By the end of 1893 there were no tracks left in New Jersey.
Which was not good for Jimmy Fitz. A couple of months before, an added starter by the name of John Fitzsimmons had been brought into the world by Jennie Fitzsimmons, who had been in the bedroom of the little house on Market Street at the time. Now, with Gloucester racing gone, the new parent had to find someplace to make a living.
He and Fish Tappen were in the stable area discussing this when one Paul Miles came along. Miles was the owner of a couple of horses. Once in a while he’d win some purse money. The mere fact he and his horses still ate food showed that.
“Well, we can’t stay here,” Miles said. “I’ll tell you, Jimmy. There’s racing out at Latonia, in Kentucky. You come out with me and do the riding and we’ll split whatever we make. Only thing is, I don’t even have the money to ship my horses. Do you, by any chance …”
“I’m worried about the week’s groceries at home.”
“Well, see if you can think of something,” Miles said. “If we can get up any money we can go out there.”
That night Jennie Fitzsimmons sat and listened to her husband talk about going to Latonia race track if only there was some way to get up the money to ship the horses. The baby was in the bedroom crying. Well, she said to herself, it’s a cinch we’ll need the crib for another couple of nights. Until it’s time to go to Latonia. Well, the crib goes last. But the rest of it? The couch? The chairs? She nodded.
“We’ll get to Latonia somehow,” she said.
From the day her husband had brought his first married dollar home from the track, Jennie Harvey Fitzsimmons had handled money like it was alive. She nursed it along and cut into a dollar here and a dollar there and before long she had furniture for herself. Nothing special. But it was new furniture and it was her own. This can be very important to a married woman. You’d be surprised just how much it can mean.
When her husband came back from the stables the next afternoon, his wife was making a joke about how much bigger their place seemed without furniture in it. In her hands was a roll of bills. It was enough for shipping to Latonia. This was some woman, you see.
A couple of days later, Jennie Fitzsimmons, her son in her arms, stepped into a coach for the ride to Cincinnati and the Latonia track. Her husband was in the back of the train before it pulled out of the Philadelphia station. He was checking the horses.
When Latonia, across the river in Kentucky from Cincinnati, opened in late May, Domino and Henry of Navarre were putting on one of their great duels in the Withers in New York. Latonia had no such stirring duels of the turf. It did have, however, a rather ancient battle going on. The larceny experts were paired against the suckers and it was every man for himself.
One look around on opening day showed this. To begin with, one of the twenty-seven bookmakers in the betting line, a man who operated under the banner of the Iroquois Club, came on the grounds ready to take friend and foe alike. He was, the papers howled later, from shaky antecedents. Latonia demanded a $300 payment in advance from all bookmakers operating. This fellow arrived with a check for $150, which was drawn on the East Bank of the Mississippi, or some such place. At any rate, his check was not going to stand up for long once people started mailing it around. He also handed the clerk a sealed envelope which was supposed to contain the other $150. All it really contained was a $5 bill, plus some assorted cuttings from the local gazettes.
Our man lasted seven-eighths of one race. When the favorite, which was going to pay $8 or thereabouts, and which had been played heavily with our man, started to come on at the eight pole and was most certainly going to win, the gentleman from the Iroquois Club did 22.4 for the furlong between his stand and the exit gate. There was the devil to pay over this. He did not, of course, forget to bring all the money with him.
In the next race, James Fitzsimmons was listed as jockey on a horse called Simrock. With Miles’ two horses in the stable area, they would go in a day or so, he had been able to get an opening-day mount from a man named Frank Brown, who had shipped Simrock up the Ohio River by boat from Louisville early in the morning. Unfortunately, Brown was considered a stranger at the track, too.
His horse had been made favorite on the opening line. But an hour before post time, while Jimmy Fitz was sitting in the jocks’ room, a groom was talking gently to Simrock as the horse lapped up a bucket of water he had in his hands.
“What you doin’ that for?” somebody called from down the shedrow.
“To make him run slow,” the groom said.
He was following explicit instructions which had been given him by one of the track officials: The orders were to give the horse water or get off the grounds.
There are many things which contribute to a horse’s slowness, but nothing does the job quite as well as a bucket of water right before a race. And when the flag dropped to start the third race and the field took off, Jockey J. Fitzsimmons found he had under him something which was moving about as fast as a beer horse.
He finished way up the track. The minute he dismounted, the judges were waiting for him, too.
“You didn’t let the horse run,” one of them, Judge Price, snapped. “We don’t want you or any of your connections around here. Pack up and get out.”
Brown then was called before them. “What are we, hicks?” Price said. “That horse couldn’t run because he was broken down. Get off the grounds.”
Judge Price was, at this moment, standing up for a group of bookmakers who had come up with a formula to make a small fortune at the track. They had, it was disclosed weeks later, placed all the jockeys under instructions. Whoever the books said was to win either won or somebody would be mangled. It was a wonderful setup and it included no room for a Fitzsimmons.
At the end of one day at Latonia, then, Jennie Fitzsimmons’ furniture had gone for nothing more than a train ride. Her husband and Miles had been ruled off the track and now everybody was stranded in Cincinnati. When Jimmy Fitz went back to the hotel to tell her about it, she was holding the baby.
Oh, she said. Nothing else.
The journey from Cincinnati to the Union Station in Washington, D.C., which is where the Fitzsimmons family and Tappen headed to make a fresh start—a half-mile track at Alexander Island, Virginia, had just opened—took three days.
The night they arrived in Washington, Jimmy Fitz and his wife, who had John in her arms, took a room in a hotel on
Pennsylvania Avenue. The place was crawling with bedbugs and they had to spend the night brushing them off the baby. Back at Latonia, the papers were filled with stories about how the bookmaking ring had been broken up at the race track. Jimmy Fitz didn’t even know about it and if he had been told he wouldn’t have cared. He never was a guy who looked back. Besides, he knew he had an awful lot of days ahead of him which could be tougher.
7. Sweating It Out
THE TRAIN WAS THE Cincinnati Limited and the Pullman porter had been told to take extra good care of Mr. Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, who was in Bedroom A and was a very important man because he was on his way to Churchill Downs to run Bold Ruler, the favorite in the 1957 Kentucky Derby.
It was right after dinner when the porter came around for the first time and stuck his head into the bedroom.
“Anythin’ I can do for you, Mist’ Fitzsimmons, you just leave me know,” he said.
“Oh, I’m fine.”
“We near Philadelphia now.”
“Oh, I know that. ’Cept when I was down around here before I didn’t have people askin me what I wanted. I was lucky to be gettin’ eats.”
“You need financin’ in those days, huh?”
“I wasn’t worried about money, son. I just wanted to get enough eats.”
By the time he arrived in Washington, getting the food was only part of the problem for Jimmy Fitz. The hardest part was making sure he wouldn’t eat it.
“Irisher,” an old man at Alexander Island told him one day, “Irishers, they grow late. Looks to me like y
ou just startin’ to grow. Now you do one thing. Don’t you try and stop it.”
But he did. In the mornings, after working horses, he’d pull on extra sweaters and jog around the track. He stayed away from water, but the stable area became a torture for him because you always had a boy drinking water from a spigot or pouring it over a horse and just to look at this made Jimmy Fitz thirsty. At meals, he would sip black coffee and eat sparingly—he would eat lettuce only after Jennie had dried it out in the sun. The weight didn’t simply come on suddenly. It was something that had been happening to his body little by little. A half pound here, a few more ounces there. But it was coming to stay. From the time he was eighteen, Jimmy Fitz should have weighed 140 pounds, even if he were working on a construction job. Instead, he was riding horses who were assigned 113 pounds or 115 or 116 or 118 and only sometimes would there be a break and a horse in with 126 or 130 would be available. So he fought weight to make a living. Anybody who ever has had to do it knows it is one of the most terrible battles you can take on.
It is an awful way to live and not many people understand what a jockey who is gaining weight goes through. It is a primeval thing—man against his body. If you walk on any race track in any year and look at what it does to these little men you can see it. The faces tell you. The eyes are hollow and have black smudges under them. The cheeks sink in and the skin is dry and it looks gray. The meals are always the same. A little black coffee in the morning, a piece of meat, no gravy, some spinach and a little more coffee at night. Some of them don’t use their heads and go out at night and load up with food, then duck into the washroom and bring it up by sticking a finger down the throat. They figure they’re fooling their stomachs. In the mornings they use steam baths and it dehydrates some of the heavier ones so much they scream to an attendant for a bottle of soda. He punches a thin hole in the top with an ice pick and the kid sucks on the cap, getting a thin stream of the liquid into his throat. If the cap was taken off completely, he’d swallow the whole bottle full of soda in two gulps and it would be too much weight-registering liquid. He’d have to go into the bathroom and bring it up. Sometimes, on a hot day, their bodies begin to sear during a race. Between races, the kids pile naked into a tub full of ice cubes. Only the years they have to live will tell them what it does to their bodies. The way the years told Jimmy Fitz.
The weight was making it impossible for Jimmy Fitz to get mounts. He began to take on any job at the track which would pay him a quarter. He worked horses for trainers, then now and then they’d have a Cook’s Race, which was for heavy jocks, and he would be in these. He and Jennie had taken a couple of rooms in South East Washington at the time and they had a house guest, his brother Pat, and since Pat wasn’t doing too well in his ventures around the track, the whole operation was in bad shape.
One afternoon a heavy-set guy named Murphy, who came from Philadelphia and was in the building business, arrived at Alexander Island to bet a race horse or two. Murphy, who had been a regular in the Gloucester days, was standing around the track office when he bumped into Bill Mosley, who was training one or two horses.
“You got a filly named Luray?” Murphy asked.
“She’s not a bad one,” Mosley said.
“I know,” Murphy said. “And she fits that race tomorrow real good. This one here on the sheet, the fourth. I’d like to make a bet if I knew what kind of a ride I was going to get. I’ll bet a hundred-dollar bill for you and the jock if I can get the right ride.”
“Who do you want up?” Mosley said.
“I’d like to go with that Jimmy Fitzsimmons. Haven’t seen him since Gloucester closed. But I know he gives you the right count. If you can get him, I make the bet.”
“I’ll get him,” Mosley said.
Jimmy Fitz was in the stable area and he was weighing exactly 118 pounds when Mosley hustled up to him with the proposition.
“We’re in at 108,” Mosley said. “If you can make 105 or so, we got a chance to win $100 bet. For a square meal I’d run in the race myself.”
“I’ll be here tomorrow. And I’ll give her the best ride I know how,” Jimmy Fitz said. Then he got going. He had to get 13 pounds off a body that didn’t seem to have an extra ounce on it. And he had only 22 hours to do it.
He walked out of the track, crossed the bridge into Washington and went home to start the lonely business of reducing. To prevent any real hunger from coming on later in the day, he swallowed a cup of tea and piece of toast in his kitchen. Then he went to the cabinet and got out the equipment he needed. He filled a glass full of salt, then added water. He stirred the mixture, then set it out on the table. Later, when he came back, he would knock it down in one swallow. The salt water was a strong laxative. He also took out a pint bottle of rye whiskey and poured a couple of fingers into another glass and put it alongside the salt. The whiskey was important. It would go down right after the salt to kill the gag in his throat the laxative always produced. His brother Pat sat in the kitchen and looked at the whiskey.
He left the two drinks side by side on the kitchen table, then mumbled to Pat and walked uptown to a Turkish bath on Pennsylvania Avenue. He paid his way in, got undressed and then walked into the hottest room in the place. He sat down and pulled himself together for the long wait. At 7 P.M., when they came around and said the place was closing, Jimmy Fitz, his tongue thickening and his throat feeling like paper, came out, toweled himself, and headed home. An attendant was drinking from a fountain as he went down the hall and Jimmy had to look away from him. All he could think of was drinking the salt solution when he got home. He had to close his eyes when he thought of how it tasted.
When he walked into the kitchen at home, he didn’t talk to his wife. He just reached for that salt water and got the thing over with. It went down very bad. He did not like the taste of whiskey, but it was a sure chaser for the salt. He flipped the glass of rye into his mouth. The minute the stuff hit his tongue he started spitting. It was cold tea. When it mixed with the salt taste it was vile.
“Where’s Pat?” he demanded.
Pat was not around. He had been earlier.
Jimmy Fitz, disgusted, went to bed. Between tossing and turning under three blankets during the hot night and getting up early, putting on sweaters and a muffler, and working horses, he had a fair chance to make the weight by midmorning. He had lost eight pounds. To lose the last few, he went out on the road in front of the race track when training finished at 10 o’clock and started walking and running in the hot sun. A few miles down the road, a fellow bare to the waist in the blazing sun was working at a brick kiln. Mr. Fitz stopped there and stood in front of the white-hot fire for an hour. The sweat soaked his heavy winter clothes as he baked himself. Then he started back for the track. He hadn’t put a thing down his throat all day. And now he was sagging a little. But he could tell by the weight of his sweat-heavy clothes that he had lost pounds. The scale confirmed it. He did 105 for the race. To Mosley and Mr. Fitz, it was a helluva thing. They were talking about what a job it had been when Murphy, the bettor, came around. Murphy didn’t care about the weight or any tales to do with the subject. He had a good word on another horse in the race. His personal figures gave the horse a good shot at it, better than Luray, he said, and he had decided to change his move.
I’ll do business with you fellows another time, Murphy said. I got a strong word on this AOH and I’m going to put my money where my figures are.
Mosley had to talk like a guy trying to get the rent, which is what he was doing, and Murphy reluctantly decided that he was stuck; he’d stand up and bet the $100 on Luray.
As the race was called, Jockey J. Fitzsimmons stepped up to the scale and carrying his tack (saddle, saddle cloth, weight pad, and whip) stopped the needle at 108 pounds. He hit the weight limit on the nose. Then he stepped off and headed for the paddock.
That kid dropped 13 pounds since yesterday, somebody whispered as he walked off.
Crazy, the clerk of scales said.
&n
bsp; You don’t know this one, the guy said. He’s broke. And he just won’t get out of the business. Has to be on a race track. He’s got the bug all right.
When the race started, the dice finally came up seven for Jimmy Fitz. He saved ground all the way around and at the top of the stretch he had a live mare under him and he got on the head end. But Murphy’s figures were not too far off. AOH was battling for it all down the stretch and Luray just got home by a nose. The horse had gone off at 8-5. Later, he and Mosley split a little less than $160. They had pulled off an impossible thing and they both felt good about it.
Jennie Fitzsimmons felt good when her husband came home with the money, too. She talked with him over the dinner table and made him eat a meal and the two of them forgot all about Pat’s whiskey drinking. Jimmy Fitz’s body hurt him all over, but he didn’t care. He never mentioned any of the twinges in the upper part of his back. He had dried himself out to the point where the marrow of his bones lost all moisture and the first little bit of arthritis which today bends him over took hold on his backbone. But his legs pained, too, and so did his head and his arms. He never noticed the back pains too much.
Around Washington at this time there was a big ex-butcher named Frank Herold, who was trying to make it with horses any way he could—owning them, training them, or betting them. Whatever road he took was always bumpy. On Thanksgiving Day, for example, he came back from the track and walked into his cheap hotel with a growl in his stomach. He could use a meal. Three other horse guys jammed into his room upstairs were in similar shape. Herold was busy wondering why he was silly enough to pay hotel rent when he could be sleeping in the stable at Alexander Island when the desk clerk called him over and gave him a package sent by a man from Brooklyn.
Herold remembered the name, Gurfein. Mr. Gurfein, some weeks back, had come to Washington from Pitkin Avenue to see such things as the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Treasury and other sights. But he had contrived to spend all but a few hours of his time around the paddock at Alexander Island. Herold had touted him on something that, surprisingly, won at a good price. Gurfein went back to Brooklyn and told everybody Washington was a beautiful city. He never forgot his sightseeing trip.
Sunny Jim Page 12