view raw text
KEENELAND PREPARING TO OPEN KENTUCKY SEASON y Lexingtons Non-Profit Track Mecca of Winter-Campaigned Stables Hal Price Headley, President of Track, One of Busiest Men in Blue Grass Region Totalisator and Stall Gate to Be Used No Camera LEXINGTON, Ky., April 5. The sun is shining bright in the Blue Grass region of Kentucky these days and the thoroughbreds are on their toes. Only a week remains before the opening of Keeneland Park, which will usher in the Kentucky racing season. It is not like it was many years ago when all of the horses came up from the Southland to battle against the best the colonels and the "hardboots" had put away for the winter and prepped for the spring season, but the horses, the ladies and the dandies, are getting ready for Keeneland. It is a non-profit track and that is the way it was during the ante bellum days when they raced up and down Water Street for side bets and purses dangling from the wire. The rails are lined with lovers of the thoroughbred horse each morning, and with clear skies driving away the light frost and the "flu," the colony is growing by leaps and bounds. Several hundred were out to the beautiful course, a plant nearly all "race track owners would like to have and few build. It is just far enough away from Lexington to get away from the hustle and hustle of the busy Blue Grass metropolis, but close enough to require only a few minutes of motoring on a new four-lane highway. The trip out takes one past several beautiful thoroughbred nurseries, chief of which is Warren Wrights Calumet Farm, and when one reaches the track he is full of the atmosphere. Kentucky paint, better known as whitewash, is being applied to farm fences, and by the opening of the meeting Thursday, April 13, there will be the same background that made the picture, Kentucky, one of the beauty. JUVENILES INTERESTING. Although the talk centers around the Blue Grass Stakes, a preparatory trial over nine furlongs for the Kentucky Derby, the two-year-olds come in for much comment. These Kentuckians like fast horses and all love nothing better than to have the champion two-year-old. It shows one to be the past master at breeding and prepping a young horse for a race. This morning two youngsters broke from the starting machine like a team and they ran three-eighths over the slow and fast drying out track in :37. "It was a good trial," said one bystander, and then four other railbirds said: "Wait until Hal Price, Headley breaks those Pharamond II. colts." Hal Price Headley is president of Keeneland, runs a big breeding establishment, two tobacco warehouses and then finds time to train enough horses each year to have hi3 stable earn around 00,000. Headley jumps from his stable to his office at the track, goes over stall applications with W. T. Bishop, his superintendent, spends a few minutes with Joe Wolkin, who has charge of the catering, and then hurries off home to check up on a brood mare ready to foal, .or look over a tobacco bed that has been burned and now ready for planting. Headley is back to the race track in the afternoon, inspects his horses and those trained by his nephew, Duval Headley, and Continued on twenty-third page. KEENELAND PREPARING TO OPEN KENTUCKY SEASON Continued from first page. then takes up where he has left off on other details. If the meeting is not the best since the track was built four years ago, everyone in Lexington will be surprised. They said when the plant opened that the Lexington ladies and dandies would not shell out for an admittance ticket. In the past everyone who ever owned a brood mare expected a badge. Most of the purses will carry a value of 00 or more this year, and besides the Blue Grass Stakes, the Phoenix and the Ben Ali Handicaps and the LaFayette Stakes will be renewed. Totalisator and the stall gate again will be used, but there will be no public address system or camera to judge the finish. There are a lot of close finishes each meeting; one came in the Breeders Futurity last fall when Johnstown lasted to beat Allegro, but the public address and the camera have never been used in Lexington, and if president Headley has his way, there will be no place for them. Connie Smythes Sir Marlboro, which was defeated in the Louisiana Derby, was vanned to Keeneland from 1 the trotting track. Smythe has eight other horses quartered at the trotting track.
