LOS ALAMITOS : Track Celebrates 40th Anniversary

With little fanfare, Los Alamitos will celebrate its 40th anniversary as a parimutuel race track today.

The track has seen better days in past years, but has also seen worse seasons than 1991. Los Alamitos, along with the rest of horse racing, is evolving from mainly a live sport into more of a satellite sport.

The track opened in 1951 when landowner Frank Vessels Sr. received permission from the California Horse Racing Board to hold an 11-day quarter horse meeting on his ranch. It rained 10 of the 11 days, but that didn’t stop the racing. Crowds averaged 3,076 and the betting handle averaged $144,371 daily during the brief meeting. Now, there are 10 betting programs a week--five intertrack wagering thoroughbred cards in the daytime and five quarter horse night sessions.

Present in 1951, as he still is several days a week, was then 29-year-old Daniel Castronova, now secretary director of the Horsemen’s Quarter Horse Racing Assn., which conducts the quarter horse meetings at Los Alamitos. Castronova, a general surgeon with a private practice in Sherman Oaks, also raced a small stable of horses in the 1950s, when the track was located several hundred yards southwest of its current site.

“We used to come out every day, and I was out quite often,” Castronova said. “Back then, the track faced the sun on the other side of the railroad tracks. It was more of a hometown crowd at that time. You knew everybody and knew all the horses.

In the ‘50s, quarter horse racing was in its infancy and the track on the Vessels ranch was the sport’s most prominent facility. It still is. Only Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico is mentioned in the same breath by those in quarter horse racing. Almost all of the leading quarter horses of the ‘50s raced at Los Alamitos, which at the time was surrounded by open fields. Today, the cities of Cypress and Los Alamitos, with their office parks and housing developments, surround the track.

The grandstand, which was moved to its current site in time for the 1954 meeting, now serves as the clubhouse. The current grandstand was built in 1960 and was modeled after Aqueduct in New York.

Los Alamitos grew each year, holding its first night program in 1968 and its first harness program in 1972. Now, harness and quarter horse racing split the racing calendar and the track’s ownership, with Lloyd Arnold and Edward Allred heading the respective breeds. The Orange County Fair runs a mixed meeting of quarter horses and thoroughbreds for a three-week stretch each August.

The track, however, stayed in the Vessels family until 1984, when Hollywood Park took over for five years. Attendance, handle and the track’s appearance then went downhill. Los Alamitos, which had average crowds in excess of 9,000 in the 1970s, averaged only 4,483 in 1987.

“I don’t think we realized how close we came to being extinct,” said Brad McKinzie, general manager of the HQHRA. “If we’d been forced to labor under (former Hollywood Park chief executive officer) Marje Everett any longer, we wouldn’t be here.”

Hollywood Park even shifted quarter horse meetings from Los Alamitos to Inglewood in 1986 and ‘87, and HQHRA will run a quarter horse meeting there next summer. Hollywood is now under the direction of R.D. Hubbard, who is also majority owner of Ruidoso Downs.

In the fall of 1989, a consortium of harness horsemen, led by Arnold and Chris Bardis, bought the track from Hollywood Park for $71 million. Six months later, they sold 50% to Edward Allred. Together, the groups, which were once bitter adversaries, have shared the track, using it as the base for both quarter horse and harness racing in California.

Allred, who first visited the track in 1959 and won his first race in 1961, thinks that intertrack wagering within the Southland, which began in earnest last September, is the key to the track’s viability.

“I have to like our chances,” Allred said. “We can turn this place around. I think the income from the day (signal) will save this place.”

In the last two years, Arnold and Allred have begun a series of capital improvements, including renovation of much of the track’s interior. Although its attendance and handle figures aren’t what they used to be, much of that lost revenue is regained through intertrack wagering. For harness and quarter horse racing, it may have come just in time.

Corona Chick, the latest entrant in the parade of champions at Los Alamitos, set another stakes record last Saturday night with a one-length victory in the $282,944 Dash for Cash Futurity. It was the third stakes record and eighth consecutive victory for the 2-year-old filly who, in the last few months, has set a standard against which future 2-year-olds will be measured.

Owned by Robert Etchandy of Anaheim Hills, Corona Chick is the only horse in track history to win the Dash For Cash Futurity, the Kindergarten Futurity and the Ed Burke Futurity. According to trainer Frank Monteleone’s schedule, Corona Chick will be off for the rest of the year, but will return on Jan. 9 in the La Primera Del Ano Derby trials for 3-year-old fillies. The finals for that race will be held on Jan. 18, closing night of the quarter horse meeting.

Corona Chick finishes the year with 10 victories in 12 starts, a lot of races for a 2-year-old quarter horse. Her victory last Saturday, when she was timed in 19.53 seconds for 400 yards, only solidified her position as the nation’s top 2-year-old of the year. Jockey Kip Didericksen thinks she deserves consideration as world champion, an honor usually reserved for older horses.

“Not many can win eight in a row against that kind of stock,” said Didericksen, who rode the 1990 world champion, Dash For Speed, at Los Alamitos. “I think (this victory) puts a lot of pressure on the people who pick the world champion. By winning this race, it puts it up in the air. They don’t like giving world champion to 2-year-olds, but this year, they may not have any choice.”

The 4-year-old Apprehend, who will race in the Champion of Champions on Dec. 21, is the current favorite to be named world champion.

Kid O Dash’s upset victory in last Friday’s $137,200 Southern California Derby came against archrival Takin On The Cash, whom Kid O Dash has chased since they were 2-year-olds at Bay Meadows in 1990. It was Kid O Dash’s first stakes victory and his first victory of any kind since July 18, 1990, at Los Alamitos.

This year, the 3-year-old gelding, owned by Joe Muniz and trained by Connie Hall, was 0 for 12 going into the Southern California Derby but had three seconds and four thirds.

It was a big weekend for Muniz, who also owns Chicks Beduino, the sire of Corona Chick. “It was a lovely weekend, a great Thanksgiving,” said Muniz, of Costa Mesa. “We always felt (Kid O Dash) would do better as he gets older. He’s always liked 440 and has a nice kick on the end.”

Muniz said Kid O Dash will probably skip this Saturday’s Champion of Champions trials, to which he has an invitation, and point for the Dash For Cash Derby trials on Dec. 13.