His package, Herold found, contained a cooked turkey. Frank took it upstairs, put it on the bed and in a matter of minutes the bird had bones clean enough to stand in a museum. Herold looked at it for a moment.
“Give me some change,” he asked one of them in the room.
Herold wrapped up the bones, went downstairs and bought some postage stamps, then mailed the package back to the guy in Brooklyn.
“We’ll see if he can take a hint,” Herold said.
Jimmy Fitz and Frank Herold met and spent time with each other at Elkton, Maryland, and from there they decided to go out and hit the Maryland Outlaw Circuit together. This was a group of small tracks around the horse-conscious state. They were called Elkton and Herring Run and Barksdale and Patuxent and the Iron Hill tracks and at any of them there was not much left over after the horses were fed. He and Herold had a loose partnership, which no money was threatening to pry apart because everything seemed to be like it was at Patuxent, Maryland.
A man named Jones had a tomato farm outside the little town. He had heard so many tales about how much money you could make with a race track that he decided to get into the business. He began by scratching out a rough dirt track around one of his tomato patches. The track had a pretty good dip in it halfway down the backstretch. Then he put up a few rows of bare wooden grandstand seats, contacted a couple of bookmakers to handle the action, then sent out announcements of his track opening. Herold and Jimmy Fitz and Tappen came on the grounds, shipping in from Elkton. They thought it would be a little better chance to get some money than they faced at most places.
On opening day, while Tappen and Jimmy Fitz went to the makeshift jocks’ room, Herold toured the plant. And he did not like what he saw. There were only about fifty people out for the races. Most of them were local farmers who might bet a dollar or two, but then again, as will farmers, they might not. The two bookmakers on the grounds were shocked. Owner Jones looked worried. Herold figured it was a day where only the alert would survive.
Herold and Jimmy Fitz were in with three horses, Farragut, Dewey, and a mare called Wistful. Wistful, Fitzsimmons up, won a six-and-a-half-furlong race in the second and Herold thought it now was time to be alert. The jockey was just climbing off the horse when Herold was on his way to the track office. He was a little too smart to ask for money. He ran the risk of getting a stall if he wanted cash for the winning race. Instead, he asked offhandedly for an order on Jones’ store for fifty dollars’ worth of feed for the horses and food for Jimmy Fitz, himself, and the rest of the crew. He got the order, went on the double to the store and presently was back in the stable area with enough to feed everybody. It was one of the big moves that can save a man’s life. For the bookmakers gave it up early and went home and everybody else running horses at the track was given a particularly sad story by Jones. Herold and Jimmy Fitz were the first, last, and only people on the track to get anything more.
For a woman, the life was no good at all. You don’t make a big production out of anything when you scrape for a living and Jimmy Fitz and his wife would come into a town, take a rented room, maybe two rooms if they had any money, and when it would come time to ship to another town, Jimmy Fitz would go first with the horses and she would follow by rail. Moving the furniture was no problem because there wasn’t any. But she never complained at all. Mostly, she was too busy trying to help. She was a woman with the strength of a brick. She sewed dresses to make money and also made thin, whipcord jockeys’ pants by hand, which her husband took to the track and sold.
“I’d hold out on her once in a while, too,” he says. “But she never squawked. Figured it was gone to feed a horse or something. Mostly, that was the case, too.”
A doctor in Philadelphia, Baird Murray, a confirmed horse player and friend of Fitz’s from the Gloucester days, used to give his old suits to Jennie and she’d cut them down and fix them up for her husband. Since a doctor’s suit never gets worn too badly, and she was good at sewing, Jimmy Fitz on his worst days was able to dress as if he had it made.
It was, on the whole, nothing more than a bare life for Jennie. By now her mother had died and her father had married a woman everybody in the family called Aunt Amanda. They were living in Frankford, a residential section in northeast Philadelphia, and Jennie went there whenever her husband would be on the road for any extended trip. She was raising a family, too. Her second son was named Jimmy. The third was named George. Both came into the family when she was living in Frankford. Her husband was not present for either birth. Jimmy Fitz was too busy making the three or four dollars that he would put into an envelope and mail home every day or so to take time out. Packing up and heading home for a new baby was out of the question. There wasn’t enough carfare.
When he came home he liked to sit in the living room and watch how the kids learned to walk. He was very interested in their stride and which leg they led off with and how they made a turn and things like that. All of which would infuriate his wife.
“These children are not horses,” she would say.
This is a habit which has not left Mr. Fitzsimmons so far. When somebody comes up to say hello to him, he’ll put a clock on the guy as he walks up and his greeting of times will be, “Morning, Jim. You’re walking wide today.”
All of his race riding has carried over to almost everything else. From the day they invented the automobile, for example, this has been America’s worst back-seat driver. There was one morning a while back when Mr. Fitz was going along crowded Liberty Avenue, outside of Aqueduct, with son Jimmy driving. He began to harp on Jimmy’s ability at the wheel.
“Don’t get right in behind that other car,” he said. “Lay off to the side there. Then you’ll be in position. If this car in front stops for some reason, you’ll have to stop, too. Get off to the side where there’s some running room.”
“If he thinks he’s on a race track with this machine, that’s fine with me,” a guy riding with him said. “But tell him if we brush against the rail we’re all going to spend the month in traction.” He pointed to the L pillars the car was skimming past.
This kind of thinking comes from years of doing nothing but being with horses, of course. Which is all he could do, in these tough years. He had no outside life. If they were going to eat, Jennie Fitzsimmons had to stay home and try and raise children and pay a few bills and stall the others without even moral support. Her husband had to be away. It didn’t make it easy, but it was the only way it could be done.
In Frankford, when George was two, he disappeared one morning and couldn’t be found. His mother searched the neighborhood, then gave that up and called the police. The kid was finally found at the end of the day—sleeping behind the living-room couch. It was one of those things that happen when you have kids and it doesn’t seem like much, except she had to go through this fright alone, and all the cuts and accidents that followed it. It is no bargain to raise a family without a husband around. And when Jimmy Fitz was away, his communications consisted of an envelope containing the couple of dollars, plus a note that was written in Sanskrit.
“She had a helluva time trying to figure out most of it,” he says. I wasn’t much on the writin’ and words for a long time, you know. So when I was away, I’d be away. There was no telephone or anything like that. One time I got a chance with a couple of horses some fellas owned and I went to New Orleans with them, I was training ’em, and I was down there for three months. If anything happened, I couldn’t of done much about it.
Wherever he traveled, the cards came up as bad in one place as they did in the next. In New Orleans, for example, he got nothing. The Fair Grounds was a major track and Jimmy Fitz wasn’t licensed to be on a place like this—he was outlawed at any major track—so he got another trainer on the grounds, John McKessey, to put his name on the entry blanks for the couple of horses Fitz was handling. Jimmy had one shot at the meeting, when he got a horse named St. Lorenzo ready for a race. He and McKessey got up a couple of dollars and bet
the horse, but a jock named McIntyre was on him and didn’t do much of anything in the race except lose it. Nobody ate much that night around the horse’s barn.
Johnny Tabor was on the grounds when the horse was ready to go the next time, so Jimmy Fitz got him to take the mount. His brother-in-law did a good job. The track was tough going along the rail, but there was a path on the outside and Tabor followed it all the way around to get home on top. But the stewards blew up at the form reversal—one time out of it, the next a winner—and suspended the horse for being erratic and acrobatic. Jimmy Fitz had no way to argue the issue simply because he didn’t know what erratic and acrobatic even meant. So after three months, he had nothing to show. When a smallpox epidemic broke out in the town, he headed for home.
The days, then, all were bad and one seemed like the next because the horses all were a little slow and the money always was short and the food skimpy. And the days kept turning into years. But through all this, one thing about the man kept standing out. He was being taken by larceny, he knew what it was and there could have been chances for him to try it himself. This doesn’t mean he could have gotten out of the hole by doing some stealing with horses. But he could have made it a lot easier on himself every step of the way. Yet he never gave it a try. His reason is simple. Back when he was six or seven, or maybe even eight, you see, he had learned what he thought was the difference between right and wrong. Nobody had ever bothered to tell him what was the good way to do things and what was the bad way. He had watched other people and made up his mind how he was going to act. He was not going to steal, for one thing. Nor was he going to complain. Nor were you going to find him putting the finger on anybody else. He had made up his mind he was going to take everything as it came and never look left or right.
“I had to do everything myself,” is how he puts it. “Anything I did I was proud of. Well, I had to find out right from wrong by myself. But I did learn it. And when I did you couldn’t change me for the world. I was proud I knew something and I wasn’t going to go back on it. What I did know I wanted to keep. Lord knows, I didn’t learn much.”
At Barksdale, Maryland, for example, he was training a horse named Electro. He put a jock named Charley Zeller on him for one race. The track was thick mud along the rail, dry and hard in the middle. Zeller got stuck in the goo and lost. After the race the people who owned the track, two gambling house operators named Mackie and Marks, suspended Jimmy Fitz.
They said I’d been doping the horse all the time and I didn’t give him the hop to win this time, he explains. The dope was news to me and the horse, but there was no sense complaining any.
Electro happens to be one of his all-time favorite horses. He got the horse with money put up by Dr. Murray. For years, the doc was one of Jimmy Fitz’s hole cards. Murray was a tobacco-chewing, horse-playing general practitioner who got to like the way Jimmy Fitz rode horses back in the Gloucester days. The two became friendly after that. Murray always kept loose money in a desk drawer in case a chance came up to invest in a horse, either with a bet or a purchase. He put up the money to buy Electro and Jimmy Fitz first rode the horse on the Maryland circuit, then trained him and ran him and the horse kept putting pork chops on the table for a couple of years.
He and Herold had a ton of uninvited trouble with a horse called Superstition. In their scuffling from one place to the other to make a living, the two wound up out at Latonia with the horse. And the horse had brought along a slight problem. Superstition simply would not run well the first time over a race track. But give him that race over the track and put him back and he was a tough horse. They put Superstition in the first time and got nowhere. A few days later, when entering the horse again, Jimmy Fitz told Herold to ask the stewards to have the horse declared out of the betting.
“He’s in real good shape and he’s liable to come close and it’ll be a bad form reversal. Get him out of the betting and we have nothing to worry about.”
The stewards refused, Superstition won like a good thing at telephone number payoff prices and Latonia once more blew a fuse over ex-jockey now trainer James Fitzsimmons.
By 1900, things were even worse. The Maryland circuit had dried up, Fish Tappen had given it up and was working in a livery stable in Philadelphia, Jennie Fitzsimmons was living in Frankford and her husband was living in a small shack outside the grounds of a half-mile fairgrounds place called the Eagle Track, which was at Media, Pennsylvania. He and Herold were trying to make it with three horses around the small fairgrounds tracks at Marcus Hook, Oxford, Pennsylvania, and the like, but if it weren’t for a little outside help they might not have lasted.
The help came from (a) an apple orchard bordering on the track, (b) a man who bought up cows from the surrounding area, then sold them once a month and didn’t care to be in the milk business so he gave away all milk, and (c) Herold’s native ability to talk to another butcher.
The Fitzsimmons-Herold cook tent was set up alongside one run by Johnny Fox, who had a stable of horses, a complement of help and an endless line of stories to give the help. Fox’s help were given mostly varied types of stewed fruit for their meals. If it weren’t for the orchard they might have gotten a lot less. But over a period of months, Herold had been buying 15 cents worth of ham nubs from a general store outside the track and by dint of continual and affable appearances he soon had it to a point where for 15 cents he could get a nub with enough meat on it to make a meal of ham and cabbage for he, Fitzsimmons, and the one or two rubbers who always were around.
This led, one night, to a minor disturbance in the Fox stable. Monty, who was one of the sensitive members of the operation, particularly where his stomach was concerned, looked up from his cooked fruit one night and, his head going back and forth like a cat, followed Frank Herold’s fork from ham and cabbage plate to mouth and back again.
“Mister Johnny,” Monty finally said. “What about a little of that ole ham for Monty here? He get hungry jest like them fellows over there do. He’d also like to eat jest like them fellows.”
“You want ham?” Fox said. Don’t you know any better. You get the scurvy from ham. That’s why we’re eating fruit here. There’s scurvy all over the place and we’re eatin’ fruit to keep it off of us.
“Scurvy’s fine with me,” Monty said. “Jest long as I gets it off of that ham they eatin’ over there. Mister Johnny, right now my stomach, it begging for a good case of scurvy.”
One of the lone bright memories of the whole Eagle encampment came when Dr. Murray, around for a visit, started to argue with one Iz Meyers about the merits of the Fitzsimmons horses as against Meyers’ Dutch Lady. A $10 match race was arranged and Jimmy Fitz, aboard Farragut, won it. The ten was a whopping purse for him. Mostly, they were smaller. For one tiny meeting at Marcus Hook, 30 miles away, Jimmy Fitz walked there and rode a horse for a man named Miller. He finished second and Miller received a purse of five dollars. Jockey Fitzsimmons, for pay, took 25 cents.
For the first time in her life, Jennie Fitzsimmons decided to step in. She had given up on the business of running horses. Jennie spoke to Aunt Amanda. This was a forceful person and she went right to work. Aunt Amanda put the arm on her nephew, who had a better-than-average job with the Philadelphia Traction Company. By the time Jimmy Fitz knew anything about it, Aunt Amanda was ready to fit him for a motorman’s glove. Aunt Amanda thought it was great. Running a trolley car every day was the kind of a job she could understand. Jennie was all for it, too. Her husband was going to get $15 a week. And he’d go out and work his shift on the trolley, then be home to take care of things like any other husband. She had no use for horse racing from the day she saw Joe Bergen, the jockey, die at Gloucester. She had learned to dislike it more in the last few bleak years. She was all for the trolley car.
To Jimmy Fitz, the Philadelphia Traction Company’s shiniest, best-conditioned trolley car, bell well tuned and all, bore a striking resemblance to a cell block. A horse, even a patched-up, sagging old thing trying to navi
gate around a ramshackle track like Barksdale, had much more to it than any trolley car. Furthermore, old ladies, the kind who like to argue when you forget to tell them at what stop to get off, are not found around horse barns. But if he was going to keep his life with horses, it would have to be under some arrangement where he would be around his wife most of the time. And he would have to at least match the $15 a week the trolley car would produce. Also, any move he was going to make in the direction of horses would have to border on cloak-and-dagger because Aunt Amanda had a strong finger on those trolley cars and she was not about to give up on it.
A fellow named Hughie Hodges, who was a trotting horse man, saved the whole thing. Jimmy Fitz met him one day at about the time Aunt Amanda’s nephew was getting the OK to hire a new motorman by the name of James Fitzsimmons. Hodges was working for a Colonel Edward Morrell, a money guy from the Torresdale section of Philadelphia who had a big farm on which he bred and raised a few thoroughbreds. Hodges trained them for him. Morrell needed an exercise boy and jockey for the small set of horses and Hodges figured Jimmy Fitz would fit in fine. All he’d have to do is lose weight —he was up to 133 1/2 now—and things might work out. Jimmy Fitz wasn’t about to wait. He started walking for Torresdale. It wasn’t wasted steps.
The deal with Morrell was fine. He had one of those big, almost feudal kind of estates. His wife had a small schoolhouse built on the property, in which she taught school for the children of those working on the grounds. She came from the Drexel family, not exactly the minor leagues. Under the terms of Jimmy Fitz’s deal, he was to work with the horses, losing weight and getting in shape to ride, and live on the grounds with his family. Then in the spring he’d ride Morrell’s horses at the big tracks, Sheepshead Bay, Morris Park, and the like. Morrell would see to it that Jimmy Fitz was reinstated as a rider on the big tracks. Financially, the deal came to a little bit better than the $15 a week the trolley car would have paid. So he took it. Aunt Amanda snorted when she got the news, but there was no talking him out of it.
Sunny Jim Page 13