Disturbance for Sparrows

One day it was a sleepy country town of 13,000; the next, a buzzing metropolis of 45,000. Saratoga natives, accustomed to this change which occurs annually with the opening, for the month of August, of the oldest and most glamorous U. S. racetrack, did not allow themselves to become perturbed by it last week. Not so the sparrows which nest in the elm trees that shake like huge dark fans over Saratoga's Broadway. Disturbed by lights that burned all night, roused by bookmakers who on the street below kept up a shrill chatter until long after midnight, the birds chattered also, lapsed into nervous silence with the rest of the town, toward dawn.

Before sunrise on the racetrack a mile away dockers glanced at stopwatches in their hands while horses, unnumbered and ridden by exercise boys or jockeys in sweat shirts, galloped through a soft summer mist. Events of the week:

P: Police and Pinkerton detectives announced, more promptly than usual, a customary feature of the Saratoga season: counterfeit bills, mostly for $10 and $20.

More alert than heretofore, the counterfeiters had apparently thought up a new trick of using urchins to distribute their productions.

P: A new feature of the Saratoga season this year, like the pretentious Spa, ceremoniously opened last fortnight, are jinrikishas, pulled by impecunious Rutgers and Dartmouth students (TIME, Aug. 5).

First socialites to have themselves lugged to the track by hand were Katherine Wait, Kathleen Kennedy and Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt's half-sister, Gloria Baker.

P: New racetracks all over the U. S. have increased the demand for racehorses.

Saratoga's yearling sales--nocturnal outdoor auctions conducted during the two middle weeks of the season--should therefore this year bring the highest prices since Depression. Thumbing through the catalogs of Fasig-Tipton Co., which conducts the auctions, horse buyers last week had their choice of 550 yearlings. Colonel Edward Riley Bradley with nearly 50 for sale offered, as usual, to bet even money against anyone who thought he could pick a yearling at the auctions which would win a race the following year.

P:. Last year Mrs. Isabel Dodge Sloane was the big Saratoga winner. Last week, though her famed Cavalcade was still trying to get over his injuries in time to race Discovery later in the month, Mrs.

Sloane's stable had been eclipsed in the public eye by that of 22-year-old Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. For the 37 stake events of the month, young "Al" Vanderbilt has 204 nominations, almost 100 more than C. V. Whitney who is second. Third day of the meet, Vanderbilt's Discovery and Identify finished first and second in the Wilson Stakes.

P: Crooner Bing Crosby whose next picture will be about racing flew in from Hollywood. So did John Hay Whitney who missed the opening day's races for the first time in years. Governor and Mrs. Herbert Lehman motored from Albany the fourth day of the meet. Sportsman F. Ambrose Clark, who spends the night at his Saratoga cottage only when it rains, commuted by plane from Cooperstown. In the crowd that saw Al Vanderbilt's Postage Due win the United States Hotel Stakes were New Jersey's Attorney General David T. Wilentz, Producer George White, Sportsman Joseph E. Widener and, wearing the aged panama hat which is his uniform for the Saratoga season, George H. Bull, portly president of the Saratoga Association for the Improvement of the Breed of Horses.

P: If improving the breed of racehorses often seems only incidental to Saratoga's racing-season pastimes of dining & dancing at half a dozen night clubs, overdrinking in countless bars, recuperating with the dubious aid of mineral waters, betting on anything from the next race to three dice in a bird cage, horses are still the focus of the town's excitement. Last week, the feature race of the first day of the meet was the Flash, for two-year-olds.

The 60-odd bookmakers, many of whom had arrived the night before on the "Cavanagh Special" (named for famed Ringmaster John G. Cavanagh), made Postage Due the favorite. The horse Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney's trainer, Tom Healey, predicts will be better than Equipoise, a big chestnut colt named Red Rain, they dismissed contemptuously at 6-to-1. After the Mash the yapping of bookmakers that kept Saratoga's sparrows awake was mostly about Red Rain. Left at the post and running a miserable last, eight lengths behind the field at the half-mile post, he had suddenly come to life running into the stretch, passed all eight horses within the last three furlongs, won the race by two lengths, cost bookmakers an estimated $100,000.

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