Fan Fare

Memorial Day was crisp and sunny, but cold for the beach. Some fans decided to stay home and avoid the rush; but more went. The day's attendance for big-league games shot up 40% above last year.

Fifteen minutes before game time, 43,068 people had poured into Chicago's Wrigley Field (seating capacity 38,396) to watch the Cubs meet the Giants. In triple-tiered Yankee Stadium, the biggest baseball turnout in two years--70,906--filled every available seat and then some to see first-place New York play Detroit.

Beaming baseball magnates rubbed their eyes and began believing their own stories about a postwar boom. There was renewed talk of enlarging old parks and building new ones.

Race-track operators had even more reason for imagining that the Golden Age had come. The largest U.S. race-track crowd on record fought its way into California's Santa Anita. The final count showed that 76,649 people were jammed into the picturesque grandstand and clubhouse built for 21,000.

In New York, another record mob proved that it was physically impossible to put up more than $3,564,151 on seven races with the existing betting facilities. At bandbox Jamaica (seating 15,500), when the betting began, a big proportion of the 64,537 fans rushed to stand in line.

It was a fairly safe bet that there would be bigger and more excited talk about those plans for gaudy new outsize tracks--one proposed for the World's Fair site in Flushing, another in Westchester's Eastview.

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