Horse Racing Fans Got Gift of a New Track

Santa Anita, one of the nation’s premier race tracks, opened for business 65 years ago today.

But it almost didn’t happen that way. Not at Santa Anita, anyway.

The syndicate that built the facility first wanted to put it in San Francisco, but the neighborhoods near the proposed site raised an uproar.

Next, Culver City was designated. That didn’t work out either.

Finally, the syndicate, led by Charles Strub, formed a group called the Los Angeles Turf Club and bought 210 acres of the old Santa Anita Rancho, a piece of land lying between the Lucky Baldwin estate headquarters on the west, Arcadia to the east, Colorado Boulevard to the north and Baldwin Avenue to the south. (Elias Jackson “Lucky” Baldwin, the original land owner, was the first to race horses there.)

Betting on horse races was made illegal in 1910. But when it was again legalized in 1933, Strub, who owned the San Francisco Seals baseball club of the Pacific Coast League, was the first to apply for a license with the new California Horse Racing Board.

In Strub’s group were titans of California industry, including Kenneth Kingsbury, president of Standard Oil of California, and film producer Hal Roach.

Ground was broken at the Santa Anita site in 1933. The original 210 acres subsequently grew to 401. Today, 198 acres alone are for parking.

On Christmas Day 1934, 39,000 showed up to watch High Glee, a three-year old filly owned by C.V. Whitney, win the first feature, the $5,000 Christmas Stakes.

Most of the greats and near-greats of the entertainment world were there, including Will Rogers, who told everyone who would listen to bet the house on Vanita in the third race.

Vanita won, and paid $30.40.

Also on this date: In 1989, former New York Yankee manager Billy Martin died at Johnson City, N.Y., when a pickup truck in which he was a passenger went off the road and down a 300-foot hillside. He was 61.