race. One day in January the judges made a mistake. We took our pictures to Christopher Fitzgerald, the presiding steward, and he looked at them and agreed with us. Once he saw the results, the photo finish camera became part of the track’s equipment.”

Gwynn Wilson is proud of his accomplishments, and, as is the case with anyone who has spent more than half a lifetime in an endeavor, there are people and incidents that stand out in his mind.

“I think four individuals have been the most responsible for the success of Santa Anita the way we know it today,” he said.

“First, of course, is Charlie Strub. He had the vision and the drive to put his ideas into effect.

“Carleton Burke set the standards for the racing. He had great influence with important racing figures in the East and he set rigid standards for Santa Anita. Racing had an unsavory reputation at the time, and Burke was such a strong presence (as chairman of the Horse Racing Board) that he gave it respectability.

“Bill Shoemaker is another who has instilled confidence in racing, both as a competitor and as a gentleman. Like racing itself, jockeys were thought of as sort of scrubby fellows until Bill came along. He has done a tremendous amount of good for the sport. He has brought it a greater respect.”

An autographed picture of Shoemaker aboard Round Table, winning the 1958 Santa Anita Handicap, occupies a prominent place on the wall of Wilson’s study.

Shoemaker won his first race at Santa Anita Dec. 26, 1949, and he’s still going strong.

“Frank Kilroe is the fourth. Like Burke, he is a superior official whose dignity and brilliant mind have kept Santa Anita in the forefront of American racing.”

Kilroe is senior vice president of racing and was the racing secretary and handicapper during the later years of Wilson’s tenure.

“Four handicaps stand out in my mind from all the others, and all for different reasons.

“First, of course, is the first Santa Anita Handicap. It was the most unique, with its great roll call of famous horses, and the excitement of its finish, with Azucar coming from far back, set the standard for future races. It put Santa Anita on the racing map.

“The most exciting, from a purely racing standpoint, was in 1950 when Noor and Citation put on a race (the San Juan Capistrano Handicap) like I’ve never seen since. It was as if the two of them had chose each other and there were no other horses in the race. They went at each other head and head for the entire straightaway.”

Noor, an Irish-bred who had won the Santa Anita Handicap by 1 1/2 lengths while carrying only 110 pounds to 132 for the 5-year-old Citation, won the San Juan Capistrano in a finish so close that Hernandez called Citation the winner. The photo finish picture gave Noor the edge by inches.

“The 1946 race is one I’ll never forget, although it wasn’t because of the race itself that I remember it. Ethel Hill had War Knight in the race, and when he won it was apparently a modest surprise to her although the horse went off at 7-1. She was sitting in her box and her first thought was to get to the winner’s circle as fast as possible. She fought her way through the crowd, but when she arrived at the winner’s circle, she was on the wrong side of the fence. She had some spectators lift her over the five-foot fence to the startled officials, who lifted her down on the other side. She made it, but it was a sight I’ll never forget.

“The most sentimental race was the 1940 handicap when Seabiscuit finally won. Seabiscuit had finished second in 1937 (to Rosemont by a nose) and 1938 (to Stagehand by a head while carrying 130 pounds to 100 for the 3-year-old Stagehand) and was injured in 1939 and missed the race.

“Kayak (Seabiscuit’s stablemate) had won that year for Charles Howard, and Howard had them both entered in ’40. Howard declared for Seabiscuit and everyone felt it would be a tragedy if Kayak beat Seabiscuit, but he didn’t. It was the most emotional race of all the meetings.”

Santa Anita and Olympic memorabilia fill the den of Wilson’s tower apartment, but even they are overshadowed by those from USC.

The Gwynn Wilson Student Union is the university’s way of saying thank you to a man who has devoted his life to the Trojans. A large picture of the building hangs on one wall.

“I’ve had a continuous association with USC for 70 years,” Wilson said proudly. “I enrolled as a freshman in 1916 and I’ve been either a student, employee or member of the board every year since. I’m still on the board of trustees, a lifetime member.”

He was student body president and captain of the track team in 1920. Charley Paddock, who won the Olympic Games 100 meters that year in Antwerp, Belgium, was Wilson’s roommate.

“I tried to make the Olympic team, too, but I didn’t finish high enough in the final trials in Boston,” Wilson said. He ran the 440, 880 and ran on the mile relay team at USC. “I finished fifth in the 440 in the trials and hoped they’d take an extra man or two for the relay, but money was short, so I had to stay home.”

USC, the ’32 Olympic Games and Santa Anita--enough accomplishments to fill three lifetimes, but Gwynn Wilson is still looking ahead.

After all, he’s not yet 90.