“You look wonderful,” Longden’s wife said.
“I’m fine. Just lost some of my speed, that’s all.”
Everybody laughed, and then Longden went back to the jockey’s room.
“What did you do to make this guy?” Mr. Fitz was asked.
“Just watched him ride, that’s all. And don’t say I made him. You can’t say that at all. He was ridin’ there probably as good as he ever did, but he wasn’t on winners so nobody noticed him much. But I could see he was a crackerjack. I asked him to come to work for me. That’s all I did. Couldn’t do much else. He did the ridin’ himself. You can see that by the record. He’s fifty-one now. Still rides better’n all them fellas on the Coast. He’s a wonder.”
Later in the day, Longden was talking about this and he said he didn’t think Mr. Fitz was telling it exactly the way it happened.
“The man taught me an awful lot of things about riding horses,” he was saying. “No, I don’t think I could give you a specific thing just now. I mean, we’re just standin’ here talking and Mr. Fitz, he showed me just about the whole business. So for me to pick out one thing would be hard. You could put down that he made me.”
“He doesn’t think so.”
“Well, you don’t think he sits out there and says ‘I did this for this man’ and ‘I did that for that man.’ He’s got more on his mind than things like this. That’s why he’s Mr. Fitz.”
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “I can still hear him saying one thing to me. ‘A good jockey don’t need orders, a bad jockey forgets them.’ First thing he told me.”
“Lot of years,” Longden said. “Seems I been riding forever. I guess Mr. Fitz can tell you why I’m still going.”
“He’ll say he didn’t do a thing.”
“That’s his style.”
It is a great style for a guy to have. And Mr. Fitz never went back on it. Check over his career and look into the way he did things and you see the man came with class. Go back into the years when he was starting to make it and you see evidence of it all over.
In August of 1914, for one thing, Quincy Stable was being trained by Steve Lawlor and the best horse in the barn was a two-year-old named Trojan who was training up to the rich Futurity like a good thing. The Futurity was at Saratoga that year and it was worth $16,000 to the winner, $1600 of this to the trainer. In 1914 you could get off the nut for a long time on $1600.
The Quincy Stable’s owner, James F. Johnson, was a straight old Brooklyn Irishman who was in the sugar weighing business. He wanted to hire Mr. Fitz as his trainer. “I want you to take the horses right here,” he told Mr. Fitz.
“Now what about Trojan?” Mr. Fitz said.
“He’s part of the stable. You take him,” Johnson said.
“I don’t think so,” Mr. Fitz said. “I better take Trojan when we get back down to New York. Lawlor’s got him coming along fine for the Futurity and I don’t want to do anything that might upset the horse. Looks like he might win the race. Lawlor probably knows things about the horse I don’t and I’d only mess it up. You better leave him as he is.”
Johnson let it stand that way and ten days later Trojan busted around the last turn on top and won the Futurity and Lawlor got his $1600. That was the way Mr. Fitz wanted it.
Then there was an afternoon when Edward Heffner, a trainer, was in trouble with a horse called Dolan. He had gotten Dolan for $4000 in a claiming race and he was having trouble because the horse wouldn’t run straight. The horse kept sidling instead of following his nose and Heffner was a little nervous, because $4000 was awful good money to have in a horse that wouldn’t run.
One morning, when Dolan was causing all kinds of trouble on the track at Aqueduct, Mr. Fitz was watching and he told Heffner he might have an idea for a different rigging of the horse’s tack that would stop Dolan from messing up. Later that morning, Frank Herold came into Heffner’s barn with some of Mr. Fitz’s rigging.
“He says to use this,” Herold said. “And he’s got a pony you can use to lead the horse and calm him down. The stable pony was sent over on loan a little while after.”
Two weeks later, Heffner had Dolan running straight, and fast, too, and the horse was entered in a race at Aqueduct which listed Filemaker, trained by J. Fitzsimmons, as another entry.
“Look out for me this time,” Heffner told Mr. Fitz. “I got my horse to running good.”
Mr. Fitz got a kick out of it. Two days later, Dolan won the race, with Filemaker running second, and Mr. Fitz didn’t like that so much, but if you’re going to lose, that’s the way he will lose them. And if Heffner had run into any trouble with the horse the day after that, Mr. Fitz would have taken a look and helped him again if he could. And if anybody would have asked him what he had done for Dolan he would have said nothing, just loaned his trainer some equipment, that’s all; and didn’t the horse run a good race the other day?
These are just a couple of things about the man. They aren’t the great big things that you could make speeches about. But they’re the kind of things Mr. Fitz goes in for. And they all come under the heading of a word which is very misused as a rule. If the word were used properly, you’d rarely see it in print. The word is charity. It doesn’t mean a handout. It means you have some class with other human beings.
When you look at it, Mr. Fitz’s disposition could come from self-preservation as much as anything else. He lived with so many people during his life that it was either be nice or be dead from arguing. Anybody knows that large Irish families, when placed under one roof, usually tear one another to bits. Now the Fitzsimmons family reached battalion strength, less one company perhaps, when Mr. Fitz came back to Sheepshead Bay for good from Torresdale, in 1905. Yet the roster shows they never lost a man as a result of this togetherness, which under the Fitzsimmons way of life is like the rush hour. And Mr. Fitz even insists, vehemently, too, that police never were summoned even once to break up out-of-hand kitchen table discussions. This is undoubtedly a record for the Irish in North America. Anthropologists can tell you that angry Sicilians, even if they are on red wine, are not as dangerous as Irish people at a kitchen table.
When Mr. Fitz came back to Sheepshead Bay he moved into a place called the Old Homestead, a big and even then ancient house which had served as General Howe’s headquarters while he was getting ready for the Battle of Long Island. The beams had been hand hewn, with wooden pegs used instead of nails, and ax marks, put there by colonial housebuilders, could be seen throughout the place. More important, it had room. For Mr. Fitz came with his wife, four children, Frank Herold, Fish Tappen, Jockey Joe McCahey, and five stablehands. The house was already occupied by his sisters Nora and Kate and brothers Steve, George, and Tom. The number of children, of course, was not to remain static. There was also a pony named Sonny, who came into the kitchen between swings of the door and stole food. Also, off and on, such visitors as Johnny Burton, the dancing school man from Trenton, who had two non-business interests in life: the couple of race horses he owned and an amazing collection of the best trap-door union suits a man could ever want to have. Burton spent his working time teaching people how to stay off each other’s feet while shuffling around with a cracking Texas Tommie. But every chance he got he’d pack up and maneuver around the race tracks with Mr. Fitz. Burton learned from the start that a man on a race track had to move extra quick or he’d wind up doing the two-step with bill collectors. He also learned that when eating in the stable area it was best to keep that fork going like a metronome.
There was one Friday meal, back at a place called the Eagle track, outside of Philadelphia, when Frank Herold came up with a piece of hambone and Burton began to scrape the meat from the knuckles to give him something remotely resembling a dinner of fried ham and eggs. While Burton was working on the knuckles, Miller, an old cook and general utility man who was around the stable, got interested. Miller spent most of his time getting on the good side of everybody. His main pitch was insisting that he was a Catholic. He fi
gured this would set him up pretty good with Mr. Fitz. But the ham was making his position difficult. He kept giving it a look, then finally decided to make a bid for it.
“Mr. Johnny,” Miller said, “ain’t I going to get some of that ham?”
Burton felt safe as a baby. “You’re a Catholic,” he said, “I can’t let you have any meat on Friday.”
“Now Mr. Johnny,” Miller said, ‘you know I a liar.”
The most important people at the Old Homestead were the horses. They were cheap as horses go and some of them were broken down, but they were horses people had given to Mr. Fitz and that meant they were going to be treated as if they were part of the family. When he started on his own after working for Colonel Morrell in Torresdale, Mr. Fitz had horses from people like Burton and Barney Flynn, a New York saloonkeeper who looked like a bishop but had a bung-starter right hand that was famous along the Bowery. A betting commissioner named Roxy Angarola gave Mr. Fitz his horses. So did Christy Sullivan of the Sullivans of Tammany Hall. And a man named Richard Johnson, who at one time was the warden of Sing Sing prison.
The horses at first were kept in a barn behind the Old Homestead and as more were taken on they were put in other barns around the neighborhood. Mr. Fitz was in no position to get stable space from the Sheepshead or Gravesend or Brighton tracks, which had room only for the big recognized outfits. At this time, streams crisscrossed Sheepshead Bay—they long since have been diverted and filled up to make way for big apartment houses—and Mr. Fitz and Herold and Fish had to build bridges over them to get the horses from the various barns to the race track.
Bob Shanahan, who rubbed the Fitzsimmons horses, came up with the lumber to build the bridges. Nobody asked him where it came from. In fact, nobody questioned anything Shanahan did. For some reason, he liked to bet on jumping races and would walk through flames to get to one of them. One afternoon, for example, Shanahan was still working on his horses at the Old Homestead when he found he had about 35 minutes to make it to the Gravesend track and get his bet down on the jumping race. He put on a clean shirt and started to leave when somebody stopped him and said he looked a bit seedy because he hadn’t shaved that day.
Shanahan grabbed a sharp knife and a piece of soap and began to walk as fast as his legs would carry him on the three-mile walk to the track. While he was walking, he would spit on the soap, rub the soap against his jowls to produce the hint of lather, then hack away at the whiskers with the knife. When he began to work at the Adam’s apple with the knife, anybody looking out the front window figured he was witnessing a suicide attempt.
The horses usually came with something wrong with them, but they were getting high class care and this was something people around the race track started to notice. Mr. Fitz took cripples and worked them into running order so often that people on the track talked about it. Some of them even helped. John E. Madden, the Kentucky breeder, gave him a filly called Miss Angie—“Pay me if you win, I like the way you do a day’s work” Madden said—and Mr. Fitz won a couple of races with her and Madden had his money. Arthur B. Hancock, Sr., another breeder, gave Mr. Fitz a filly under the same arrangement—the horse was named Edith F. after his latest addition to the family, a daughter. Edith F. won races, Hancock got his money and more people began to talk about this Fitzsimmons. Then came Davis and Pratt and a regular stable at the track and things looked good.
At this time, just when everything seemed to be starting to turn for Jimmy Fitz, piety became a tremendous issue in New York. Religious fanatics crept out of the woodwork, and their quick-talking, Bible-quoting speeches began to influence legislative thinking, con newspaper editors, and excite the people. Committees for Law and Order popped up everywhere. Their target was racing at first, then drinking.
Then, in 1910, the lawmakers, with the aid of Governor Charles Evans Hughes, said they thought betting was immoral. The sport of horse racing was banned in New York.
Now to appreciate what happened at this time, you’ve got to know something about gambling in general and race track betting in particular. Since all gambling is done by people, any knowledge is at best inexact. However, you can be certain that any kind of gambling, race track betting included, can become a terrible disease. Right along with alcoholism. As a means of creating trouble, gambling, of course, runs a terrible second to sex, but it is most certainly a lot easier to ban. Although a ban does not mean betting on horses stops. This is something which can never be stopped because there always is a set of people who like to bet on horses and they will walk on broken bottles to get a bet in. England has recognized this for some time now and has horse betting legalized all over the place. Since this has the faint odor of common sense about it, we should not expect this country to follow suit for some time.
As for the morals of it all, you can get an idea by looking at the different classes of people in this country who gamble. There is, first, the degenerate. He will bet the baby’s milk money, let his wife go shoeless and lose his self-respect at the drop of a dollar. He is a sick man. Has been from the time he was six or seven years old, probably. He’ll bet on horses. If you close them up, he’ll shoot crap in an alley. Stop that and he’ll play cards in a gas station. He will contrive, one way or the other, to get rid of his money if he has to wind up betting on bus numbers. It doesn’t matter whether you have a race track open or not. The degenerate gambler will get rid of it all.
Then you have the guy or woman who gets a kick out of betting, goes to the track figuring to lose a few dollars and proceeds to do so while having a wonderful time. This type makes up the overwhelming majority of people who attend horse races in this country. They bet because they happen to like it. Now this is the type the reformers claim is put upon by race tracks. The tracks, they say, reach out and grab these people and pull them in, then take the rent money from them. Rent money most certainly does get blown at the track, many times by these normally sensible pleasure bettors. They blow the rent almost as much as it is blown by normally sensible pleasure bettors chancing it on baseball or professional football, the two most gambled-on sports in the entire world.
But on the whole, people who go to the races do not bet over their heads. They simply walk around, chew on a sandwich perhaps, read a program or form sheet until the eyes blur, then talk excitedly the rest of the day about a sure thing they know is about to come off in the fifth. They bet the race and lose. They wouldn’t bet any more than they planned to if you twisted their arm. They go home tired—and ready to save for the next time. There is no more wrong in this than there is sitting home in the living room.
The legislators in New York State felt they had the answer to a great, steaming demon of an evil when, in 1908, they passed the Perkins-Agnew bill, which made any effort at wagering on horse race illegal.
The bookmakers, however, had an answer to that. They came up with what they called “oral betting.” You went up to a bookmaker, told him what you wanted to bet, and that was it. The book, his hand thrust into his pants pocket, merely nodded. He was writing the bet down inside his pocket as clearly as if it were typewritten. Such as Izzy Hamm, and Big Sol Lichenstein, became know as “Memory Brokers.” Under an interpretation, this was ruled legal.
Governor Hughes moved to close this gap. He had a bill introduced which would jail anybody connected with the track, from such as August Belmont on down, if gambling laws were violated. It was introduced as the Hart-Agnew bill and the vote was a tie. On April 23, 1910, the legislature adjourned. In the meantime a Republican legislator from the Niagara Falls part of the state died. Hughes appeared for a special election to replace him and stumped for a guy he knew would back his anti-betting bill. This accomplished, he called a special session of the legislature on May 11 to vote on the anti-betting bill. Again it looked like a tie—the track interests had grabbed a guy, too—until the doors in the chamber opened and they brought in one Otto Foelker, a Republican from Brooklyn who had just had his appendix removed. He was on a stretcher. Foelker was a t
hick-headed Dutchman with colossal nerve—he wasn’t even a citizen, therefore was holding office illegally. But with his heart filled with piety, he voted against the bill and racing now was illegal in New York State by a 26-25 vote.
While he was governor, Hughes did a job on racing. And Mr. Fitz found himself once more on the road, traveling with horses while his wife and children followed by train and sometimes he had to wonder why he didn’t take the job of running a trolley car in Philadephia.
9. Heading for the Top
WITH NEW YORK IN the hands of people who said they were close to God, the racing crowd had to scatter. Some went to Europe to make a living, a few of the horsemen stayed around New York and helped run hunt meets at private clubs on Long Island which millionaire sportsmen like Davis backed to keep the game alive. Jimmy Fitz, having taken to the road again, arrived at Moncrief Park, Jacksonville, Florida, in 1912, with eight or nine horses, four children, no money, and a little bit of Irish hope that he’d get some.
The day he shipped in, he was around the stable area and ran into Snapper Garrison, the jockey, who was walking along with Colonel Phillip T. Chinn of Lexington, Kentucky, Juarez, Mexico, and any other such promising place.
“How’re your horses?” Garrison said.
“Fine,” Mr. Fitz said.
“Well, tell you what I’m going to do,” Garrison said. “I know you don’t have much money. So I’m going to go out and buy you a whole mess of padlocks and you can lock in your horses so’s nothin’ happens to them. No sense runnin’ them. Colonel Phil T. Chinn here, he has this game by the a-double-s.”
The colonel beamed. He then hustled away. He seemed to have the horses to blanket the meeting all right, but the trouble was he did not know who owned them at the moment. Chinn owed the slight matter of $4000 to Izzy Hamm, a bookmaker. Now Hamm had extensive connections with the sheriff’s office, and as he saw it, the debt could be most easily resolved if the sheriff would help him foreclose on Chinn’s horses the next day. But Chinn had an angle or two going for him at Moncrief Park. As did nearly everybody else on the grounds, Mr. Fitz had to learn.
Sunny Jim Page 15