A Day at the Family Fun Park

Don’t get them wrong. They are not trying to lure little kids into horse race betting. They are not trying to create another Sid the Squid or a Sideways Sidney. They are simply attempting to educate children on the sport of horse racing. And then if the darlings decide at an adult age to plunk down cash on a pony’s nose, it’s a free country.

I am speaking today of the relatively new family-friendly image of Santa Anita Race Track, which is opening its heart and its $2 windows to Southern California’s children. Well, not its $2 windows yet, but someday when they’re grown-ups. That’s the point. The track is betting on the future.

The effort came to my attention through an invitation to attend a family day at Santa Anita, a park that every year attracts about 2 million adults. I said to myself, a family day? What’s going on here? Little children do not belong running and squealing at a place where serious betting is in progress. It is an offense against God and Damon Runyon.

Not that I am an aficionado of betting on the bangtails, but I have known people who were. One of them was the aforementioned Sideways Sidney, so named because he stood sideways to the person to whom he was speaking, outlining his ample, but tidy, pot belly.

Sideways used to hang out at a downtown bar called the Redwood and make mysterious telephone calls by the dozen during an average happy hour. I lured him into taking us to Santa Anita once in the pre-family fun days to display his betting expertise.

Sideways studied the Racing Form, closed his eyes, sought divine guidance, bet his money and lost. My wife bet the numbers of our children’s birthdays and won. Sideways never went to the track with us again.

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Surprised by the effort of Santa Anita to go family-friendly, I was moved to discuss the sacrilege one day with its publicist, Stuart A. Zanville.

Here is a guy who is as smooth and sweet as a baby’s kiss, and when he tells you the track is luring families to its fold not for the money but for the pleasure and welfare of American children, you believe him at first.

He knows families, this dude, having worked at Knott’s Berry Farm and Universal Studies, two places that are filthy with families, you should pardon the expression.

Zanville is a trim, slightly balding man who seems never to stop smiling (one pictures him asleep, eyes tightly closed, a grin on his face). I usually do not trust people who smile, but I will make an exception in his case.

In a voice that can calm sailors and grow flowers, he talks about the new play yard in the center of the track, pony rides where kids can have their pictures taken in racing silks, educational tours, a museum, a picnic area and other facilities intended to attract whole families.

Then as we get serious about it Zanville adds that, well, yes, the older bettors are dying off and maybe it is time to lure new people to the track. He never uses the term “gamble.” He says connect them to the sport. If they happen to like watching animals run and consider it fun to sweeten their joy by betting, at least they will have some knowledge of the game.

As Sideways Sidney used to say, standing sideways to me, “Prostitution and horse race betting is no place for amateurs.”

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I was in on the start of the movement in Vegas they called the Burger King Revolution in which families were discovered as a source of income and now every new hotel has a whole floor of games for kids.

Mama and Daddy can dump their little loved ones into certain calamitous electronic rooms and spend the rest of their lives playing the slots while the kids grow up, leave home, marry, have children of their own, and then dump their kids in the game rooms and join their aging parents at the slots.

If Vegas can do it, why not Santa Anita?

Stuart Zanville convinced me that they are not trying to create people like the late Sid the Squid. Sid was such an addict of racing that when he died, they sprinkled his grave with torn Racing Forms and played not “Amazing Grace” at his burial rites but tapes of races run at Santa Anita.

“A lot of people just come to the track to watch the horses and nothing else,” Zanville said in a tone that seemed to embrace me. He smiled warmly. “Santa Anita welcomes them, too.”

What a nice guy.

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Al Martinez’s column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com