HIS PLACE TO SHINE

If you’ve been to Santa Anita racetrack but never met Eddie Logan, it’s your loss.

Today, Logan will turn 96, and he’ll celebrate his birthday the way he lives every other day, with style, class and dignity, a heavy dose of common sense and some funny lines.

“They call me the foot man,” said Logan, who has run a shoeshine stand and sold Racing Forms and programs at Santa Anita since the track opened on Christmas Day 1934. “Give me leather and I get together.”

Logan is about 5 feet 8 but seems shorter because he’s so often crouched over a pair of shoes worn by someone occupying a chair on Logan’s prized red and gold-trimmed stand.

“He’s just a wonderful, wonderful man,” said Jack Disney, a former sportswriter and current horse-racing publicist. “They don’t come like him anymore.”

Logan has shined the shoes of all the great jockeys and trainers over the years, from George Wolff to Johnny Longden to Eddie Arcaro to Bill Shoemaker, from Farrell Jones to Charlie Whittingham. “I’ve been getting my shoes shined by Eddie, 34 or 35 years or so,” said Hall of Fame trainer Richard Mandella. “When I started coming around, he was already a legend. I had to stand in line behind Whittingham and Shoemaker and [Walter] Guerra and them.”

Logan, who loves to tell people that he was born in Arkansas on “May 2, 1910, at 4 o’clock in the morning,” is much more than a shoeshine expert. As a young man, he says, he played outfield, shortstop and catcher in the Negro leagues.

“I played with the Homestead Grays and the Kansas City Monarchs, and caught for Satchel Paige when he was in his prime,” Logan said. “I played exhibitions with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig all around the country. It was Gehrig who told me not to try and pull that outside pitch but to slap it the other way. He helped raise my batting average 20 points.”

Before Logan began working at Santa Anita, he had worked in a shoe factory and for a trucking company.

His life changed when he met Dr. Charles Strub, founder of Santa Anita, in 1933.

“When Doc Strub opened the place in ‘34, he asked me to come work and I’ve been here ever since,” Logan said.

Logan’s wife, Marie, drives him to and from work and makes sure he takes his blood-pressure medicine.

“Eddie is just an amazing man,” said Marie, Logan’s third wife. “He still does all the yardwork and helps out around the house.... His doctor told him recently that Eddie was healthier than he is.”

Logan is a man of unique sayings, including:

* “I don’t follow no empty wagon.”

* “Once a man, twice a child, and I’m in that neighborhood myself.”

* “You’re never too old to learn, and if you keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, maybe you’ll learn something.”

* “It’s better to love than it is to hate because the man you hate today may end up being your best friend.”

* “I don’t use polish on shoes. Never have. I don’t spit on no man’s foot.”

Logan, who uses wax instead of shoe polish, stopped smoking cigarettes about a decade ago. He puffs on a pipe daily but says he doesn’t inhale. “I’m listening to the doctors,” he says, “but you’re going to die someday from something.”

Logan also never drinks fluids when he eats and tries to get in a good shadow-boxing workout every morning.

Lately, however, he’s been slowed by nagging problems.

“My back acts up on me from time to time, and my left leg don’t help out the right leg like I want, but I’m doing great,” he says.

During race meetings, Logan gets to the track before 8 a.m. and works until the last race is over in the early evening. Santa Anita recently completed its winter-spring meet and is dark until the fall, but Logan will work once a week during the simulcast season.

“I’m just an old-timer, hanging in there,” he says.

Logan’s mother died when he was 19 but his father lived to 79. He’s the only surviving sibling of five, and he and Marie have 13 grandchildren, with a 14th due any day.

But his family grows to thousands when he adds the people he has met at Santa Anita over the last 71-plus years.

“When you’ve been here as long as I have, you get to meet a lot of ones,” he says. “A lot of them are gone, but I’m still here.... They hired me to take care of something, and that’s what I do.”

Regulars who have visited Logan’s stand outside Santa Anita’s executive offices know that there are several unwritten rules when visiting his stand:

Don’t expect polish on your leather, don’t expect Logan to break $100 bills and don’t look for him to give you tips on horses.

He uses the honor system at his newsstand. Customers pick up their Forms and other papers and make their own change out of a drawer.

On April 20, Logan was honored at a pre-birthday celebration at Santa Anita. Logan wanted to make sure everyone knew that it wasn’t a retirement party.

“I ain’t what I used to be,” he said with a laugh. “But I like people and I do my job. Some people appreciate it, and some people don’t. Those that don’t, they’re excused.”