Hoot Mon's Daughter

During a Florida vacation in 1951, J. (for Joseph) Elgin Armstrong, a horse-fancying contractor from Brampton, Ont., took a fancy to a yearling filly named Helicopter. Half an hour later, he bought the little brown trotter from her trainer and part owner, Del Miller, for $7,900. Explains Armstrong now: "I wanted to win the Hambletonian."

Helicopter kept her new owners (Armstrong and his brother Edwin) guessing. Last year she won only four of 21 starts, but her purses repaid the purchase price, plus $85.41. This year she won four out of ten races, blithely coming in last one week and finishing first the next. Last week, finally entered in the Hambletonian, trotting's annual classic, the fickle filly again kept a crowd of some 20,000 guessing, including city slickers who jammed the gaily canopied grandstand at Good Time Park in Goshen, N.Y. In the first heat, Helicopter lost ground by breaking her gait, coasted in 17th in a field of 23 (if three different trotters win the Hambletonian's scheduled three heats, the classic's winner is decided by a run-off heat held for them only). First-heat winner: a 17-10-1 shot, Milky Way Stable's Morse Hanover. The 8-5 favorite, Newport Stock Farm's Newport Star, took only show money.

Having taken her ease, Helicopter (with odds at 5 to 1) handsomely won the second heat, out-trotting Singing Sword, a bay colt driven to show money by Del Miller, who is still Helicopter's trainer. In the third heat, at sharply reduced odds of 7-5, Helicopter was trotting second close to the finish. Then the leader, Allwood Stable's Kimberly Kid, broke his trotting stride. Laying on the whip, Helicopter's Driver Harry Harvey strained forward in his sulky, catapulted his charge a half-length ahead across the finish line. Elgin Armstrong's vacation hunch had paid off.

Helicopter's victory produced some records of the kind carefully watched by tradition-minded Hambletonian devotees. She was the first Hambletonian winner ever sired by another winner--Hoot Mon, who set the Hambletonian's fastest heat mark of two minutes flat in 1947.* Driver Harvey, 29, a Vermont farm boy, was the youngest winning driver in Hambletonian history, no small feat in a sport-dominated by grand old men. And for Canada's two Armstrong brothers--the first foreign owners to win the race--Helicopter earned the biggest Hambletonian purse to date ($63,126).

* Hoot Mon's forebear was Hambletonian X, ancestor of almost every modern U.S. trotter and pacer. In 24 seasons, he got 1,331 foals, bringing nearly $200,000 in stud fees to his owner, a onetime farm hand named William Rysdyk, who bought him for $125. Hambletonian (after whom the race is named) in turn was sired by Abdallah I, an evil-tempered individualist who, after siring hundreds of foal's, wound up at 31 hitched to a fish peddler's wagon. After venerefully kicking the wagon to pieces, proud old Abdal lah spent the final months of his life roaming wild on a Brooklyn beach. Too weak to forage for food, he took refuge from oncoming winter in a deserted shanty, starved to death standing up, leaning against the shanty's wall, legs mired in knee-deep mud.

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