Big Risk For Pipe Smokers

Since I myself am an ardent horseplayer, it pains me to contemplate how many tens and hundreds of thousands of my fellow fans have temporarily lost their senses. Up and down the land, they have put aside their Daily Racing Form and relinquished their perpetual fantasies of twin doubles to concentrate instead upon the gaudiest and most treacherous dream of all—the irresistible and irrational urge of every $2 bettor to have a racehorse of his own.

The horse that has fired this year's dream—and this has been an annual frenzy since 1954—is a colt by Sword Dancer out of Elite; although a mere 2-year-old that does not even possess a name, it is already one of the most publicized racehorses in the world. The colt is won by sending in, by the first week of April, a name and a wrapper from a pack of Kentucky Club pipe tobacco. So, from Maine to Oregon, the pipe smokers in the horseplaying fraternity puff away like mad, and the nonsmokers seriously deplete their betting funds by buying tobacco anyway and pressing it upon their friends. (One contestant, gifted with a more practical turn of mind than most horseplayers, once bought a hundred packs, tore off the wrappers so that he could submit a hundred names, then gave the contents to a veterans' hospital, thus establishing a charity deduction for his income-tax return.)

No class of horseplayer seems to be immune to the blandishment of the contest. In past years two of the prize horses have been won by college professors, and one by a staid civil servant in the Department of Labor. Several housewives have won, including the widow of a Massachusetts policeman. One year a whole bundle of entries was mailed in, unsuccessfully as it turned out, by a nun in an Ohio convent who persuaded her pupils' fathers to save their Kentucky Club wrappers for her.

The number of names submitted in the contest runs to the astounding average of 800,000, and this year contest officials think the total is close to a million. To all the contestants I can only offer the kindest thought I know: I wish you bad luck.

This attitude may seem harsh of me, but owning any kind of racehorse is a hazardous business; it has broken the hearts of gallant generals and bankrupted shrewd tycoons. Owning a young horse is the biggest risk of all. I could cite you some harrowing examples out of my own sad experience as a small-scale horse owner, but we can let that pass. The record of what has happened to the contest winners speaks as eloquently as I could.

Last year's winner was Dr. E. Dean Anderson, assistant to the president of Portland State College, who acquired a colt by Citation out of Fast Jane by naming it Title Talk. Did Title Talk get to the post as a 2-year-old? Only the naive would ask. Two-year-olds have a maddening tendency to get the equine equivalent of whooping cough in the spring, buck their shins in the summer, tantalize their owners by looking ready for a race in the fall and promptly buck their shins all over again.

What then did happen to Title Talk? Well, the other morning at Hialeah, where the colt was in training for its 3-year-old campaign, it worked a leisurely half mile, walked off the track and dropped dead. (I have tried, incidentally, to figure out how and why Dr. Anderson and the judges found the name Title Talk pertinent, but must confess that I remain baffled. I have also looked into why the winning names are usually so awful, and I am no longer baffled as to that. Obviously, ties must be thrown out and, obviously again, when several hundred thousand people sit down to name a horse the good names occur to more than one person.)

The 1962 colt went to a Los Angeles physician named Dr. Theodore Stonehill. It was by Polynesian out of Secret Recipe, and the doctor came up with one of the few good names that the contest has produced, Cook's Find. Dr. Stonehill journeyed to Churchill Downs at the tobacco company's expense to take formal possession on Thursday of Derby Week, as is the custom, and found himself grievously disappointed, not to say shocked. The pictures in the advertisements had shown Cook's Find to be an absolutely faultless and handsome gray—but in Dr. Stonehill's opinion, exquisitely expressed in a lawsuit that he subsequently filed against the company, the colt was pigeon-toed, slovenly-gaited, overweight and carrying heat in both ankles. To compound the doctor's chagrin, the colt, at least in the doctor's view, was lop-eared and therefore esthetically obnoxious.

The company settled the case out of court and kept Cook's Find, maintaining that the colt is and always has been all right except for an unfortunate tendency to buck its shins, which it has just done for the third time. At any rate, Cook's Find is now 4 years old and has yet to get to the post, much less get into the money.

Is it worse to have your hopes dashed at the start or to be permitted to dream awhile? For three years Walter Dorn, a Pasadena jeweler who, among other things, sells binoculars and stopwatches to the horsemen at nearby Santa Anita, had yearned and struggled to win the contest. The fourth year he persuaded his wife, Madeline, to try. The colt was by Count Fleet, and to Mrs. Dorn this seemed like fate, for her brother was engaged at that very moment in a tense political campaign for a rapid-transit system. She sent in the name Hasty Transit and, sure enough, it was fate all right. In late April a man came knocking at her door to tell her that she was the proud owner of a racehorse. Mrs. Dorn was panic-stricken. What she had really wanted, in her heart of hearts, was one of the second prizes, a hi-fi set.