Fair Grounds Saved

New Orleans' first stake race was run 104 years ago. A horse named Angora won it, running on a makeshift track near the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, around a grove of moss-hung live oaks. For 36 years the track was a playground for Creole gallants and their blooded plantation ponies, for the stock fairs and horse races of New Orleans' Mechanics' Society. Eventually the informal track became the Fair Grounds.

After the Civil War, New Orleans' favorite track, Metairie, was turned into a cemetery, and the Fair Grounds, home of the Louisiana Jockey Club, became the centre of U. S. winter racing. Competition from California or Florida was as yet unheard of, and the track prospered. Then in 1908 the State Legislature banned Louisiana racing.

Businessmen who had suffered from the loss of winter tourist trade got the ban lifted in 1915, and Colonel Edward Riley Bradley, owner of Kentucky's famed Idle Hour Farm, who took over the old course in 1925, turned it into a show place. The Colonel built up the New Orleans Handicap purse to $50,000 -- the U. S.'s richest winter stake. Those brave days lasted seven years. Then Louisiana's oafish dictator, Huey Long, decided it was time for Bradley to go. Up went the Fair Grounds' real-estate assessment to prohibitive heights, and out went the Colonel.

Last fall New Orleanians learned that their beloved Fair Grounds had been sold to a syndicate (price: $460,000) which planned to subdivide it into small lots. The Longster syndicate which took over the track from Bradley had failed to make a go of it. Governor Sam Jones's reform administration had set up a new State racing commission to control bookmaking, enforce saliva tests, and the Longsters had decided to pull out.

On the day set for auctioning off the track's fixtures and equipment, many a nostalgic fan was on hand. For an hour and a half a red-faced auctioneer knocked down $2,000 worth of chairs, tables, other track paraphernalia. Suddenly he declared a recess. After a long wait he returned to tell the crowd that the auction was off, someone had taken an option on the track.

Last week that someone turned out to be some 65 New Orleans fans and business firms who were unwilling to see the old track go the way of Metairie. In the old Fair Grounds club house, across from the infield where Black Gold (1924 Kentucky Derby winner) is buried, they took title to the track. The price was $177,000 down and a $348,000 mortgage -- to be paid off by selling stock to New Orleanians. Said Syndicate Head Sylvester Welch Labrot Jr., president of the new Louisiana Jockey Club: "[From now on the] Fair Grounds will operate as a civic enterprise. It is to be New Orleans' track. . . . We shall have honest racing. . . ."

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