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VETERAN ANDY PLATT Cleveland Old Timers Idea of the Turf Its Figures and Speculation When Andy Platt after wintering at his home in Cleveland where his son is a phy ¬ sician and surgeon put in his appearance at Baltimore for the opening of the racing sea ¬ son at Bowie The Sun announced the ar ¬ rival of this veteran and incidentally got from him some good advice as follows iAndy Platt wished hed see seventytwo more racing years which was a large fat wish considering he has seen seventytwo already You may not know Andy Platt if you are a deacon you dont but if you know a fetlock from a carburetor you prob ¬ ably do doAndy Andy was at the Emerson spraying his asthma with an atomizer giving Father Time a sixfurlong handicap and leaving him at the post and talking of Longfellow and the first race he ever saw at Pimlico PimlicoHe He knew Longfellow well did Andy You may talk of your Hiawatha and your Childrens Hour and your Wreck of the Hesperus but did it ever occur to you to look up the beloved poet in the racing rec ¬ ords No Well he won the Long Branch Cup in 1872 beat the great Harry Bassett by a whole beard beg pardon neck You see there were two of them One could take his pen in hand and race the muses to a fareyouwell but the other could take the bit in his teeth and in the first quarter leave the other horses behind like a bunch of weary flies trying to crawl out of flypaper flypaperFor For fiftynine years Andy Platt has fol ¬ lowed racing Today at Bowie he is Amer ¬ icas oldest racing fan and hell back it up But listen to him as he grabs Joy by the neck and chokes the life put of it Its an unbeatable game You cant beat it The man who tries to is a fool You dont see the big men in racing gambling on it Ill bet my atomizer and thats a big bet that the biggest men in the game dont place a ten dollar note on a race the year round But its a clean game Its as clean as banking And the men who are running it are the biggest in the country People forget that when they pan it Yes Ill have a little bet down tomorrow Squishsquish Thats the atomizer And you may tell em Im the only man in the world who ever saw three Derbys in one year That was in 1831 The English Derby at Epsom Downs the American Derby iu Chicago and the Melbourne Derby in Aus ¬ tralia
