The Horse Race Tracks: What Good Are They For?
The modern racing boom actually began early in World War II.
Attempts were made in the name of austerity to close tracks, or at least to prevent the opening of new ones.
But the government took the position that racetracks were good for the war effort because they siphoned money that otherwise would have been chasing scarce goods.
Between 1940 and 1946, racing attendance patriotically tripled to about 24 million, and the betting handle quadrupled, to about $1.8 billion.
Thereafter for four years, the attendance remained level and the handle declined to $1.3 billion; and then both rose sharply from 1951 to 1953.
Some of this rise can be attributed to television; millions who had never seen a horse race became fans of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt' s Native Dancer, whose gray coat could be seen clearly on television screens.
Since 1953, thoroughbred racing has expanded slowly, and not all of the expansion reflects a real rise in the number of fans.
Some of the increased attendance is accounted for by tracks that have lengthened their seasons. And much of the expansion in betting comes from these longer seasons, and from increases in the number of races on a day's program.
In 1941, just before the racing boom began, the great American racing writer Salvator (pseudonym for John Hervey) recalled that with great changes there has come, as inevitable, a corresponding change in atmosphere.
In addition, Salvator also pointed out that there had been complaints more than twenty-five years ago, his time, that racing in America was getting too much the savor of commercialism.
It was the familiar epigram that in England it is a sport, in France an entertainment, and in America a business antedates 1916 by some years.
It appears that Salvator, in 1941, had no glimmering of what racing as a business was developing into. While the customers multiplied, the group of people who 'produce' racing - the breeders, horse owners, trainers, track owners and racing officials began to look and act like businessmen.
Some of them were pretty big businessmen at that. Some owners fortunate enough to have top horses were soon capitalizing them at one million dollars or more, and syndicating them like pieces of real estate.
The venerable American institution of buying and selling horses also looked new in the meshes of modern taxation. But perhaps the most striking change was in racetrack operations.
Some racetracks were nonprofit institutions: a controlling interest in Del Mar, California, was given to Boys Inc., a national boys' club by Clint Murchison and the late Sid Richardson.
Some tracks were non-dividend-paying - for example, all those run by the New York racing Association, which is controlled by trustees named by the gilt-edged Jockey Club.
But generally, most tracks are public corporations very much interested in profits for stockholders; and racetrack stocks have had a considerable over-the-counter boom.