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► ■ Between Races -By OSCAR OTIS Shoemakers Riding Is Highlight Doesnt Care About New Records Agent Selects All of His Mounts HOLLYWOOD PARK, Inglewood, Calif., June 27. — Jockey Willie Shoemaker, who now has well over 200 winners and with the year not half over, tells us he is not interested rS ? in or thinking about "breaking 400" but that R V he will keep on plug- II5and. WKKm ging away, let the win- WtW ~Wf hers add up as they ||*"rt lw*J • come along, and that is 11 IE***; -% that. If he breaks a H| W/m record, fine, if not, so "MUW--what? Of course, along i - Wk in mid-December, if it g$|§ M, , jH looks like he is close to the 400 mark, he might •m take a flier to Florida or New Orleans during that two weeks pre-Christmas siesta-which always prevails in California. Actu-olly, there is steady major track racing scheduled on the Coast until Dec. 12 and racing will not be resumed until the Santa Anita Inaugural on Dec. 26. Shoemakers amazing midseason record has been piled up, it might be added, t* a considerable extent on a five-day week, which makes his feat just that mach more impressive. As against this loss of Monday competition, however, he has not lost days through suspensions for rough riding. His racing board "report card" for 1953 shows but one official action against him, a ?25 fine for "slapping a two-year-old" in a race at Santa Anita last winter. As most people know whips are not permitted on two-year-obis at the Arcadia course, and slapping, i.e., using the hands in the manner of a whip, while forbidden, was a common practice and the rule was one which the stewards were powerless to enforce. Harry Silbert, the veteran agent, handles all Shoemakers engagements, and the boy never knows who he is to ride until Silbert tells him. This arrangement was broken only twice this year, with Shoemaker deciding hed like to pilot Trusting, whose summer campaign has been worse than disappointing, although perhaps through no fault of his own. Silbert has consistently refused to allow Shoemaker to give a stable "first call" for a season, and among those he turned down this year was that of Calumet Farm. "A good free lance has a better chance in California," explains Silbert. "In making engagements for Shoemaker, I use only two guides, the way horses are running and the condition book. I watch every race in the afternoon carefully to see how horses are going, and if you tab them carefully, they will tell yon a lot. If they are running well, and they fit the conditions of the next race, Shoemaker will be glad to ride them. That fitting the conditions is perhaps the most important factor. All horses fit a condition book to be eligible of course, but some fit a race better than others. If I can be said to favor any trainer at the track in the matter of riding, that would be B. H. McDaniel, who has the knack of running his horses exactly where they belong." Silbert is an unusual citizen of the turf in many respects, for he started his turf career more than 20 years ago as an agent, and "has never endeavored to be anything else but an agent. Rather he has treated his job as a profession. A native of Brooklyn, Continued on Page Forty-Threi BETWEEN RACES I By OSCAR OTIS Continued from Page Three Silbert hung around Aqueduct as a youth, and was finally given a job by Al Miller, then trainer for I. J. Collins. Miller handed him a rider, Hank Manifold, and Silbert was "on his way." Through the years, he handled many good riders, among them being Cal Rainey, who is making good today in a rather spectacular way as a steward. But of all the riders Silbert has ever handled, Shoemaker presented him his greatest problem, for the reason that when "Shoe" first came around, he didnt talk. Trainers in the paddock would give their instructions, and had no inkling whether or not Shoemaker ever understood them. He said nothing. But Sil-berts persuasive talking made up for Shoes silence, and after the boy had rid-/ den a couple of days and done very well, indeed, Silbert seized on his liability, his taciturnity, and converted into an asset. "So what if he cant talk," argued Silbert in the horsemens forums around the office of the racing secretary, "he does better than talk, he rides." It wasnt more than a week until he had the trainers agreing with him, and ever since, Shoemaker has never had anything that could conceivably be called a "slump." So far as we know, the phenomenon of somewhat demented citizens "holding up" or attempting to hold up the pari-mutuel cashiers within the race track enclosure has been limited to Southern California, but the TRPB seems to have effectively solved this problem by a hush hush alarm system which paid off last Tuesday when a gent grabbed ,700 from the 00 cashiers window manned by Les Rustad. For Rustad, It was his third hold-up. However, the stick-up man was nabbed within a matter of minutes, and it is thought his prompt arrest will discourage any future such attempts. John Hanson, agent in charge of the TRPB on the West Coast, received his first introduction to a race track while serving as head of the FBI in Los Angeles and was told by J. Edgar Hoover to find an unknown kidnapper and murderer thought to be playing the races at Santa Anita because some of the ransom bills had been traced to a Santa Anita deposit through the alertness of a teller at the Federal Reserve bank. Hansom drove to Santa Anita on a Saturday, saw some 50,000 people out at the track and sighed to himself that Hoover was asking the impossible, to apprehend a total stranger in a throng like that. Yet, Hanson had his man on the next racing day. For its cooperation, Santa Anita and its late pari-mutuel manager, Mort Shaw, were given citations by Mr. Hoover. j Borses and People: Caliente has been splitting its season, into two halves and the first half ends officially this Sunday, and a check of the records discloses that once again, trainer Wesley A. Cain had a wide margin over all rivals, and as of last Sunday, he had 22 winners, 15 seconds and 12 thirds out of 95 starters saddled, an exceptionally high percentage. . .Cain is- a former farm boy from Spokane who learned his trade as a trainer on the prairie circuit of Winnipeg, Calgary, and Regina. . .Caliente executive Walter C. Marty is vacationing at Lake Tahoe. . . Catalogues tor the Fasig-Tipton .California breeders summer yearlings sales have arrived for distribution and bear out the statement of Humphrey Finney that the credentials of yearlings offered set a hew all-time high for a West Coast vendue. . ."Chuck" Coughlin, general manger of Golden Gate Fields, tells us that while he has no way of knowing how successful Las Vegas will be, the Gate will go "on the assumption that it will be a smasher and will card its overnight and stakes program to meet the "competition," which is an indication that the Gates stakes roster will be boosted to an all-time high.
