WAVE OF NOSTALGIA : At Lazy, Crazy Del Mar, the Racing Is Easy

DEL MAR —  Young and old, anyone with a hunch on a horse answers Del Mar’s clarion call and settles in here for a day, a week or a season during the summer racing meet. Johnny Burke and the track’s founder, Bing Crosby, wrote the Del Mar anthem--”Where the Turf Meets the Surf”--in 1938, and their lyrics still apply: Take a plane, take a train, take a car. Del Mar is as timeless as the song.

Del Mar is Saratoga without the waters, Santa Anita without the haze and Hollywood Park without the airplanes overhead. “Every year, I can’t wait for Del Mar to open,” said Ron McAnally, the Hall of Fame trainer, who has won more than 50 stakes races here since 1961. “When it comes to race meets, there’s no comparison.”

This Wednesday, 60 years after it opened, Del Mar will begin its 58th seaside season. There are always some sure bets: The field for the first race will come on the track to a scratchy recording of the Crosby-Burke-James V. Monaco song; the first race will be a route, starting in front of the stands; and when the horses are sent on their way, a crowd of more than 25,000, many of them women wearing flying saucers for hats, will scream deliriously, setting an early decibel record for the meet. For another seven-week season, Del Mar is back, and the rest of the world is on Mars.

McAnally was a teenager when he first saw Del Mar. By the summer of 1948, Crosby had sold out and the track was operating under its third ownership group in as many years.

Brought up in a Kentucky orphanage, McAnally was working at the adobe barns as a groom, rubbing horses for his uncle, Reggie Cornell.

“Doc Robbins [the veterinarian Jack Robbins] was driving an old brown Chevy,” McAnally said. “He was always nice to the guys who worked around the barn. He’d take us out to dinner once in a while, and I remember going to a restaurant one night and meeting Shirley Temple and John Agar [husband and wife at the time].”

McAnally and Robbins became lifelong friends. It was Robbins who looked after the sore-legged John Henry when McAnally was taking the old gelding to two horse-of-the-year titles in the early 1980s.

A quarter of a mile from the Pacific Ocean, Del Mar is 100 miles south of Los Angeles and 25 miles north of San Diego. Horse trainers work at seven-day-a-week jobs, and the season here is about as close as many of them come to an actual vacation. The grind-it-out reality of the bigger tracks disappears, or at least becomes a mirage. By contrast, the living is easy. Gershwin wrote that, not Crosby.

But you can live hard at Del Mar if you want to. Lester Holt, the leathery trainer who died in 1995, was fully aware that the candle had a wick at both ends. Besides being a partner in Bully’s North, one of Del Mar’s most popular hangouts, Holt believed in patronizing the competition, just to see if he might learn something. A night on the town with Holt was a multi-stop marathon. A mile and a half was his best distance.

One morning after, Holt was found at his barn, propped up on a folding chair. In the nearest stall was Prince Spellbound, the best horse he ever had. Holt had brought a large fan to Del Mar, to help Prince Spellbound with the summer heat, but this morning the fan was turned around, pointed at the trainer. This day, Holt needed the blasts of air more than the horse did.

“There’s a reason I don’t run Prince Spellbound out of town,” said Bill Pease, who owned the horse. “My trainer doesn’t ship well.”

Bully’s is for the meat-and-potatoes crowd. For upscale tastes, Del Mar habitues turn to restaurants like Scalini’s, in the direction of tony Rancho Santa Fe. Holding court there one night, hosting a dinner party of about 12, was Tom Gentry, the breeder from Kentucky.

The room was thick was gossip about Gentry’s financial predicaments. Not long after, he filed for bankruptcy and did some prison time for fraud and money laundering. “Hey, yeah, I’m in some trouble,” Gentry said as he left Scalini’s. “But hey, this is Del Mar. I just had to be here.”

You can’t hide at Del Mar. Nobody wants to, really. Jack Price, who bred, owned and trained Carry Back, winner of the 1961 Kentucky Derby, had been to racetracks all over the world, but he had never seen Del Mar, and a few years ago, before his time was up, Price left his Florida home to visit here. Joe Morgan, who managed the Boston Red Sox, would escape Anaheim for a day so he could do some serious handicapping.

The other day, Johnny Longden, now 90, was visiting a nearby granddaughter when he came over to Del Mar.

“Just wanted to get a look at the place,” said Longden, who made riding history here and also suffered three broken legs at the track before he went on to training horses. When Longden rode his 4,871st winner, breaking Sir Gordon Richards’ record on Labor Day of 1956, Desi Arnaz congratulated him in the winner’s circle. On another Labor Day, in 1970, Bill Shoemaker rode his 6,033rd winner to break Longden’s record. The horse’s name was Dares J, and Longden, retired for four years, reached up to shake Shoemaker’s hand before he hit the ground.

The bettors at Del Mar might be laid-back, but Longden found that horseplayers wronged are still capable of rocking a grandstand anywhere. One of the biggest tremors here came after the 1956 Del Mar Futurity. Prince Khaled, ridden by Ralph Neves, won the race by 11 lengths in a record time, but had bumped Longden’s horse, Mr. Sam S., leaving the gate. The stewards took about 20 minutes to decide, finally disqualifying Prince Khaled, moving Swirling Abbey from second to first and Longden’s horse from third to second.

“Neves’ horse was so much the best that all he had to do was keep him straight,” Longden said. “But they couldn’t blame the uproar on me. I didn’t claim foul. It was the stewards that lit up the inquiry sign.”

Old Del Mar photographs show Longden posing with a variety of personalities--one shot in the jockeys’ room with J. Edgar Hoover, a $2 bettor and director of the FBI; another at a charity softball game with Joe Frisco, the stuttering comedian.

Frisco, frequently in debt to Crosby after betting on slow horses, went to the track one day with a friend who was packing the Daily Racing Form, every tip sheet, a pair of binoculars and a stopwatch. Frisco brought only himself.

“You gotta have the figures, Joe,” the friend said. “The only way to beat this game is with the figures.”

He lost the first five races while Frisco, for a change, picked several winners. As the horses came out for the sixth race, Frisco was asked what betting system he was using.

“See that three-horse wiggle his ears?” Frisco said. “See that four-horse wiggle his ears? Three and four. I’m going to play No. 9.”

“No. 9?” the other one said. “What the hell ya talking about? Three and four comes out to seven.”

“There you go with those damn figures again,” Frisco said.

Structures at the Del Mar fairgrounds are named after Crosby and actor Pat O’Brien, who helped bankroll the track in the beginning and was Del Mar’s first vice president. Jimmy Durante Boulevard runs on one side of the track and the grass course is named after the comic who had the nose to make every photo a winning one.

During World War II, Del Mar missed three years of racing and the grandstand became an assembly line, where crews cranked out wings for B-17 bombers. By mid-1945, Santa Anita was allowed to run an abbreviated meet and Del Mar’s season came on its heels, starting in July. On Aug. 14, after the bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, word reached the track that Japan had surrendered.

In something straight out of “Knute Rockne, All American,” an emotional Pat O’Brien stepped to a microphone with a priest at his side. “Although this is a time for joyous celebration,” O’Brien said, “it is even more a time for prayerful thanks.”

The next day, which had been declared a national holiday, 20,324 fans bet almost $1 million, setting a Del Mar record. On Labor Day, the attendance record was again shattered when 22,402 came. “Del Mar had come of age,” wrote the late publicist, Eddie Read. “Bing lifted the mortgage.”

Crosby may have gone, but the celebrities kept coming. In 1952, Prince Aly Khan arrived at the old Del Mar airport by private aircraft, and the first thing he said upon deplaning was: “I have only $10 in my pocket and I’d sure like a couple of winners.”

A little later, the prince met trainer Willie Alvarado, who was running Moonrush with only 112 pounds in the San Diego Handicap. “Bet my horse,” Alvarado said. “I don’t think he can lose.”

Moonrush won at 4-1.

“Aly was jubilant,” Read wrote.

Now Del Mar is lean on celebrities and long on horses. Last year, a crowd of 44,181--a record by almost 10,000--turned out as Cigar was thwarted by Dare And Go as he tried for his 17th consecutive victory.

“It was during the Republican national convention in San Diego, but it didn’t make any difference,” said Peggy Manoogian, executive director of the Greater Del Mar Chamber of Commerce. “It would have been impossible to find hotel rooms or make a dinner reservation, anyway. That’s the way it is every racing season.”

The track was rebuilt several years ago at a cost of $80 million. Termites were threatening to tear down what Bing built. But there are many things about Del Mar that have stayed the same. The cost of housing, veteran trainer Mel Stute said, always seems to creep past what you think you can afford.

“When you had $1,500, a place would cost $2,000,” Stute said. “Then when you had $2,000, the price was $3,000. That’s the way it goes.”

This season, the Stute family will settle down in a five-bedroom home near the track at a rent of $8,000 for the seven-week season. But this is Del Mar, and it might still be cheap for the pleasures that are ahead.

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Del Mar Facts

* When: Meeting runs Wednesday through Sept. 10 (43 days).

* Races: Wednesday through Monday; Tuesdays are dark.

* Post: 2 p.m. except for 4 p.m. on first four Fridays of meeting (July 25, Aug. 1, 8 and 15) and 12:30 p.m. on Aug. 8 (Pacific Classic Day).