Flip Side of Big-Time Tracks Still Fairly Obvious Up North

Registered Arabian mare, 13 1/2 years. Daughter approximately 6 1/2 years. $800 each. Both approximately 14 hands. Daughter allergic and I don’t have enough time.

--Classified ad in Ferndale newspaper

Without leaving California, this is about as far from Del Mar as you can get. Geographically--750 miles north of San Diego, about 250 miles from San Francisco and almost to the Oregon border--and in all other ways.

A typical racing card for the 100th Humboldt County Fair might include an Arabian claiming race, a maiden race for Appaloosas, a quarter horse race, a couple of thoroughbred races, and--oh, yes--a $1,500 mule race at 220 yards.

The races are run in this Victorian village of 1,450, on a half-mile track with a 530-foot stretch, less than a furlong from the Giant Dragon, one of the fair’s most popular rides, and the dairy heifer auction, the chicken-calling contest, the junior hand-milking competition and the kiss-a-cow contest. Norman Rockwell could have done an entire portfolio here.

The centennial Humboldt fair’s 10-day run ended Sunday with Elkhart, a 6-year-old gelding who has kicked around the claiming ranks in Arizona and on the California fair circuit, winning the $10,000 Marathon Handicap, the richest race of the season. The marathon is 1 5/8 miles, which means the horses pass in front of the small grandstand four times. The toughest thing the jockeys have to do is remember when they’re running down the stretch for the last time.

Afterward, jockey Danny Boag, who won six races in the closing two days, and trainer Dennis Hopkins were awarded silver belt buckles that go to the meet’s leading horsemen, and Stuart Titus, the fair’s general manager, felt as tall as one of the classic giant Redwoods just south of here.

“We’re puffing our chests,” said the 42-year-old Titus, who spent $800 on a campaign a couple of years ago to beat out his second cousin as a write-in candidate for mayor of Ferndale. “Our attendance [40,216 for the season] was up 22% over last year, while the rest of the fairs are down about 9%. Our handle was $2.7 million, second highest in the history of the fair. I think we’ll have bragging rights for a year on the fair circuit.”

Two years ago, the Humboldt fair was struggling for survival, and reaching year No. 100 was iffy. There was competition from the San Mateo fair, near San Francisco, and Ferndale was temporarily prevented from sending its television signal to Del Mar for betting. The Ferndale handle dropped 50% and Titus, already worried, also wondered how his fair was going to afford more than $100,000 for the track’s new aluminum inner rail that the California Horse Racing Board required.

Given a delay by the board, this year the fair, for the first time in more than a decade, charged $2 admission to the races. “We started educating people to this a year in advance,” Titus said. “It was this rail thing that forced us to do it. The people understood. They still came out in big numbers.”

Titus was the quarterback on a Ferndale Union High School football team that went undefeated. The school is adjacent to the fairgrounds, and in the racing infield are two of its baseball diamonds, a running track and a lone, rusting goal post, a vestige of the days the football team practiced there too.

“It’s a toss-up whether Ferndale or Pleasanton is my favorite fair,” said Everett Nevin, the 90-year-old director of racing at Ferndale. “Racing needs the fairs. They’re a way to introduce new patrons. You hope the young people interested in the chickens and the jams and the jellies might wander over to the races, like them and then come back.”

Nevin, whose son, Dennis, is now working as a steward at Del Mar, was showing pigs as a 4-H member at Pleasanton in 1914. Everett Nevin, the first ticket manager the Oakland Raiders ever had, and Gunnar Froines were the linchpins of continuity at Ferndale, but Froines, after calling the races here for 42 years, suffered a stroke and missed this season. They had a day for him during the meet and he accepted the honors in a wheelchair, in what was a touching presentation.

“Gunnar once told me that a horse named The Whale won a race a day for six straight days at Ferndale,” Ellis Davis said. “And if Gunnar said it, I know it happened.”

Davis has been charting the races here for the Daily Racing Form for 14 years. His first year at Ferndale, the finish line was a piece of tape connected to a pair of tetherball poles. In a frightening display, Davis sits at the edge of the grandstand roof, the equivalent of four stories from the ground, dangling his feet and watching through binoculars as he calls the positions of the horses to a chart-taker who stands a safe distance behind him. Fortunately for Davis the wind is never a factor.

The only other people on that roof while the races are being run are Dick Riley, Froines’ replacement as track announcer, who works out of an enclosure not much bigger than a phone booth, and a TV cameraman.

“We used to work up there,” said Tom Ward, one of the Ferndale stewards. “But after the bad earthquake [1989], they decided that the roof might not be capable of carrying the weight of the stewards’ stand.”

The horse that might have somewhat reminded old-timers of The Whale this season was Endless Career, an 8-year-old thoroughbred gelding who won twice in four days before finishing off the board on the final day of the fair.

“We were starting to call his trainer, Gene Tagliaferri, ‘D. Wayne,’ ” Ellis Davis said, referring to D. Wayne Lukas, the perennial national leader in purse money.

Trainer Dennis Hopkins won with both thoroughbreds and a mule, Wind Song, a 13-year-old molly--a female mule--who won for the 40th time in the 114th race of her career. Her total purses: Less than $25,000.

That’s what is known as grinding it out, but mule trainers don’t expect much more than a few hee-haws. Mules are renowned for dropping their jockeys just past the finish line.

Jerry Jackson, who couldn’t beat Wind Song with a couple of his mollies, was still enjoying the weekend, having recently beaten Hopkins’ heavily favored Alydar’s Moonfire with his mule Fancy at the Bay Meadows Fair in San Mateo. Alydar’s Moonfire is believed to be out of a mare sired by the famed thoroughbred, Alydar, but officially her breeding, on both the sire’s and dam’s side, is listed as “unknown.”

Before Fancy’s upset, Alydar’s Moonfire had been beaten only twice.

“He’s the Cigar of mule racing,” Jackson said.

After Ferndale closed, jockey Steve Valdez packed his tack and headed for the fairgrounds in Salem, Ore. Riding the bullrings is what is left for the 40-year-old Valdez, who was a teenager in 1973 when he won an Eclipse award as the country’s outstanding apprentice.

He was riding winners of important stakes at Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Del Mar then, but in a few years, beset by a drinking problem, he was seemingly finished as a jockey and worked as an assistant on the starting-gate crew at Los Alamitos and other tracks.

By 1993, Valdez weighed 205 pounds. He went on a 600-calorie-a-day diet and got down to 118 pounds. He was the leading Ferndale jockey in 1994 and last year rode more Appaloosas to victory than any other rider in the country.

“Hindsight is 20-20,” Valdez said, sitting on a cot in the rustic, wooden-boarded jockeys’ quarters behind the Ferndale paddock. “I would have done a lot of things different if I could do them over again.”

For Tom Ward, who works as a steward on the major Southern California circuit the rest of the year, it is Ferndale’s sameness that equates to charm. There aren’t many turn-of-the-century venues around anymore.

“I’ve been coming up here since the ‘70s,” Ward said. “The place hasn’t changed a bit. And that’s just the way I like it.”