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! AURORAS OPENING FEATURE Fox Valley Inaugural Handicap to Be Run Fourteenth Time on May 1. Has ,500 Added This Year and Should Bring Together Fast Band of Sprinters. The race which has been opening the Illinois season since 1923 the Fox Valley Inaugural Handicap, at six furlongs will have its fourteenth running on May 1 as the feature of the eight-race program, which opens Auroras nineteen-day spring meeting. The fixture will this year be for a ,500 purse, according to the condition book for the first half of the meeting issued yesterday by racing secretary Dick Leigh. Because the class of thoroughbreds which will be campaigned at Aurora this season is somewhat higher than in other years, more purses for racers of the better sort will be offered than ever before. Sprinters get their chance at a ,500 purse in the Inaugural; on May 2 the middle distance performers come together in the ,500 Aurora Handicap, at a mile and seventy yards; in the second week will be offered the ,500 Elgin Handicap, at a mile and a sixteenth. The climax of the meeting will come, of course, in the fourth running of the Illinois Derby, at a mile and a furlong, on May 22. This year the purse for this increasingly important three-year-old special has been increased to 2,000 in added money to make it one of the "big five" of Chicago stake races. Large stables will be the rule at the Fox Valley course this spring, to judge from the stall allotments that have been made, and from the strings of thoroughbreds that have already arrived from the southern tracks. One of the. largest will be that of Mrs. A. M. Creech, who is bringing nineteen. Among them are such good ones as Sound Advice, Hasty Glance, Technique and the Illinois- Derby candidate, Reaping. William OToole, Chicago owner, has fifteen, including Mr. James and Dusky Devil; his trainer, Otto Bagley, will race in his own silks the good four-year-old sprinter, Transmutable. Transmutable shares with Mrs. J. H. Whitneys Crowning Glory the Chicago record of 1:04 for five and one-half furlongs; he set it at Aurora last spring, and Bagley immediately acquired him for a reported 0,000. E. K. Bryson will race twenty at Aurora. Mark Cox, Wyoming rancher-, is likewise shipping twenty. Alderman J. J. Coughlin will campaign ten. The Aurora division of A. G. Tarns large stable now stands at eleven head, including Swiftsport, Back Log, Blue Day and Epernay, but he expects to increase it before the meeting opens. Smaller strings are those of J. H. Man-heimer, John Oros, the Three Ds Stock Farm, W. C. Reichert, H. O. Simmons, Dick Watts, Al Gaal, W. C. Stroube and the Moorland Stable. The last named has an Illinois Derby candidate in Sun Tryst.
