Track Record

But look at Epitaph, he wins

it by a half

According to this here, in

the Telegraph . . .

So sang Rusty Charlie to Benny Southstreet and Nicely-Nicely Johnson in Guys and Dolls. The three veteran horseplayers were searching for that eternally elusive winner in the bible of Belmont and Broadway, The Morning Telegraph. No other publication in the world was so well-informed on such a will-o'-the-wisp subject--the ponies. The Telegraph was the Wall Street Journal of the racing world, and its 30-odd pages crinkled on every railing from Santa Anita to Hialeah.

The Morning Telegraph was so valuable a guide, in fact, that every day 50,000 readers plunked down a dollar for its thoroughbred information. No more. Last week after a nasty labor dispute and a one-week strike, the Telegraph appeared on the nation's news stands for the last time.

Like so many New York City journalistic shutdowns, the Telegraph's demise involved Bertram Powers and his powerful Local 6 of the Typographical Union. Powers had called the strike, he said, because the parent organization, Triangle Publications, had refused to submit to arbitration the layoff last winter of 20 of the paper's 120 printers. Stewart Hooker, publisher of the Telegraph and its sister sheet, the Daily Racing Form, argued that the printers still had a year to go on their contract, and anyway the 20 who had been laid off were back on the job before the strike was called. Powers struck anyway.

Setting the Pace. For Hooker, the strike furnished a good excuse to close the old-fashioned Telegraph and shift much of his editorial force to the more efficient Racing Form, a computerized operation. The Form will retain much of the Telegraph's flavor. "Chart Callers," for example, will still encapsulate the drama of a race with the same terse economy they exercised in each issue of the Telegraph: "SOLAR NAIL saved ground from the start, got through rallying in the stretch and outgamed ODDS HAVE IT to the wire." Or "BOBS B BEES quickest to begin, moved to the inner rail when clear, increased the margin along the backstretch, began to shorten stride in the final sixteenth and was all out to last over STOOL PIGEON."

Founded in 1833, the Telegraph's roster of writers over the years included H.L. Mencken, Ring Lardner, Louella Parsons, Ben Hecht, George Jean Nathan and Heywood Broun, who was fired. When it carried Walter Winchell's "Beau Broadway" column in the 1920s, the Telegraph was studied as closely as Variety at Broadway restaurants such as Sardi's and Lindy's. Even in recent years the paper kept five staffers on the show-biz beat. One of the most popular writers in the 1950s was Columnist Tom O'Reilly, who used to write a Monday piece. As Saul Rosen, 66, the paper's saw-voiced editor since 1965, wistfully recalls, "I used to watch O'Reilly through my window as he would settle at his desk, type out a line with two fingers, then go into convulsions of laughter. I've never seen a guy break up over his own humor like O'Reilly."

Rosen himself is a paradigm of a curious Telegraph phenomenon: like bartenders who do not drink, most of its callers and handicappers seldom, if ever, played the ponies. They wrote for the track record because they really loved the feel of races: the jockeying for position at the rail, the thrill of a photo finish and the sweet, sweet smell of big money. Tom O'Reilly once wrote it nicely: "It is fun to doll up and play the sport of kings for a day--as much fun as going to a wedding when the bride's old man is rich."

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