A Life at the Races : Strub Helped Santa Anita Reach Prominence, but Now He Suffers From Lou Gehrig’s Disease

The name of Strub is all over February’s racing calendar. Bob Strub, the chairman and chief executive officer of Santa Anita, will receive an Eclipse Award on Friday night in Century City for his service to racing, and a day later the track will run the $500,000 Charles H. Strub Stakes, which is named after his father, the visionary San Francisco dentist who opened the place with an $800 race on Christmas Day in 1934.

Despite the Eclipse tribute and race the same weekend, nothing is right about the timing of these events. Bob Strub, 75, is in a wheelchair, having learned last summer that he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, an incurable affliction that wrecks the muscle-controlling nerves in the brain and spinal cord.

Bob and Betty Strub, his wife of almost 50 years, sat in their San Marino home a few days ago, discussing the past, present and future of a vastly successful racetrack that has had their family imprint for six decades. They are stiff-upper-lip cheerful. Slow of speech, Bob Strub is still sharp of mind. A couple of times, he corrected his wife and a reporter when they were thinking one thing and saying another.

In June, before he was found to have the disease, Bob Strub had undergone quadruple bypass surgery. Follow-up treatment for that operation led to the confirmation of Gehrig’s disease by August.

“Before that,” Strub said, “I thought I had a problem that might be cleared up with a back operation.”

Last month, in his wheelchair, Strub had a front-row seat at a two-day racing conference at a Pasadena hotel about nonracing forms of gambling. But that was not close enough for the racing executive long known to be part of the fray rather than a mere spectator.

“That’s right,” said Alan Balch, who has worked in marketing capacities at Santa Anita for most of the last 20 years. “I had lunch with Bob one of those days, and it was just eating him up that he couldn’t participate.”

In the quiet of San Marino, Strub reflected on how the sport has changed since his father started Santa Anita, and since he became president of the track in 1960, two years after Charles Strub’s death and following a hard-nosed proxy fight.

“There was no (state) lottery,” Strub said. “No Indian gaming. No keno. Now we’re in a position where we’re legislated and licensed by the state at the same time we’re in competition with the state (against the lottery and other games). And all the while, we’re asked to pay the highest parimutuel tax in the country. Sacramento has multibillion-dollar deficits, so it’s not going to change, either. It’s no wonder I prefer what were really the good old days.”

When Strub became president of Santa Anita, the track was averaging 26,000 a day in attendance and $2.1 million in betting. Hollywood Park, averaging 29,000 and $2.2 million, was offering purse money of almost $65,000 a day, more than any track in the country. By 1987, the last year these tracks would operate without off-track betting, Santa Anita’s daily figures--30,000 fans and $6.1 million in handle--had dropped Hollywood Park into a distant second place.

“Bob had been under other people’s thumbs until there was that proxy fight,” said Ray Rogers, a former Santa Anita general manager who has worked alongside Strub in several capacities since 1955. “After he survived that, he really showed people what he could do. He lifted the stature of Santa Anita in a number of ways. The most important thing he did was to redecorate the plant over the next six or eight years. He went about it 200 or 300 feet at a time until it was finished.”

The common perception of Strub is that he has surrounded himself with capable people, then given them lots of slack. “That’s not entirely correct,” Balch said. “When I first joined Santa Anita, it was said that you didn’t sneeze without getting Bob Strub’s permission. He has been an extremely hands-on track operator. I hate to think how many meetings he sat in on, just to discuss the quality of the toilet paper in the rest rooms.

“He hasn’t been a neck-wringer. He’s wanted to be advised of everything that was going on. Once you had his confidence, he’d give you enough rope so that you could hang yourself a hundred times over. When he decided to go ahead with the (1984) Olympic equestrian events at Santa Anita, he turned me completely loose. Contrary to his public reputation of being a conservative, Bob is a risk-taker. And the one thing he’ll always ask you when a decision needs to be made is: ‘What should we be doing as far as the best interests of the company are concerned?’ ”

Tall, thin and extremely polite, Strub’s Walter Mitty-like ways have inspired a raft of anecdotes. Strub has gone through life, for example, sticking out his hand and saying, “Hi, I’m Bob Strub from Santa Anita” even when it might not be necessary. Years ago, Joe Harper, who headed the Oak Tree Racing Assn. at Santa Anita before he became general manager at Del Mar, had left a meeting at Strub’s New York hotel suite only to discover on the street that he had left his raincoat.

Harper took the elevator back up to Strub’s floor and rang the buzzer.

Opening the door, Strub saw Harper and instinctively said: “Hi, I’m Bob Strub from Santa Anita.”

Harper stuck out his hand and said to his old friend: “Hi, I’m Joe Harper from Del Mar, and I’ve forgotten my raincoat.”

At a dinner much like the Eclipse Awards affair Friday, Strub ran into the jockey, Cash Asmussen, and mistook him for Steve Cauthen, another American rider who had gone to Europe.

“Hi, Steve,” Strub said.

“I’m not Steve, I’m Cash Asmussen,” Asmussen said.

“No you’re not,” Strub said, and moved on to another group of people.

More than 50 years ago, Bob Strub, home from Stanford, and the former Betty Miller met at what was then called a coming-out party, in honor of one of Miller’s cousins.

“We talked, and when Bob asked if he could call me, I told him it would be all right,” Betty Strub said.

Three years later, Strub made that call. He asked if she wanted to go with him to a volleyball game. When Strub knocked at her door, Betty Miller opened the panel to see who was there.

“I thought you were a blonde,” was the first thing Strub said.

They married about eight months later and had seven children, who have accounted for nine grandchildren. The two sons, John and Robert, who are in their 30s, are members of the board but have never been active at the track beyond that.

“This has always been a public company,” Bob Strub said, “and I’ve never felt that it was proper for the family to get involved in the operation.”

Strub, whose salary reportedly is $400,000 a year, has sold much of his stock in recent years. He said that the Strub family still owns about 600,000 shares, which would give them about 5% of the company. Strub said that is more stock than any individual shareholder owns.

When Charles Strub and his partners began Santa Anita, the stock was not easy to sell. Hal Roach bought in, but another movie producer said to Strub: “Hell, Charlie, after 90 days I’ll be able to buy you out for 10 cents on the dollar, so why should I put in any money now?”

On opening day in 1934, Bob Strub, who was 16, joined his family in Box No. 216 at his father’s new track. In the crowd were Al Jolson, Clark Gable and Will Rogers. Grantland Rice, there to write about it, said: “The fans were packed in tighter than a tackle jammed against a guard.”

The crowd dropped from 30,000 to 4,000 for the second day of racing. “My dad was concerned,” Strub said. “It was a shaky feeling. He was not panicky, but he was deeply concerned.”

At 19, Strub began working during Christmas vacations, processing photo identification cards for employees. After an Army hitch during World War II, he joined the track full-time in the winter of 1945-46. He was assistant general manager at the time of his father’s death.

Strub paused to think when asked what he might have done had he not made a career at the track. “I guess I would have tried to be a doctor or an electrical engineer,” he said. “But not a dentist.”

He visits a hospital weekly for tests regarding his condition and physical therapy. Studies show that 90% of those with Gehrig’s disease die within five years of diagnosis.

“I have what is known as an orphans’ disease,” Strub said. “Only about 30,000 people suffer from it, and as a result there is not a big demand for research that might lead to a cure.”

Experimental drugs that have apparently improved the condition of animals haven’t been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “Patients with Gehrig’s disease want to do what AIDS patients have done, lie down in Washington until somebody listens,” Dr. Stanley Appel, head of a research center in Houston, said recently. “This is a lethal disease for which there is no known treatment. Patients are desperate and willing to assume risks.”

Bob Strub is in that category. “People willing to take a chance should be able to get the drugs even if they’re not approved,” Betty Strub said. “People should be able to take the drugs voluntarily if they want.”