World of Literature’s Loss Was Gain of Race Courses in Kilroe
As a young man who had studied American literature at Columbia University, Jimmy Kilroe sold short stories to Collier’s magazine, American Magazine and Liberty circa 1936.
But he and his father, a New York physician whose patients had Park Avenue addresses when they weren’t on the French Riviera, came to an early understanding.
“He was getting a bit weary of supporting me as a would-be writer,” Kilroe said.
So Dr. Edward P. Kilroe, who moonlighted as the president of the old Jamaica Race Course in New York, sent his son to the track to take a menial post in the racing office. The boss was John Blanks Campbell, the doyen of racing secretaries who once weighted horses so perfectly that there was a three-way dead heat for the victory in the Carter Handicap.
Under Campbell for five years, Kilroe watched, listened and learned.
He later recalled that one day there was a shortage of horses for a feature race and Campbell gave Francis Dunne, who was about the same as Kilroe in the pecking order, the thankless task of filling out the field.
Dunne called trainer Bill Winfrey at home, and the cook told Dunne that Winfrey was sleeping and there had been explicit orders not to wake him.
“Maybe he’d feel differently if he knew one of his horses was dying,” Dunne said.
Moments later, a crotchety Winfrey picked up the phone.
“What’s this about one of my horses dying?” he said.
“He’s dying to run in tomorrow’s fifth race,” Dunne said.
Kilroe could tell a good story as well as he could write one, and literature’s loss was racing’s immeasurable gain when he returned to the game after combat duty in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. Besides working in New York, he spent summers at the Chicago tracks, the start of a long-running, on-again, off-again friendship with Marje Everett.
By the 1950s, Campbell had died, and Kilroe, who had been splitting his years by working the winters at Santa Anita, soon found himself in charge of racing at major tracks in both California and New York. He was bi-coastal before anybody ever thought of the word.
The new Aqueduct track opened in New York in 1960, but Kilroe had nagging reservations about the future of racing there.
“The six-day racing weeks were getting to be less and less appealing,” he said. “Also, New York was becoming more political all the time, and it wasn’t hard to decide to shift coasts to California.”
Out here, the three Southern California tracks--Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Del Mar--were smart enough to share Kilroe for several years during the 1970s, and their business thrived. On-track crowds of 30,000 were not uncommon.
“No matter where he was, he moved things up,” said Bill Shoemaker, a riding icon who became a trainer as the Kilroe era was ending at Santa Anita. “He was everywhere, to see what was going on. You might just as well find him on the backstretch as you would in the racing office.”
The soft-spoken Kilroe suffered a stroke in 1989, and retired from Santa Anita the following year.
“There is only one Jimmy Kilroe,” Robert Strub, the chairman of Santa Anita, said at the time.
Kilroe, who was 84, suffered other strokes, and he died last Saturday at his home in San Marino. To the end, he was dedicated to racing, fretting about the sport’s manifold problems, watching with worried eyes from a wheelchair at the top of the box-seat section at Santa Anita.
Last June, he invited a small group of friends and fellow horsemen to a hotel in Pasadena, for what would be a final birthday party. Before Kilroe let everyone go home, however, there was a Socratic exercise that which he hoped would produce some cures for racing’s ills.
“We’re in big trouble,” he said. “And if we don’t come up with some answers, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
As far back as early 1973, shortly before Secretariat’s Triple Crown would make him every editor’s cover boy, Kilroe was ahead of his contemporaries as he nervously peered around the corner. He seemed to know that the diluted 1980s and the panicky 1990s were coming.
“There are too many states trying to make an easy buck out of the sport,” Kilroe wrote then. “And too many tracks competing for the same tired animals. . . . [Less racing] would have to be better, and the only losers would be the breeders of the worst horses, whose names, regrettably, are legion.”
Horse Racing Notes
Hollywood Dream, Memories Of Silver and Real Connection have been supplemented, at a cost of $30,000 apiece, to run in the $700,000 Matriarch at Hollywood Park on Dec. 1. The probables for the race include Duda, the Bill Mott-trained horse who has won only one of five starts since winning the Matriarch last year. Memories Of Silver, who finished fifth in the Breeders’ Cup Mile, will be ridden by Robbie Davis. The Matriarch is expected to determine the vote for the Eclipse award for females on grass.
With a grant of $50,000, the Oak Tree Racing Assn. is establishing a fund to benefit racetrackers with emotional problems. The fund will be named after Robert A. Jack, who reportedly committed suicide in August. Jack was equine medical director for the California Horse Racing Board.
Letthebighossroll, who finished next to last in the California Cup Sprint, will try to rebound Sunday in the $100,000 On Trust Handicap for California-breds. The 8-year-old gelding is the high weight at 121 pounds, five more than assigned Testimony, who won the Cal Cup race for his third in succession. . . . Odyle, winner of the San Felipe Stakes and the Volante Handicap, suffered a tendon injury during a Wednesday gallop and has been retired.