“You take all the time we spend takin’ care of a horse,” Mr. Fitz says. “It adds up to a lot of work. We get to know everything we can about the animal. Now when it’s time to run him in a race, it seems the jockey becomes the important one. There’s so much talk about jockeys that sometimes I wonder if we’re havin’ jockey races instead of horse races.”
Mr. Fitz has some comments on horsemanship in general. “Take whipping, for example. There’s no need to whip a horse as a rule. Most horses get out there and try their best. So if you hit him it isn’t going to do anything but hurt. It’s just like hollerin’ at somebody who’s doin’ his best. It’s discouraging. When you’ve got a horse out there trying, the rider should try to help him. Hold his head up and sort of keep him together. But these fellas get nervous and start hitting with the whip. It does no good at all. Another thing I don’t like about them is the way they ride short. The stirrups are so short all they can do is kind of fold their legs up and just hang on and ride. There’s no way to really direct the horse. They don’t have that much leverage.
“When I rode, we rode long. The stirrups were down further and you had a chance to use your legs to direct the horse. Not today. Oh, they do one thing better than we did. When I rode, we’d sit up kind of straight in the saddle. These boys are down, with their head lower than the horse’s. That kind of cuts down the amount of wind they buck. It helps ’em go a little faster, I guess. And they all get as far forward on the horse as they can. Which is the right way. But there’s other things I don’t like. You take a young horse, a two-year-old. Well, the minute one of these boys breaks him from the gate during a race they’ll get out there a little bit and the first thing they do is, whoa! They start taking him back. Pulling him in. It gets kind of tight out front there and they want to come back and get a little room. It’s a lot safer that way. But what about the horse? They’re teaching him a bad habit. Hell, I don’t want the horse to stop. He’s going, then keep him going. But they’ll pull him back every time. Pretty soon the horse goes out there and stops on his own.
“These boys have no reason to do it. If they’re afraid, they have no business riding. You’ll never find Arcaro doing that. Oh, not him. If the horse wants to run, he’ll go with it. He takes a chance every time. You’re not going to find him backing off. No, sir. Eddie gets a horse right out there for you, whether it’s crowded or not. And he does it every day, too. Not just once in a while when there’s big money around. Put him on a horse in any race and he’ll give you the best he can. And he’ll let the horse do the best he can, too. That’s what we’re all here for, son.”
Mr. Fitz got up and walked out of the house and across the road to the barn to tell Jasper, one of his foremen, about something he wanted done with the horses. Barn 17 had that usual ammonia-hay smell, strong enough to bring an alcoholic back to life. It is a smell that you find nowhere else except at a clean horse barn. Because of this, it is anything but a bad smell. Early in the morning, after a night of being a bad boy, it makes the legs stiffen and the eyes burn. But even then it isn’t bad. As Mr. Fitz walked into the barn and started to talk, curious heads began to stick out from each stall. Aside from a few shakes of the head to shoo a fly away, the heads looked at the bent-over old man and nothing else. It was a wonderful place to spend an afternoon. It is the only side of racing Mr. Fitz cares about. “Nice life,” he said quietly.
5. The Green Years
THE PLACE WAS CALLED The Lamp and it was across the street from the docks where the charter fishing boats leave Sheepshead Bay every morning. The juke box was playing something by Glenn Miller, saxophone over clarinet, the way it used to be in the late 1930s, and then the music changed and Bunny Berigan was playing “I Can’t Get Started with You” which is of the same years. Berigan must have been a genius. He made music while the whiskey was making his legs stagger and his fingers stiff, yet here it was, still good enough to be coming out of a box and into a place in Sheepshead Bay in 1961.
The girl who was at the bar with her boy friend didn’t like it at all. “Unh,” she said to her boy friend. “Where do you get all this old stuff from? I don’t like nothing old like this. We might as well be in a museum, you sit listening to old stuff like this.”
She was about twenty and she probably had a good complaint. Things from the past can seem fine if you have been there yourself. But it is different if you have not. Then when somebody starts saying about how he could get a five-cent glass of beer in his time somebody who was not there is going to ask him how many kids used to die from diphtheria in those days because they hadn’t found a vaccine for it. It is always hard to understand about the past. You’ve got to sit down and make yourself imagine what it was like.
You could see this a couple of minutes later when the guy who owned The Lamp walked across the room and tapped his hand on a big Currier & Ives print he had hanging on the wall over the booth.
“This was a great big race,” he said.
The print was of a horse called Proctor Knott, his nostrils wide open as he sucked in air, defeating Salvator in the Futurity of 1888 at Sheepshead Bay race track.
“The First Futurity,” the owner said. “They run it right up the block here. The track was off Ocean Avenue. You look at all the apartment houses they got there now, you’d never know it. But they had a big race track there.” He looked up at the picture. “These days here, it’s like they’re from another world. You know what I mean?”
Yes. The picture was of a horse race, but it was a race out of the era that produced Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons. And you have to go into them and understand them, even if they were a long time ago, if you want to understand his career. Although he is alert and active and a winner here in 1961, everything Mr. Fitz does, all his opinions and outlooks and habits, they all started at a time that only a very few today are alive to remember.
Late one afternoon in the fall of 1877, T. R. Jackson, a successful New York architect, walked into his office on lower Broadway after a long lunch uptown at Delmonico’s. Luncheon included a ton of rye and water and Jackson felt great. More important, stuffed in his jacket pocket was a commission from Pierre Lorillard, William K. Vanderbilt, and August Belmont, to design a new race track. Now Jackson didn’t know much about racing, but that didn’t matter to him at all. He knew that Lorillard had a barrel of money from the tobacco business and the names of Vanderbilt and Belmont spoke for themselves. If they wanted a race track, Jackson told his staff, they were going to get just about the best race track anybody ever saw.
The place was to be called the Coney Island Jockey Club and it was to be put up, for the immense sum of $80,000, on a tract of land in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. When the land was surveyed and mapped, Jackson got out his T square and compass and a handful of sharp pencils and went to work. He took his time. He was not about to give his big money clients a couple of freehand sketches.
There were a few houses on the land, and when Jackson was finished drawing up his plans he told his clients that the houses had to be cleared out right away to make room for the construction.
“There is one place that can stay a while,” he said. “The way I have it now, the house sits right in the middle of what will be your infield. We won’t need anything done there until the landscapers come in right at the end, so the people can stay there a while, if they want to.”
The people who lived in the house were George and Catherine Fitzsimmons and their seven children, including the next to youngest, who was baptized James E. Fitzsimmons and had been born on July 23, 1874.
The Fitzsimmonses had been born in the old country. George Fitzsimmons was brought to this country from County Meath at age two. Catherine Murphy came over in her mother’s arms from Cork in the same year. They were part of the wave of Irish who had to pick up and leave their country during one of the potato famines. They filled steerage on anything floating which was headed for New York. When they landed, a large number of immigrants headed out from the crowded city
and settled in Sheepshead Bay, which at the time was a little fishing village surrounded by farmlands. The Bay, as people who live there call it, is part of the Gravesend region of Brooklyn, which flanks one side of the mouth of New York harbor. Officially, Gravesend was a part of New York City, but everybody thought of it as a place you traveled to.
When George Fitzsimmons and Catherine Murphy married, they moved into an old frame house on land owned by some rich people they had never heard of, Lorillard or something, and raised a family. The area was known as Irishtown, which in those days was not exactly an endearing name. By the time their son Jimmy Fitz was born, for example, the New York Times had just gotten over the custom of running help wanted ads with the title IRISH NEED NOT APPLY placed boldly over many of them.
Jimmy Fitz was three years old when workmen came around and started to knock down other houses in the area and plow the land up. While carpenters started on the framework of a grandstand, a group of men and some plow horses started the painstaking work of building a running strip for thoroughbred horses that completely encircled the Fitzsimmons house. So somewhere before his fifth birthday, Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons was able, for the first time, to go out his front door, walk a few yards, then dig a toe onto a track surface and see what kind of footing there was along the rail. He had, of course, the perfect background to be a carpenter.
Catherine Fitzsimmons was worried at first when workmen and their heavy construction equipment came around to build the track. Under an agreement with the landlord, she could remain in the house for about a year. This was, she worried, a long time for her children to be running around dangerous equipment.
Her concern faded for her next to youngest son, at least, when a man named Jim Claire, who removed the debris from the place with a wagon, began to leave his workhorses in the barn alongside the Fitzsimmons house each night. Jimmy Fitz was given the treat, each night, of getting up on one of the broad-backed animals and riding him into the barn. He became self-appointed groom, jockey, and general water boy for the two horses and there was one night when a workman, watching him ride one of the animals, said to Catherine Fitzsimmons, “Maybe you people ought to stay here. When the races start, your kid will have a field day. If he doesn’t get much bigger he might make a jockey for you. He is crazy about these two old horses. If he treats you as good as these horses you’re going to have a fine old age.”
The Coney Island Jockey Club track was one of three that was being built in the area and when they were finished the place became the thoroughbred racing capital of the nation. With Gravesend, Brighton Beach, and the Sheepshead track operating, the nation’s finest horses and richest owners were found there. The New York social and sporting crowd came down from Manhattan and stayed at big, gaudy hotels which lined the waterfront. The Oriental Hotel, a block-long, four-story mass of wooden spires and verandas, was a vacation showplace. It sat on Manhattan Beach, a few blocks from Sheepshead’s fishing piers. On an early summer evening, just after the races, a small Negro string orchestra would play tunes in the dining room, which was crowded with actors, politicians, prize fighters, and such as Diamond Jim Brady, James R. Keene, and the rest of the top-crust of the society-sporting set. The side doors and windows of the restaurant would be open and you could hear the music and listen to the people talking and see the waiters popping magnums of champagne. Out on the street there was a line of barouches, phaetons, and other fashionable rigs of the carriage trade. The drivers sat quietly, smoking, while they waited for their people to finish dinner and call for the drive back to New York, a long one, or the shorter and more picturesque canter along the waterfront to any of the other rambling, gracious hotels which were set back from the beach.
You can understand this kind of living. But for Jimmy Fitzsimmons who lived in Irishtown and moved to another house when the race track was built, it was all different. And it was a kind of life that a kid today never will know about.
Life started in a hurry for anybody growing up in Irishtown. When you were able to walk, you were able to work. When Jimmy Fitz was six years old he was working to help his family have enough food on the table. His father had a huckster wagon and summer mornings at four o’clock he would hitch horses to it, go into the house and wake up his son, put him in the back of the wagon, and then let him go to sleep again while he would drive to the Wallabout Market in Greenpoint to get his supplies for the day. It was a drive of an hour and when he’d get to the market, George Fitzsimmons would wake his son and have him mind the horses while he went and did some buying. On the way back, Jimmy Fitz would drive the horses and his father would sleep. It would be morning, time to get out and start selling, by the time they got back to Sheepshead Bay. It would be three or four in the afternoon before they were through selling the produce. This was the way Jimmy Fitz started out in the world—with an 11-hour working day. He never did many of the things you are used to seeing children doing in the back yard or in a playground because when you are six your body is not very strong and working 11 hours a day leaves it too tired for play.
Sometimes, it took longer than scheduled to complete a day because somebody at the market always had a bottle of whiskey to accustom his body to the pre-dawn air and George Fitzsimmons was not one to be unsociable. And when a man takes a drink he just can’t up and leave right away.
There was one morning when George Fitzsimmons got the wagon loaded and was about to climb aboard when he seemed to remember something.
“You wait right here for a minute,” he told his son. “I’ve got to go back and see somebody about something.”
It wasn’t five o’clock yet and there was a good chill in the air. There wasn’t a man in the market who didn’t want to see somebody about something this morning. Two hours later, George Fitzsimmons came back to the wagon, his face a little bit red, and his eyebrows bunched up as he tried to put together a good story. He saw his son asleep. He also saw the way to his alibi.
“Where’ve you been?” he roared at Jimmy. “You moved this wagon. We were down two blocks from here when I left. I’ve been lookin’ all over for you.”
Then he climbed onto the back of the wagon and fell asleep. Jimmy Fitz drove home and kept trying to remember when the horses had taken off on their own. He decided it must have been when he was asleep, although he could have sworn he was at the same street corner when he woke up. But he didn’t argue. It’s never a good policy to knock the other guy’s story, particularly when he is your father.
Potato farms were an important part of the Sheepshead Bay economy. During the picking season Jimmy Fitz would move with his father out to a neighboring farm. He’d get up at 3:45 in the morning and start to work right away, because the potatoes had to be ready to load on a truck headed for the market at a little after 11 A.M. So George Fitzsimmons would be stooped down, digging the potatoes, and this little kid with him would shake the potatoes off the vine and put them into a basket. At night, Jimmy Fitz would climb up a ladder to a small attic room where they had a pillow and floorboards for him to sleep on. A window had been cut into the room because the garret soaked in the sun each day and retained its worst heat over the night. But the window had no screen over it and mosquitoes came whining in all night, biting the kid and waking him up.
You would make the newspapers if you were found doing this with a boy of six today. But at this time it was common and necessary. There was no question of cruelty or even harshness on children. It was something everybody did and the kids grew up as they always do and nobody thought anything of it.
If it seems hard for somebody today to understand this sort of life, Mr. Fitz has a simple answer. “If you can’t imagine it,” he was saying one day, “I’ll help you. Do you have a kid that’s six? Then send him out to work in the fields every day. That’ll give you an idea of what it is like.”
There were, he says, two general rules of conduct while he was being brought up and everybody in the area adhered to them. “One was, no matter how bad things were, don’t yo
u dare touch something that doesn’t belong to you. Why you could hang diamonds out on the washline and they’d be there at night. And people were all the same to us. We had colored families and Italians and Irish and Jewish and it didn’t make a bit of difference. You lived with the colored same as you lived alongside the Irish. Now I was supposed to have been brought up in hard times. Well, now I got to wonder how hard they could have been. You go around today and you hear people roastin’ the Jews or roastin’ the colored or some other nationality and the guy doing it don’t know why he doesn’t like them. He’s just sayin’ something. You sit him down and ask him why he don’t like the ones he’s roastin’ and he couldn’t give you any sort of a worthwhile answer. Well, we had no distinction where I came from and as far as I’m concerned we have to get back to that again before the world is going to get straightened out. When we learn to live together, then everything’ll be all right. There’s no trick to it, you know. All you got to do is live with people and forget about what they are. That takes a lot less out of you than going around figuring out reasons why you don’t like them. When everybody starts learning that, things’ll be better.”
Of the six other children in Mr. Fitz’s family, two are still alive. His brother Tom, only eighty, can be found almost any morning hot-walking horses, stick straight, a cap on his head, heavy army boots on his feet. He looks like you could send him out to do a day’s work anyplace. Mr. Fitz’s sister Nora is eighty-nine. She is as clear as a bell, lives in Sheepshead Bay and stays up too late watching television at night. The three brothers and a sister who passed away lived to a bit better than average age. Pat, who died in 1955, was eighty. Steve was seventy-five when he died in 1956. Sister Kate died at sixty-seven in 1949 and the oldest in the family, George, was sixty-five when he died in 1932. Apparently, the hard work didn’t hurt anybody. Nor did anybody starve. There is always food where there is farmland. All you have to do is work for it. Which is what the Fitzsimmons family did.
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