There is never a mid-September when the collective memory of the Southern California racing clan does not turn to the bustling inland town of Pomona, where the Los Angeles County Fair made its debut in 1922, and Thoroughbreds competed for attention with the thrill rides and carnival barkers for three-quarters of a century.
Racing was staged in Pomona before a grandstand built in 1932 in anticipation of the legalization of pari-mutuel racing in California the following year. That meant the fair was off the mark first, before Santa Anita (December 1934), Del Mar (1937), or Hollywood Park (1938).
Through the decades, the Pomona meet offered a three-week break after the intensity of Del Mar and the looming riches of Santa Anita, and later Hollywood in the fall. Some smaller stables depended upon the 14 days of racing at Pomona (renamed Fairplex Park in 1984) to make their nut for the year.
Fairgoers – eventually numbering more than a million every year – could meander in and out of the racing venue as they pleased. The fact that they could quite by accident get a glimpse of such Hall of Fame riders as Johnny Longden, Milo Valenzuela, Don Pierce, or even, for a single, fleeting race, the legendary Bill Shoemaker was part of the allure.
Cherry picking
Trainers Bobby Frankel, Charlie Whittingham, Wayne Lukas, and Jack Van Berg would show up there from time to time to cherry pick a sweet purse with a horse that might otherwise be a cut below stakes quality. Solid journeymen riders like Francisco Mena, Martin Pedroza, and David Flores generated a handsome living at the fair, adapting their one-mile course skills to the constant turns.
My first immersive experience at the Pomona Fair was in 1973 as the No. 2 man in a two-man publicity department. To describe the late summer weather of the east San Gabriel Valley as challenging is being kind. Smog checks were not required in California until the cars manufactured in 1976. A high-pressure system assured that most of the filthy air was eye level for the duration of the meet. You didn’t sweat as much as ooze. There were something like 84 grandstand stairs to climb to the press box in lieu of an indifferent elevator. Ties and jackets were discouraged, although oxygen was recommended.
And yet the sport was endlessly entertaining, conducted on a half-mile hoop known in the vernacular as a bullring, which only meant something if you had been to an actual bullfight. Riding the ring was a skill unto itself, combining the instincts of a fighter pilot with the carefree mentality of an unattached bachelor.
“Pomona was a funny little track to ride,” said Don Pierce, who won two versions of the Pomona Handicap and a pair of Pomona Derbys. “But then I had an advantage. I started out on a three-eighths mile track with two turns at the county fair in Gold Beach, Oregon.”
Gold Beach is on the Oregon coast at the mouth of the Rogue River, but don’t bother looking for a racetrack. Pierce was 13 when he rode there for a trainer who doubled as a sheep farmer, and that was 1950. Ten years later, Pierce won the first of his four Santa Anita Handicaps to go along with all that Pomona success.
“I thought I had an edge riding at Pomona, because I didn’t think I had to be in front,” Pierce said. “Most jocks would be going into that turn like they were going a quarter of a mile. They ended up blowing the turn, and while they were going to the fair, my horse was down inside coming out of the turn on the lead.”
On the same afternoon Prove Out shocked Secretariat in the Woodward Stakes at Belmont Park, I got to see Specialamente, bred by Harbor View Farm, win the Pomona Handicap for trainer Hector O. Palma and jockey Rudy Campas, who sat a horse like a hood ornament. Three days earlier, it was Real Decision, racing for Ken Schiffer’s Hat Ranch, taking the Pomona Derby for Mel Stute and Bill Mahorney. Stute won a dozen training titles at the fair, which was good enough to have a racetrack bar named in his honor, along with a high-priced menu item at the Top of the Fair restaurant.
In September of 1968, ace sprinter Kissin’ George set a Pomona track record of 1:09.6 for six furlongs. Two starts later he was in New York winning the Sport Page Handicap, then wrapped up his season playing second fiddle to Dr Fager in the Vosburgh Handicap.
Preakness winner
Codex turned up at Pomona in September of 1979 to finish fourth in the Beau Brummel Stakes. Of course, we all knew then and there he would go on to win the Santa Anita Derby, Hollywood Derby, and defeat Genuine Risk in the Preakness Stakes the following year. Sure we did.
Free House, though, was a different matter. He was all over the map in winning a maiden race at Fairplex Park in September of 1996, but the talent was clearly in there somewhere. Paco Gonzalez teased it out of the big gray to win the Norfolk Stakes in his next start, then spent the post-race interview answering why he would run such a clearly valuable commodity at the fair. As I recall, the trainer answered something like, “He needed to learn a lesson.”
Racing ended at the fair with the 2013 season, a victim of its own idling prospects. There were found to be better uses for more than 50 acres of grandstand and infield during the fair. The September fair racing dates were shifted to Los Alamitos in a move of somewhat cynical compromise, as if no one would notice the Los Angeles County Fair racing meet would now be presented in neighboring Orange County.
It turned out to be a short-term bandage. For the 2020 season, Santa Anita Park’s operators flexed their muscles and succeeded in acquiring the September dates granted the Los Alamitos-Fairplex partnership. It was suggested that Los Alamitos could stage its faux fair meet in July, but there was no interest. In the end, all parties lost. The Santa Anita meet that was scheduled to begin on September 9 in place of the fair dates was pushed back to September 25 due to the impact of the pandemic on business. The Southern California racing of mid-September, once the climax of the fair meet with events like the Pomona Handicap and Pomona Derby, has been for the first time since World War II rendered dark as a banker’s heart.
There has been so much trauma inflicted upon the California racing circuit in recent years that the elimination of racing at Pomona has had only marginal impact. Losing Bay Meadows and then Hollywood Park in the last decade, along with the associated stabling, has shaken the circuit dramatically.
At one point there was a flurry of interest in reviving the Fairplex property with investment as a major training and racing center and a turf course added, no less. But that eminently sensible idea fizzled from a lack of unified enthusiasm, and so the regional sport continues to suffer from the phantom pain of an amputated appendage. September has never been the same.