Country Slicker

On eleven brilliantly lit tracks around the country, some 85,000 Americans gathered each weekday night last week to feast their eyes and bet their dollars on an old-fashioned American pastime all dressed up in modern glare and glitter. They were building this season into the biggest yet in the postwar harness-racing boom.

At midseason the sport which even some of its most reverent admirers irreverently call "the trots" is drawing crowds at a rate nearly 10% higher than last year, when 10,500,000 customers flooded into 77 pari-mutuel tracks (42 on fairgrounds) to bet more than half a billion dollars. (Thoroughbred racing in 1956 attracted 29 million fans who bet $2.2 billion.) Another 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 harness enthusiasts yearly watch the swaying pacers and busy-gaited trotters at some 337 fairground tracks, where the only betting is undercover.

Lobbies at Work. In sentiment the big Midwestern fairs still rate above the city-slicked pari-mutuel tracks, still form the backbone of the Grand Circuit, a series of major meetings that are held consecutively at 19 tracks each year. At least 30,000 fans are likely to jam into the fairgrounds at Du Quoin, Ill. this month to watch the Grand Circuit's "Kentucky Derby," the $120,000 Hambletonian. But in practical terms, the sport's future lies in the ornate pari-mutuel tracks that operate at night near metropolitan areas, making a trip to the races as simple as a trip to the downtown movie house.

The big pari-mutuel tracks are still largely confined to the Northeastern and Midwestern U.S. New York State alone accounts for more than half of the fans and the betting totals (California has only daytime trots, because the motion-picture lobby has successfully opposed night racing). But many a state capital has its quota of lobbyists bucking for legalized nighttime racing.

Soothed, Stimulated, Served. The gaudiest proof of night trotting's appeal looms above Long Island 20 miles northeast of Times Square. There one night this week, on the spanking new $21 million Roosevelt Raceway (capacity: 50,000), some of the best harness drivers will tug on their silks, sit spraddle-legged on their sulkies, and open a 105-day meeting. The showplace (built near the site of the runway that bounced Lindbergh into the air for his 1927 flight to Paris) is as efficient as a supermarket, as plush as a nightclub. But at every turn the patron will be reminded why--in the management's opinion--he is there: post time will flicker from a dozen nooks; even a hotdog stand will flash the odds. Soothed by five acres of gardens, and stimulated by a decorator's 203 startling hues, the trotting fan will be served by 440 betting windows.

"We're expecting great things out here," says George Morton Levy, the canny, cigar-smoking chairman of Roosevelt's executive committee. Levy, once a top-flight lawyer (one client: Lucky Luciano), peers at his business through a rimless pince-nez and finds it thoroughly respectable, though it has been under more than one cloud.

Spectacle & Sport. But even the doubters admit that Levy & Co. and their durable pacers and trotters put on a good show. Harness racing, maintains Levy, is a more spectacular sport than flat racing. "The interval between our races isn't boring. These horses are out there all the time, running back and forth in front of the stands, warming up. Some of them run five, six miles a night before the race. You can't do that with a thoroughbred. And the lights all make it look better. In the next ten years, harness racing will double in New York and around the country."

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