Day & Night

For a few weeks each September that cozy little strip of Long Island between Forest Hills and Old Westbury becomes a paradise for U. S. sport fans. At Forest Hills (except during war years) they may see the world's top-flight tennists, at Westbury the cream of the world's poloists, at Belmont the best U. S. thoroughbreds--and here & there, now & then, the world's greatest golfers.

This year, just a whip's crack from Westbury's famed old Meadow Brook Club, another hardy sport will bloom in September. On the site of the barren Roosevelt Raceway, into which four years ago a group of Eastern sportsmen sank $1,000,000 with the hope of bringing auto racing back to the East, another group of Eastern sportsmen has just sunk $100,000 to revive harness racing.

To attract customers to their 30-day meet, they will do away with scoring, the timehonored, time-wasting method of starting,* and substitute the recently invented McNamara starting gate in which drivers, separated by dangling ropes, are given 15 seconds to jockey for position and cross the line. The promoters will also do away with the equally hallowed custom of heat racing (two out of three heats to decide the winner instead of one race). They will lay out a half-mile track, popular with railbirds because the horses pass the grandstand twice, and install an electric tote board and apparatus for camera finishes. Besides these innovations, Roosevelt's races will be run at night, under spotlights.

Night harness racing is nothing new. In Ohio, where there are more "twice arounds" (half-mile tracks) than anywhere else in the world, trotters have raced under lights for more than a decade. Well aware that "bosses" run as well if not better in the cool of the evening (several world's records have been broken at Toledo), the country's leading stable owners last week were willing to trust their pets to a track sanctioned by their fellow owner, Socialite Elbridge T. Gerry, Chairman of New York's Harness Racing Commission, and backed by such upright citizens as Socialites Robert G. Johnson, J. Averell Clark, William G. Curran.

This September, Manhattan sport fans may see Greyhound and other top-notch trotters on their fabulous neighboring island.

* In which horses parade up the track in double file, turn and trot (or pace) down to the starting line in their lot-drawn post positions. Sometimes they make ten or 15 false starts before they all go over the line "on their gait" (without breaking stride).

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