School in Sheepshead Bay was a kind of casual thing. At first there was a one-room shack which served as a school. And later a new one was built. But Jimmy Fitz went to school only now and then in the winter and then only when it was too cold to do any working. He didn’t learn much of anything, either, but nobody at home was particularly worried about this because food on the table was all that was important. You were not going to get tomorrow’s breakfast by sitting in a classroom learning how to do things like reading and writing. Besides, during the spring and fall, when both school and the race tracks operated at the same time, a student in Sheepshead Bay ran a poor second to the scratch sheet with the local schoolmaster. Many afternoons, a few minutes before post time for the first race, the man would clear his throat, mention something about tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, then dismiss the class and run like a thief for the grandstand.
There was time for a few kid things while Jimmy Fitz was growing up, but not a lot. Fist fighting, for one thing, was a lost art with him. He spent so much time working he never did learn how to get away from a left hand. In his only three outings, a boy named George McNulty batted him out each time. In the fighting department, he still is a maiden.
But even with little training, he knew how to maneuver pretty good. When it came to getting a penny for the store or a couple of stray cookies or the other things kids work housewives for, he was a bit faster than the next one. He would go up to somebody’s house and announce brightly that the big kids up on the corner had told him to come and run that errand you wanted. When the housewife would say she had no errand in mind, he would put on a little of that sad Irish into his face. The housewife then would do something, either create an errand for the penny or come up with a piece of something, for this poor boy who was fooled by the older ones. This worked out pretty good until he would try it a second time around at each house.
He had one good friend in the Bay. His name was George Tappen, whose father had a small seafood restaurant that later on was to grow into one of New York’s best-known eating places. But when Tappen was a boy the place was nothing and he had to do a day’s work like any other kid in the Bay. When Jimmy Fitz came to know him well, Tappen had a job minding two horses a man they called Buffalo Bill kept in a paddock behind his saloon. Jimmy Fitz liked to come around and ride the horses bareback. Tappen was attracted to the animals, too. So the two spent afternoons riding the broadbacked horses around the paddock and they kept talking about how much they liked horses, just as they were to talk about these animals for the next seventy years of working together on race tracks.
Aside from working with his father, Jimmy had several types of jobs around the Bay. This was in keeping with the place, for a tradesman in Sheepshead Bay was a man who had to be able to do anything to turn a dollar. There was, for example, Gus Friend, the blacksmith. There were plenty of horses around and usually lots of work to do on them, but he wasn’t going to get caught in any financial jackpots if the blacksmith business ever became slow. Not Gus. Not while he could be a dentist on the side. Jimmy used to work for him, sweeping out the place, and he liked to hang around and watch the horses being shod. Then one afternoon his sister Nora came in, her hand flattened out on a throbbing jaw. Friend simply nodded, put down his anvil and hammer and, by the simple process of picking up a pair of pliers, became the dentist. Over the years, Friend had earned a reputation for having a light touch with the pliers, so Nora never twitched a muscle while she opened her mouth and pointed to the troublesome tooth. Gus gave it his light-handed yank. It didn’t get him anywhere. Another tug or two didn’t do much to the tooth, which had come to stay. Mr. Friend put his professional reputation as both a dentist and blacksmith on the line with the next tug. He sent it all in with a yank that would move a dray horse. Nora’s tooth came out. So did her jaw. It was dislocated. Nora headed for a doctor, a legitimate one, to get it straightened out.
Mr. Fitz also held a job for a time working for a man named Brunner, who had a provision wagon. Brunner was about his business from dawn to dusk and paid his helper, Mr. Fitz, four dollars a month and meals. He had cheeses, pickle barrels, herring barrels and the like on his horse-drawn cart and hustled his stuff to the people in the area. Jimmy Fitz took orders from the housewives and ran back to the wagon and picked them up. He couldn’t read or write at all, but he wanted that four dollars a month, so he developed a system of making little hieroglyphics on a paper bag and he insists he rarely got an order wrong. But dealing with housewives was, of course, murder. Particularly when it came to the herring. They were kept in a cold barrel of brine and to get one you had to reach in the brine up to the elbow. After which, of course, the woman would say it was too small and she wanted a larger one. This could go on for as long as the woman wanted to haggle. This being a woman’s first love, he had stiff workouts on the brine barrel.
Brunner, aside from selling whatever he had, continually made small side deals along the route. There was, for example, a Mrs. Van Kutchen, who had money and lived in the elegant Coney Island waterfront section. She kept a goat in her yard which caught Brunner’s eye. One afternoon he made a deal with the woman to buy the goat, loaded it on the wagon and started away. Before he left, Mrs. Van Kutchen gave his helper an order for a pound of lamb chops to be delivered the next day. Jimmy Fitz made his little hieroglyphic for chops on the paper bag, then hustled back to the wagon and gave Brunner the order. Brunner took it down carefully. He did not carry lamb chops in his store, but this didn’t seem to bother him at all. When Jimmy Fitz started work the next morning, the goat, which he had left tied in Brunner’s yard, was not in evidence. And Brunner handed him a package for delivery to Mrs. Van Kutchen. “It’s her lamb chops,” he said.
Brunner was also murder on the meals. He was a frugal Dutchman who was not going to go for three cents on anything, particularly food for somebody working for him. After awhile, then, his helper began to gag at the thought of another plate of pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut for dinner. For a change of pace, Brunner would throw knockwurst with sauerkraut at him and pretty soon this kind of food knocked Jimmy Fitz out of the box. He made a couple of gentle complaints, but the best he got out of that was heavy on the sauerkraut. He decided to straighten out the deal his own way. He was alone in the storage cellar one afternoon when he spotted a big ham Brunner had ready for the next day’s selling. Jimmy Fitz got to work with the knife and had a good-sized piece ready to take home to his mother to cook when Brunner came into the place and caught the move. This was how Jimmy Fitz got his next job cleaning the cesspool for a woman named Callahan who lived on 14th Street.
“I wasn’t interested in any of the jobs, anyway,” Mr. Fitz says. “All I wanted to do was be around animals. I had jobs minding cows for some women. I minded for three of ’em. Now what I call mindin’ cows doesn’t mean just standin’ there and looking at ‘em. I’d have to come and get ’em each morning after they was milked and drive ’em down Ocean Avenue and look for the best grazing land. Then I had to make sure they wouldn’t get in anybody’s farmland and start eating cabbages and things like that. Then I’d bring ’em back to the woman in time for milkin’ late in the afternoon. I had a kind of a goat cart, too. I fixed up an old box with some wheels and I put a harness around the goat. Oh, I was proud of that harness, had it all fixed up nice, and I’d drive the goat all over town. But whatever I did wasn’t important except to get money to bring home. All I ever really wanted to do was be with the horses. When they built the tracks and had all them horses around, I wanted to work there. Oh, I was little. Only weighed about 85 pounds or so, but I wasn’t thinking too much of being a jockey or anything like that. I just wanted to work with them. Well, one of the jobs I had was delivering milk to the stable kitchens at Sheepshead Bay. You’d bring four, five quarts in a big can to them. When I went there, I was always around there looking at the horses and bothering the people for a job. Tom Healy, he was working for the Walden stable, was one fella I pestered a lot. Then I got to
the cook in the kitchen at the Brannan Brothers Stable and one day he said he could use me if I wanted to work and I said yes. That was how I got started in racing.”
Jimmy Fitz’s start was a strong one. He checked into the Brannan Brothers Stable kitchen at 6:00 A.M. on the morning of March 4, 1885, and got home to his house at dusk with a load on. President Grover Cleveland had been inaugurated in Washington that day and after 14 hours of work at caring for horses, the stable crew threw a small party in honor of the new President. They put together a mess of eggnog and started to work on it when young Jimmy Fitz, as they called him, came out of the kitchen. Somebody handed him a glass of it. Jimmy Fitz tossed down the first drink of his life, did some laughing and then started home. He had to walk through some woods to get over to his house and he found, on this night, the trees getting closer together with each step. The rum from the eggnog was popping in his head now and being an amateur at the business of being stiff he couldn’t figure out what was going on. He had to hang onto trees here and there and finally made it home. It was the perfect way to come home from a race track, just about anyplace else you care to name for that matter, but it was the last time he went against whiskey to any extent.
It was the last time he had any time to try it, too. At this time, a race track for a kid working on it was a place where you did your work until it was finished and then you went to bed because there wasn’t much time left in the day. The horses were being wintered at Sheepshead Bay—there was no such thing as winter racing in the South as we have today—and without the excitement of afternoon races, the work seemed longer and harder.
“I liked it right off,” he says. “Love? Oh, that’s one of those strong-sounding words for a thing. But I guess you could call it love. You worked as hard as I did, you had to love animals, I guess.”
It is when you start looking into the racing career of Mr. Fitz that you begin to see how old this business of running thoroughbred horses is. The first record of any organized racing, for example, was in 1174 at Smithfield, near London. By the time Mr. Fitz came around, it was a big thing. By comparison, college football had hardly started and professional baseball was just forming. But the races were big. A little too big at times.
Professor J. A. Going was one of the more eminent authorities on horses around. He wrote a column of veterinary advice for horsemen and in it he plugged any of the dozen items he was selling on a mail-order basis at the time. He had a blister ointment which was “prepared on request of prominent horsemen” and which was guaranteed to take care of sprains, splints, and spavins at a cost of 75 cents. For 50 cents Professor Going sold a picture of the anatomy of a horse. In his column, he dealt with such topics as the problem of keeping mice from eating the horse’s harness. He had a special solution to rub on the harness to take care of that. Professor Going had competition from the firm of Samuel Garry and Company, 237 Broadway, which put out “Spanule, the Great External Cure. Good for Man and Beast.” For man, it was a quick cure for “malarial diseases, wounds, piles, boils, chilblains, bunions, corns.” For beasts, it took care of “lameness, sprains, scalds, sores, bruises.” It cost 50 cents a pint, a dollar a quart. The Goodwin Brothers of 241 Broadway seemed to be the best mail-order touts of the time, their ads guaranteeing four winners a day. Of course if you had your money up on a particularly hot day for the Goodwin boys, you had way more than that.
Even at this time, racing was a sport that was 215 years old in this country. The first race track in America was established in the spring of 1665 at Salisbury, Long Island, by Colonel Richard Nicolls, a British officer who had taken over the job of running New York when Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch were forced to surrender the area. Daniel Denton, one of the era’s writers, described the place as “toward the middle of Long Island lieth a plain sixteen miles long and four broad, upon which plain grows very fine grass that makes exceeding good hay; where you shall find neither stick or stone to hinder the horse heels or endanger them in races, and once a year, the best horses in the Island are brought hither to try their swiftness, and the swiftest rewarded with a silver cup, two being annually provided for the purpose.”
The place was called Newmarket, after the English course, and today it is the site of a public golf course for people who live on Long Island.
After Newmarket was established, there seemed to be all the racing you wanted. Some of it was strictly on the quiet. William Penn, for one thing, had the stallion Tamerlane and two mares on his Philadelphia property in 1699, but rather than offend his fellow Quakers—worse yet, lose their backing—he kept his stock for private use. In Virginia, horsemen were keeping the courts filled with cases involving welshing on bets and such as the pulling of a horse called Smoker, who was lengths the best in a match race with the mare Folly, but was pulled up before the finish line and lost. Chicanery was charged and the matter wound up going to the highest court in the area. As for race tracks as we know them today, Saratoga, opened in 1864 by John Morrissey, an ex-prize fighter, saloonkeeper, and politician, was the first.
But as far as the Coney Island Jockey Club was concerned, everything in racing was amateur night before they put up the Sheepshead Bay Race Track. The “American Ascot,” they called it, and they bet at bookmaking booths. Leonard Jerome, whose Jerome Park, in the Bronx, already had fine racing, was named president. His daughter was married and in England. A Churchill, she had named her first son Winston. James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the New York Tribune, put up a $1000 here and there to make the stakes values look a bit better and Pierre Lorillard and James R. Keene were two of the more active members. In 1879, Lorillard didn’t even think twice about coming up with $18,000 to buy the great horse Falsetto from J. W. H. Reynolds, another tobacco guy. Falsetto then went on to beat Spendthrift at Saratoga in one of the year’s big races. Keene’s financial situation was adjudged not to be shaky from the day this goateed ex-prospector and newspaper editor did a little bit of maneuvering with a man named J. P. Morgan and began to play with enough money to buy Russia. Keene also brought a lot of enthusiasm to the game and in his time owned some of the great horses, Sysonby, Peter Pan, and Frizette.
Sheepshead had 430 acres of ground and a rambling, two-decked grandstand. The high-class people who sat in the upper tier box seats found they had a commanding view of the Atlantic, with Sandy Hook jutting out of the water far to the right. The club had promised its best patrons that they would not be molested by the riffraff and lived up to the promise. An upper box at Sheepshead was as good as a seat in the Diamond Horseshoe at the Metropolitan Opera House. Patrons paid 50 cents for general admission, a dollar for clubhouse privileges. They bet at bookmaking booths set up by the firm of James E. Kelly and Joseph Bliss. There were also new machines, imported from France, which sold $5 win tickets. They were called mutuels and were despised by the bookmakers.
“Now at this time, people, particularly their legislators, had not grown up enough to understand that there was nothing immoral about gambling. Betting on anything, even at a place owned by such as Pierre Lorillard, was illegal. The thought of enforcing the law, however, was as distant to authorities as having it repealed. It was, at this time, one of those strange little shams this country for some reason always has had.
Yet there were certain formalities which were to be observed and this accounted for the visit, early one May morning, of Mr. James E. Kelly to the office of Chief John Y. McKane, who was in charge of all police in the Gravesend area, was active in politics and became known as the “Czar.” He was to get in trouble later in his career, but all anybody in Sheepshead Bay knew about him was that he was a man who would give the poor a break, and this was much more important than anything which came out of a political feud which put McKane into hot water later on.
“Morn’n to you, Chief Kane, and I know you’re busy so I won’t take much of your time, and would you please close the door?” Kelly said.
Kane said hello. Then he closed the door.
“I can’t s
tand hypocrites,” Kane said. “Sometimes I think organizations against gaming is made up of hypocrites.”
“Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say they are,” Kelly said.
“Now I have a problem. I’m wonderin’ if you happen to know a carpenter who could make me a dozen gambling booths. You know, just big enough for one of my lads to occupy. I know they’re quite valuable. I’m willing to pay $100 apiece for the master carpenter who could do this difficult job.”
“I’m very strong with the hammer,” Kane said.
Kelly got up, shook hands with Kane, and walked out. The police chief went down into the basement where they had twenty of the things impounded. He told a patrolman to dust them off a bit. When the grand jury tried to get at him a couple of years later and requoted the conversation to him he said he didn’t know what they were talking about.
Kelly, to get the franchise at Sheepshead Bay, gave the Coney Island Jockey Club $5100 a day at the start. He was anything but tough with a dollar. He gave his bet-takers— sheetwriters, in bookmaking terms—$10 a day, plus carfare and lunch money. He ran a big operation. He averaged $50,000 a day worth of business and at the end of a 20-day meeting at the place he found that, with extra payments and the like, he had given the Jockey Club $136,200, paid everybody who hit him, and still came away with a ton of money for himself.
Sheepshead had the best horses, horsemen, and jockeys in the nation on its grounds. On opening day, for example, three of the nation’s top riders were in the jocks’ room getting ready for a day’s work. One was Edward (Snapper) Garrison, who began what is now known as the Garrison finish. In his day, the Snapper left trainers and owners in a heap while he would stay far off the pace, then close in a rush. The whip in his left hand would slam the horse, his handlebar mustache would flap in the breeze and he would have his cap turned backward. He’d scream at the riders in front of him as he started the Garrison finish. It was fine to watch, but murder on the ticker and one of his owners, a man named Corrigan, wound up in a hospital in Chicago after his jockey just did get up with a mount. Also in the room was Isaac Murphy, a Negro kid who had the arms of a middleweight fighter. Murphy won three Kentucky Derbies before he quit. He won on 44 per cent of his mounts, a staggering figure that nobody has come close to since. And there was Jimmy McLaughlin, a tough Irish kid with a touch on horseback reserved only for a few. McLaughlin went on to win six of the seven Belmont Stakes in which he rode.
Sunny Jim Page 8