Sunny Jim

by Breslin, Jimmy;

  “Telling me all about Brooklyn seventy years ago or something, he was saying. He thinks that’s all I got on my mind. He’s talking about seventy years ago in Brooklyn and I’m trying to win a race next week. Seventy years ago in Brooklyn. What good is that? I got no time for that nonsense.”

  In attempting to analyze Mr. Fitz’s success at battling the years, all sorts of Bureau of Labor statistics are at hand to show that only a minute percentage of the population, 3.1 or so, is able to hold a job at eighty or over, and of this number only an infinitesimal few do much more than putter around at odd, part-time jobs.

  Mr. Fitz’s situation excited all the experts on the subject except Frederick H. Ecker, honorary chairman of the board of the huge Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

  “I don’t see anything implausible about Mr. Fitzsimmons’ case at all,” Ecker said.

  “How old are you, Mr. Ecker?”

  “I’m ninety-three. You may reach me here at the office five days a week.”

  There have been many old people in the little part of the world called sports who were active to the last and, as far as the public was concerned, were as productive as ever. Only the slightest experience of being around these people, however, was enough to show that Mr. Fitz is one of the very few who consists of anything more than memories.

  His age only makes him angry sometimes because he cannot do everything by himself any more.

  “I got to rely on other people,” he tells you, “and that’s no good in my business. Now you take a thing like the inside of a horse’s mouth. You’ve got to keep watchin’ that all the time. Not just now and then, either. If he has a little cut or a sore in there, it’ll bother him when there’s a bit in there and he’ll go against it. What you got to do is check the horse every day. Take aholt of his tongue and pull it to one side so’s he won’t bite you, then put your hand right in his mouth and feel all around. Make sure he’s got nothin’ botherin’ him.

  “Well, I can’t do that with every horse any more. And I tell somebody to do it and they wait and then they come and tell me, ‘Oh, it’s all right. I couldn’t find nothin’.’ Now I know they didn’t do it right. But what am I going to do? Most of the time I just walk off mad. That’s the only thing about bein’ old that bothers me. I can’t do them things by myself any more.”

  When it comes to matters pertaining to his personal finances, Mr. Fitz’s mental ability is the same kind young Greeks bring with them to the shipping game. This was brought out the night we left his Chicot Court house so grandson Jimmy, who handles his legal and investment work, could go over some things with Mr. Fitz.

  Later, Jimmy came around to Harry’s bar and grill, picked us up and drove us home.

  “He said, ‘What have you got this over here for?’ ” Jimmy began. “ ‘You told me last time it was supposed to be put down here. Now you got it over here. What for? You shouldn’t be changing all these things. Keep ’em in order.’

  “It was just one little thing. But that’s what you are up against. Everytime.”

  Mr. Fitz also does not believe in taking it particularly easy on himself simply because of his age or back. You can find him, each night, riding one of those health club bicycles down in the cellar of his Chicot Court house. He grinds away for nearly a half hour, keeping a delivery boy’s pace. Every few minutes he checks his watch to make sure he isn’t doing too much.

  “The heart,” he says, “that’s the thing I don’t want to overwork. Nothing else matters. The legs? I should work ’em harder. There’s nothin’ the matter with them.”

  Mr. Fitz then, in everything, has the outlook of the lean toward life. And over the years he was not the only one in the Fitzsimmons household with this attitude. For he had, from the day he was married, somebody just as tough back home in the kitchen.

  When Mr. Fitz was a mere seventy-two or so, for example, he stepped into the barn at Aqueduct to start the day and a dog named Apache rushed to greet him. Apache flew the length of the shedrow, slammed into Mr. Fitz’s leg and bounced off. Mr. Fitz bounced, too. He went off the barn door and down to the ground in one motion. He broke his right leg as he fell and they picked him up and put him on the bed in the stable cottage. The doctor kept him there, the leg in a cast, for two weeks and anybody working for him wanted to beat the dog with a stick for causing this kind of trouble. Fitzsimmons stable workers now had the pleasure of taking orders from him for every minute of the day.

  When Mr. Fitz finally was allowed to go home he decided to surprise his wife. He came into the front hall at Sheepshead Bay, dropped the crutches and began to pull himself up the steps backward. He would, he figured, get to the second-floor sitting room, then call for his wife. After much effort, he got up the stairs and entered the sitting room by hopping on one leg. He reached for a chair to balance himself. It was a fine new chair. It had been bought during his absence. The only trouble with it was it started to slide across the room when he put his weight on its arm. The chair kept sliding and Mr. Fitz, his bad leg held in midair, clutched the arm and started to fall forward. The chair stopped sliding only when it bashed into the wall and one of its legs snapped off.

  The noise brought Mrs. James E. Fitzsimmons into her favorite room. She took one look at her husband, who was now stretched out, face down, on the floor, and let out a shriek:

  “Look what you’ve done to my chair.”

  Mr. Fitz, as the years went by and the family reached its sprawling size, became immovable on the idea that none of the younger generation in his family was going to attempt to make a living at the race track. And the years of winning had given him a hole card—he had money to pay the college tuitions. Anybody who wanted to work with horses was told he could try it if he went to college. That got the boy out of the way for four years and at the end of this period Mr. Fitz had a good argument: Why waste all that education on a race track?

  His grandson, Eddie Carr, was talking about this one night. “I wanted to work out there,” he was saying, “but the old man raised hell. ‘Go to college,’ he kept yelling. So I went to college. Then I still wanted to work there. So I had a little job taking care of some of the paper work for him, but he kept yelling about me wasting my education so much I had to leave and go and get a job. Look at Jimmy. He went to college to be an engineer. He still wanted to come out to the track. So my grandfather talked him into trying law. He went to school again and now he’s a lawyer. The only one who’s going to beat him is my kid brother, Bob. He’s going to Cornell to be a veterinarian. In the summer he’s supposed to take a job working around animals. Grandpop can’t turn him down there. The kid was hot-walking horses this summer. Wait and see, he’ll get the degree and sneak right onto the track and the old man won’t have an argument against him.”

  Mr. Fitz thinks it is this side of a sin for anybody to follow him onto a track. “The big thing a kid should do is take care of his mind,” he says. “Go to college. Then when you come out you see how much you don’t know. So you can go and start learning what everything is about. But at least you’ve got the foundation for it. Now, after all that schooling, what sense does it make to get into a business of pure luck? That’s all the race track is. Now I’m a winner at it. But I keep tellin’ you, all them horses could’ve lost. What good is it to be smart if you’re living depends on luck? If any of my kids want to get into racing, I’ll let them. What they can do is go and get a job and make enough money to own a horse of their own. Then they can come out, hire a trainer and watch the horse run. Otherwise, no good.”

  Mr. Fitz, like anybody else who has made a living in a business where starving is casual, is against any moves but an old-lace-and-blue-chips kind of thing. His topcoat that became famous shows you that. One afternoon in the spring of 1950 he was wearing the garment around the barn at Aqueduct and it was simply too much for the late Harry King, a sportswriter.

  “I’m with you, Mr. Fitz,” King said. “But I’m not with that coat of yours.”

  The coat h
ad a huge yellow streak across its back where sunlight, over many years, had bleached away the color. The collar was frayed like cheesecloth. The pockets and buttonholes were a mess.

  “You must have taken a rooking on the coat,” King said. “It didn’t hold up at all.”

  “What’s the matter with it?” Mr. Fitz said.

  “It’s all falling apart,” King said.

  “Show me where and I’ll get it fixed,” Mr. Fitz said.

  With that, Sarah, who was in the kitchen, let out a moan. She had been taking that coat to a tailor near the track to have it mended from the first day she came to Mr. Fitz. The thing had become so embarrassing to her that she took to simply throwing the coat on the counter and leaving before the tailor was able to come out from the back and tell her, as he always did, “Maybe you should take one of my coats if he is having things so bad. I can’t mend this. Here, take one of my old ones. Take. Take. Do anything. But don’t give me this again.”

  This day, however, John Fitzsimmons saved her. “We’re going to do something about this,” he said. “We’ll give the store a good dressing down for this.”

  Mr. Fitz kept looking at the fray marks and saying he was all for it.

  The coat had been bought in a store called Hilton’s, which once had been in Brooklyn but had moved to Broadway in Manhattan. John called the place, got the manager, and then complained eloquently about the way the coat had fallen apart. Mr. Fitz kept nodding in agreement.

  “When did you buy the coat?” the manager asked.

  “It was bought in Brooklyn,” John said.

  The guy from the store gave a big “What?” and then became excited.

  “Please,” he said, “forget the complaint. Tell me about the coat. We haven’t had a store in Brooklyn since 1905. You still have a coat being worn which was bought in that store? Well, I’m going to put an ad in the newspapers about that.”

  The next day Hilton’s window on Broadway was filled with pictures of Mr. Fitz standing at Aqueduct with his frayed topcoat which had lasted forty-five years. But Mr. Fitz would have been much more pleased if they had fixed up the coat instead of putting his picture in the window.

  Mr. Fitz feels everybody should be like this. He gives plenty of advice on the subject and in one sad case, perhaps one of the most tragic in sports history, it was turned down.

  That was in 1939 and the man he gave it to was Earl Sande. Earl stopped riding in 1934 and became a trainer. He was a success in that business just as he had been a success on a horse. In 1938, with Stagehand his top horse, Sande became the leading money winning trainer in the nation. With this kind of success behind him, Earl decided to go into the business of owning and breeding race horses himself. He did not think that there was a thing in the business of racing which he could not do with tremendous success.

  But owning and breeding race horses is a proposition which a man shouldn’t take on unless he has enough money to buy Russia. Short money, in this game, can mean a million. Which accounted for the summons Sande received at Belmont Park that summer. Mr. Fitz, who was in the paddock, wanted to talk to him. When Earl got there, the old man didn’t waste words.

  “Now look, Earl,” he said, “I don’t think you know what you’re doing. Owning horses isn’t for you. That’s for big, rich guys. I don’t care if you got a million dollars to your name. You need way more than that. Now you listen to me. You got the name. Everybody knows how good you are. You just sit back and let some rich fella get the horses for you and you train ’em. Don’t you go around tryin to own a lot of horses. It’s too rich for you.”

  Sande listened quietly, smiled, and said thanks a lot to the man who had helped him so much. But as he walked away you could see he wasn’t buying the talk. How could Earl Sande fail at anything?

  It wasn’t cockiness, either. At the time, it looked like the absolute truth. As a rider, Sande had everything, including to-the-bone honesty. As a trainer he won big ones. And even in his side line, singing, he was an unqualified success. He used to sing at private parties for his own pleasure, but when Sherman Billingsley first heard him he promptly booked Earl for his Stork Club. It was not a headline-getting affair, either. Sande had the warmth, smile, and Continental manners to project himself in a room like the Stork. And he had the voice. Some people sang in the shower. When Sande sang, he did it for big money in the Stork Club. That’s how his life went and that’s how he thought it would always go.

  But it didn’t. His breeding operation was based on hopes that Stagehand would become a great sire. He did not even come close. The horses Sande was trying to make it with were so bad that Frenchy Schwartz, the clocker, came over to him at Jamaica one morning and told him seriously, “Earl, you do better for yourself puttin’ them things into cans for dog food. They gonna break you.”

  They did. The money went, the real estate went, the horses went, and in 1950 Sande wound up where he is today, living in one room on the second floor over a restaurant in Westbury, Long Island. Downstairs, in the big, immaculate taproom, a sheet of typewritten paper is framed. It begins, “Say have they turned back the pages …” It is the only reminder of who Sande is.

  Sande has refused all kinds of help because his pride is that of one who has always won; won too much, perhaps, and every time somebody offers him a job—many of them have been for big money—he crumbles a bit inside. He thinks it means charity. He says no. He wants to do it all by himself. In 1953 he shocked the sports world by making a comeback as a rider at age fifty-five. He had three mounts and on the third, a thing called Honest Bread, he placed the horse well and came down the stretch with just a little touch of the old Sande in the saddle. And you could hear the cheer in the stands. It was hard to believe that a racing crowd, whose only hero is a winning ticket, would get excited over somebody, but as Sande kicked Honest Bread down the stretch you could hear the roar that race tracks heard all through the ’20s—“Come on, you Sande!” Earl won the race, but he was dead tired and it was his last ride.

  One night recently he talked quietly about the day Mr. Fitz told him to stay away from it all.

  “Money,” he smiled, “I used to have a lot of money. Now I don’t have anything. I remember the day Mr. Fitz warned me the thing would happen. Ah, but it was just another piece of advice to me. I’d been advised all my life, and all my life I’d done just as I’d pleased. I guess I should have listened to him.”

  Sande is one of many stories in sports that causes you to become disturbed inside when you run into them. The job of handling money always is a problem for somebody in sports, and particularly for somebody in racing. The money can come in big and it can come in fast. And it is coming to a person who many times is hit by the thing so hard that all he knows how to do is turn the cash into confetti.

  Mr. Fitz is not exactly in this pattern. In fact, you could say that he treats a dollar as if it were a horse. And he has done this for seventy-six years now. Nobody really knows what he has in the way of money and it doesn’t make much sense to inquire because ten dollars or ten million dollars is not going to make a human being like him. But mere browsing through the record books shows you that what he’s made isn’t hay.

  His private business probably consists mostly of stocks and bonds, all of the kind that would hold up even in a depression. Most of his bets in the stock market were made for him by William Woodward, who understood that his client wanted to traffic only in things which were cement-solid.

  Mr. Fitz’s major business venture would have to be a thing called Bigeloil, a liniment. He purchased most of the stock of the company owning the formula and set up a small bottling plant in the ’30s and has it running on about the same basis today. He also puts out a product called Fitzsimmons Leg Paint, which is usually applied to an ailing horse’s leg, although expectant women, who flop around with leg cramps, can put it to excellent use. It does a fine job on the legs, although it can be hell on husbands because when you wake up in the morning you think you’re rooming with John
stown.

  Bigeloil, according to the Fitzsimmons family, can cure anything this side of a coronary and they are not too certain but that it will prevent that. Mr. Fitz, each morning, sits down with a bottle of the stuff and plasters himself with it. He rubs his gums with it, gargles with it, paints his face and ears with it. His horses, similarly, are doused with quarts of the stuff after every workout.

  Mr. Fitz’s main business, however, is being himself and this is a unique business you are never going to find listed anywhere. You can’t set a price on things like warmth and honesty. All the money ever made could not get for any man the reaction people always have when they first meet Mr. Fitz.

  It is something which struck Catherine Drinker Bowen, the writer, one morning at Churchill Downs and she took note of it. She was at the track to see her first Kentucky Derby and early, while the horses were working out, she came to the dingy stable area and went over to meet Mr. Fitz, who was sitting in the early sunlight.

  “You shake hands with him,” she said later, “and you get a feeling that there is greatness in the man. How many happy mornings, you wonder, has he spent this way?”

  An awful lot of them. Mornings can be the toughest part of life if you are having trouble with each day. For Mr. Fitz, who is old and bent over, the mornings are the best. They start another day for him.

  l Mr. Fitz as a jockey

  2 Mr. Fitz riding in the Oldtimers’ Race at Pimlico in the 1920s

  3 Mr. Fitz, Rox Angarola and, center, Walter Miller, leading rider at the time, which was around 1914

  4 Mr. Fitz and James Fitzsimmons, Jr., in the 1920s

  5 Max Hirsch and Mr. Fitz (1959) (The New York Times)

  6 Gallant Fox winning the Preakness in 1930 (Wide World Photos)