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AURORA IMPROVEMENTS Construction Being Rushed on New Barns and Mutuel Plant. Change in Dates Would Affect Three-Year-Old Specials in Chicago Eddy in Chicago. The uncertainty engendered by the effort that is being made to rearrange Chicagos 1936 racing dates into a new schedule, which would cut the Fox Valley Jockey Clubs spring meeting to thirteen days, has resulted in no slackening of preparations which are going forward at the Aurora race course for the opening Friday, May 1. Construction is being rushed both on the new barns and upon the rebuilt mutuel plant, horses are arriving daily and are galloping over the resurfaced track, and officials are continuing their annual campaign to assemble a field of crack three-year-olds for the 2,000 added Illinois Derby, at a mile and a furlong, that is slated to close the meeting on Friday, May 22. The demand that has been made for the curtailing of Auroras spring dates, so that the half mile Sportsmans Park course may add six days to its October meeting, has been something of a puzzle to Auroras management. President Robert S. Eddy arrived in Chicago late yesterday to confer with counsel for the Fox Valley Jockey Club over the matter and will represent the track in i the special meeting which has been called for Monday afternoon by the Illinois Racing Commission. Eddy stopped off at Fairmount last week to inspect the plant there, and expressed his surprise at the unexpected development that has made the reopening of the 1936 date situation a possibility. "Naturally we are prepared to resist any effort to overthrow the dates which the commission assigned Aurora," Eddy stated. "The dates were allotted us at the annual meeting by the commission, we have signified our acceptance of them as required by law, and we have paid the first installment of our license fee to the State of Illinois upon the basis of a nineteen-day meeting. In the expectation of such a meeting we began considerable construction at the track, arranged Continued on eighteenth page. AURORA IMPROVEMENTS Continued from first page. our racing schedule, and raised the added money value of the Illinois Derby to 2,000. It seems neither fair nor logical to attempt to reopen such a matter when we have made heavy commitments in good faith upon the strength of the dates assigned us." The fact that the proposed shift in dates would keep almost every three-year-old stake performer away from Chicago until late July was pointed out by racing secretary Dick Leigh, who has been at Aurora for a week, preparing for the Illinois Derby and handling the assignment of stables to the more than 1,100 horses that are expected for the meeting. Such a move, he declares, will result in a conflict between four important three-year-old specials the Illinois Derby, Preakness, Detroit Derby and Chicago Derby at Hawthorne. "The Illinois Derby is always run on the final day of the Aurora meeting," Leigh explained. "If six days were taken from the dates Aurora has been assigned, the Illinois Derby would have to be run the day before the Preakness, and none of the three-year-olds racing in the Maryland stake would have any reason for coming to Chicago in May. On top of that the moving up of the Hawthorne opening by a week would put the 5,000 Chicago Derby at Hawthorne on the same day as the 5,000 Detroit Derby, and no top three-year-old would have any reason for coming to Chicago until the Arlington Classic in late July. The whole Chicago season would suffer."
