When Ronnie Franklin entered Buddy Delp’s world, he was nowhere near adulthood. In fact, at less than 5 feet tall with stick-thin arms and legs and a smooth face, he appeared prepubescent, as though he could still be sitting on the floor at his parents’ house playing with toy cars or soldiers.
Instead Hank Tiburzi presented him at Pimlico as an aspiring “hot walker.” It was a low-paying job, and it required no previous experience or skill set. The one and only advantage to the job was that it was always available. “All you have to do to start work on the track is to show up at the main gate in the morning,” an article in Practical Horseman magazine said. That would land you a job for $65 to $75 a week. For that you were expected to “walk six to 10 hot horses a day for four to five hours each morning, seven days a week.”
Franklin was barely out of high school, but he was already no stranger to work that was low pay and low prestige. He didn’t care about that. For him the key was the easy point of entry to the racing life.
Cathy Rosenberger described the job in its simplest terms. “Turn left,’” she said. “That’s all you have to think about: ‘Turn left.’ Give ’em a sip of water and turn left. And you do that for about five hours every morning.” In short it was the perfect job for a sixteen-year-old with a tenth-grade education.
It was Hank Tiburzi’s idea for Ronnie to seek a career at the track, and it was Tiburzi who brought him there for the first time and asked the security guard to announce him over the loudspeaker. It just so happened that it was the Delps who needed a hot walker at that moment, so they dispatched Dougie to fetch the kid.
Nobody in the Delp organization initially saw anything in Ronnie that was in the least bit out of the ordinary. “[The boy] had never held a horse or hardly ever seen a horse,” Rosenberger said. The first day he arrived at Pimlico, “He didn’t know what he was doing at all,” she noted.
As an unskilled laborer, young Ronnie Franklin had a grueling day. His morning began around 5:00 a.m., and he worked without break until around 11 a.m. In between he walked horses. Each horse that didn’t go to the track had to be walked for twenty minutes. That removed the equine occupant from his stall so that the groom could muck it out and bed it down.
When the horses who did exercise came back from their workouts, Ronnie and the other hot walkers held the animals while the grooms bathed them. Then, depending on the weather, they draped a sheet or blanket over the horse for comfort and warmth. After that, Rosenberger said, “The hot walker took the horse in the barn and turned left.”
If the horse had worked out, Ronnie walked it for half an hour just to cool it down. Without that attention the horses were prone to sickness. “The hot walkers are steady, moving the whole time we are training,” Rosenberger said. “One after another after another.”
Some hot walkers were assigned to come back for the afternoon racing as well. It was a hard day of work, but “turning left” suited Franklin far more than Algebra 1 or having to ask the incessant question: “Would you like fries with that?”
Ronnie was just one of many hot walkers, but he was restless and oddly ambitious. He had enough gumption to walk right up to Cathy, a young woman he barely knew, and tell her, “I want to ride your pony.”
The ponies Cathy rode belonged to her, and they represented her livelihood. She had reason to be cautious with them. Even so, she generously allowed Franklin to ride them through the “shed row,” around and around, just to give him a feel for the activity. But it was obvious he had no background or skill with horses.
Rosenberger’s horses were outfitted in Western-style saddles, and Ronnie mounted them like a matinee tenderfoot; he bounced around in the saddle and clutched the horn just to keep himself from falling off the horse.
The Delps generally didn’t approve of Cathy’s efforts to teach Ronnie. That became apparent one day when she took over his duties holding horses for the blacksmith while he rode her pony. Dick Delp walked by, saw the reversal of responsibilities, and wasn’t pleased.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Oh, Ronnie wanted to ride a little bit,” she said.
Dick made it clear that he didn’t like what he saw, so she took her horse and went home for the day.
Buddy also wasn’t keen on her efforts to teach Franklin. At one point she approached him and said, “I have been giving this kid riding lessons on my pony, and we need to go forward a little bit. How about if I take one of the older horses, tack it up? I’ll put Ronnie on the horse and take him out to the track, but I won’t let go. We’ll just walk and jog a little bit.”
“No,” Buddy said. “I have plans for Ronnie.”
Ronnie wanted to ride; that’s why he’d come to the track. He might not have been progressing as quickly as he would have liked, but he appeared for work every day, and that in itself was a small miracle.
The Franklins owned only one vehicle. Tony Franklin had to be at his job early every morning, and now Ronnie had to do the same, only he had to go all the way over to the other side of town. It was a thirty-five-minute car drive from Dundalk to Pimlico, even in light traffic. The only way for both of them to get to work on time was for Tony to usher his son out the front door by 4:30 a.m. He got Ronnie to Pimlico without complaint, and then he backtracked to get to his own job.
But that was Tony Franklin. He was a worker, and long before there was any glory or real money in racing for Ronnie, he was proud that his son was a worker too.
Tony Franklin had the very best of intentions when he dropped his young son off. Pimlico, with its long, storied history and famous brand, represented not only opportunity but also a sense of purpose and dignity. It was one of the oldest and most legendary sports venues in the United States.
The roots of Pimlico Race Track went all the way back to a Mexican American war hero and Maryland governor named Oden Bowie. In 1868 he was one of the invited guests to an important party at Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York thrown by the influential horseman M. H. Sanford. The men were gathered to discuss how to revive the Maryland Jockey Club and southern horse racing in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Bowie grew up on a plantation and was a former slave owner. When he was a child, his life revolved around horses as he foaled, broke, and fast rode his own “unruly colts.” From this inherited mantle of wealth, he was an unmistakable member of the ruling class and quickly became a powerful force in Maryland Democratic politics. He rose to the highest offices in the state and attended the Chicago Democratic Presidential Convention of 1864 that nominated General George McClellan to run against Abraham Lincoln.
The talk at the dinner party eventually turned from the revival of racing to the creation of a new stakes race. The guests called it the “Dinner Party Sweepstakes” because they’d given birth to it at the table that night, and initially the entries were to be limited only to the horses owned by the men who were there that evening. It wasn’t long, however, before word got out and other sportsmen clamored to get in on the action.
Saratoga made a play for the new race, but Governor Bowie brought it home to Maryland by promising to build a showcase race track for it. Bowie delivered and built his new track in Baltimore, a city on the rise. It was already a major seaport, the Western Hemisphere’s leader in railroading, and the world leader in medicine. And it was about to explode as a center of manufacturing muscle too.
To fulfill Governor Bowie’s promise, a parcel of land in northwest Baltimore called Pimlico was chosen as the site for the new track. There were many theories as to the roots of the name, but the most plausible one was that it was the brand name of an English beer.
The first Dinner Party Sweepstakes at Pimlico was held in 1870. The winner was a beautiful bay colt named for the small town in New Jersey where he was foaled: Preakness.
Within three years the Dinner Party Sweepstakes was renamed the “Dixie Handicap,” a sign of Maryland’s unreconstructed and racist core clinging to its past. At the same time, a new stakes race for three-year-olds was established and named in honor of Pimlico’s first major race winner: the Preakness Stakes. The inaugural Preakness was run on May 27, 1873, a Tuesday. It was won by a colt named Survivor.
So two years before the first Kentucky Derby, thirty years before the first World Series game, about a half century before Jack Dempsey became king of the heavyweights or Babe Ruth opened Yankee Stadium with a humdinger, and almost a century before the first Super Bowl, Pimlico hosted events that captivated the entire nation.
In 1877 a special race among three horses—Parole, Ten Broeck, and Tom Ochiltree—representing the North, South, and West, was held to decide America’s best thoroughbred. Interest for the event was so high that Congress adjourned for the day, and many of its members rode up to Baltimore to watch the race in person.
Despite its early and indelible mark on popular culture, Pimlico was never quite what it seemed. Baltimoreans nicknamed it “Old Hilltop,” a charming and evocative moniker, but it actually referred to a nuisance. There was a hump of land in the infield that annoyed fans and obstructed race views. In fact, the track was under near constant criticism and threat. In the late nineteenth century the Preakness was briefly moved to New York, first to Morris Park (a site between Westchester and the Bronx) and then to Gravesend Course at Coney Island. The famous race returned to Pimlico in 1909, but the threat that it would one day move again was persistent and would last more than a century.
In 1938 the directors of the Maryland Jockey Club voted to make one sorely needed major improvement to the track but forgo another. They agreed to pay for a lumpectomy (removing the hill from Old Hilltop), but at the same time they refused to build a new and long-discussed clubhouse. Their willingness to do the one but not the other revealed a serious schism. The directors of the Jockey Club ran the races at Pimlico, but they didn’t own the track. Pimlico was the possession of a trust. The Jockey Club only leased and operated it.
William R. Hammond, a grain dealer from Baltimore, had purchased the property at auction in 1904 for $70,000. A little later he acquired the clubhouse too, for an additional $40,000. When he died in 1917, he established a trust to run the property for the benefit of his daughter, who no longer even lived in Baltimore. Like one of the swells in The Great Gatsby, she had married well and split her time between New York and Connecticut.
Hammond’s decision to keep Pimlico for his daughter was a brilliant one. His original $110,000 investment earned her $80,000 per year in rent from the Jockey Club, as well as $90,000 to $100,000 annually in maintenance and improvements. All that, and the Jockey Club paid Pimlico’s tax bills too.
It was a sweetheart of a deal—for the trust. But for the Jockey Club the lease was a straitjacket.
Meanwhile, after years of use, major aspects of the track had worn out, and the costs for renovation were astronomical. A new grandstand was desperately needed, and it would require more than a million dollars to build it. The bill, of course, would go to the Jockey Club, while the improvement, once completed, would belong to the trust.
Good fortune didn’t keep the trust from exhibiting obnoxious behavior. With time running out on the old lease, it gave the Jockey Club only two days to decide whether it wanted to renew under the same old oppressive terms or purchase the property for $1.3 million.
The Jockey Club directors were both strapped and affronted. Their first thought, naturally, was to bolt. They planned to build their own track, somewhere in the Baltimore area, though the precise location was an unrevealed mystery. These plans, however, were stymied by a myriad of complexities. Horse racing was regulated by the state, and any attempt to leave Pimlico to race elsewhere was a serious political and legal issue that required the blessing of the governor and legislators.
Sensing that the shoe was finally on the other foot, the trust stepped up to protect its interests. It opposed the Jockey Club in Annapolis, the state capital, and worked against a bill that would have allowed the club to purchase and operate its own track.
It seemed that the trust had all of the leverage. Even politicians who were sympathetic to the Jockey Club’s dilemma had few options in helping it. Maryland state law did not license organizations for racing; it licensed sites. This was a key distinction that made it nearly impossible for the Jockey Club to simply leave and build its own track.
But the Jockey Club was run by extraordinarily rich and powerful men, and they didn’t give up easily. They lobbied to have the law changed so that the Racing Commission could issue a license to any qualified party. And they didn’t stop there. In the legislation they favored, the Jockey Club directors also proposed a provision to block anyone else from racing at Pimlico in the event that they left the property.
With all parties aggrieved, angry, and pointing guns at each other, a compromise was struck, and the Jockey Club came out stronger than ever. It finally purchased Pimlico under agreeable terms and acquired two other Maryland tracks, Laurel and Timonium, to operate under its auspice. The most interesting feature of the deal was that it brought “Old Hilltop” under the control of a venerable American family called Vanderbilt.
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Jr. dominated the Maryland Jockey Club as its major stakeholder, and by extension that made him a major mover and shaker in American horse racing. His name might’ve evoked more urbane locales, such as Manhattan or Newport, Rhode Island, but Alfred Vanderbilt was as Baltimore as they came. His maternal grandfather was Captain Isaac Emerson, a Baltimore druggist and inventor who created and manufactured Bromo Seltzer, a headache remedy that was in fact the go-to cure for hangovers. Needless to say, it was an enormously popular product in the highly intoxicated states of America, pre-Prohibition.
Emerson was a master marketer at the very beginning of a century that would be defined by branding. He pioneered techniques such as multimedia advertising, promoting Bromo Seltzer in newspapers and radio and packaging it in distinctive blue bottles that stood out on store shelves.
Even Emerson’s manufacturing plant was a marketing opportunity. He built a factory that was a reproduction of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, including a 289-foot tower. The Emerson Building—or Bromo Tower as it was more commonly called—was completed in 1911. Just as Captain Emerson hoped, it immediately drew attention. First of all, it was the tallest building in the city with a four-face clock that beckoned in any direction. The most distinctive feature of all was the building’s cap: a thirty-ton spinning electric-blue Bromo Seltzer bottle. On clear nights its azure glow could be seen clear across the bay on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. “All Baltimoreans may be divided into two classes,” the famously cranky newspaperman H. L. Mencken once wrote, “those who think that the Emerson Tower is beautiful, and those who know better.”
Many years later Bromo Seltzer lost its luster and went out of business when it was discovered that the brand Captain Emerson touted was far different from the reality. The product contained a number of toxic ingredients. Nevertheless, Bromo Seltzer had highly beneficial effects on one vital organ—the Emerson family bank book.
That was Vanderbilt’s maternal family. His father, Alfred G. Vanderbilt Sr., was the number one heir to a railroad fortune valued at more than $800 million. Even so, he wasn’t destined for a long, happy life. He died on the Lusitania, the civilian luxury liner torpedoed by a German U-boat. He was on board only so that he could acquire high-quality English fox-hunting horses. Vanderbilt’s body was never recovered, but back in Baltimore, his namesake, Alfred Jr., inherited two things—much of his father’s vast wealth and the old man’s love of horses.
Since the first day he walked into Pimlico as a young boy, Alfred Jr. had no other ambition but to be a horseman. Going to the track was “the most exciting thing I ever experienced,” he recalled years later. “It was what I wanted to do all the time.”
The centerpiece of Vanderbilt’s equine empire was Sagamore Farms, a brilliant swath of rolling green meadows in the Baltimore County countryside, framed in crisply painted white wooden fences that traveled over hill and over dale and seemed to stretch on into infinity. The property had been assembled by Captain Emerson and presented to young Alfred as a twenty-first-birthday gift—a far grander gesture than giving him a car or pen and pencil set. Sagamore included a ninety-stall barn that at times housed and trained many of the twentieth century’s greatest racers. But it was most well known as “the Home of Native Dancer.”
This man of comfort and privilege, Alfred Vanderbilt Jr., headed the Jockey Club and by extension also ran Pimlico. And under his direction, Old Hilltop occupied a preeminent role in its sport.
Alfred was the man who finally brought Seabiscuit and War Admiral together on the same track, which of course was Pimlico. Their challenge race in 1938 was one of the most compelling sporting events in American history. President Roosevelt interrupted a cabinet meeting, where he was only discussing how to end the Great Depression and avoid entering World War II, to tune in the match race on his radio. Not until the undefeated gladiators Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier met in a boxing ring three decades later would any sporting spectacle match the anticipation and intrigue surrounding Seabiscuit and War Admiral. The early Super Bowls didn’t even come close.
But for all of its excitement and venerability, Pimlico also had its share of scandals and sketchy characters. Beyond the sterling brand, there was a seamy side to the track, and it was obvious early on that it was a place that could be contentious, brutal, and corrupt. One unlikely hero came to clean it all up, and yet in doing so, he opened a box of furies that would have wide-ranging negative implications for the entire country that would last well into the twenty-first century.
His name was George P. Mahoney, and his career in public life began with a short, stormy tenure as the Maryland state racing commissioner. Born in 1901, Mahoney was the eleventh child of an Irish cop. Like many an American success story, he achieved material wealth without the virtue of an education. He quit school in the seventh grade.
Mahoney was to amass a great fortune in Baltimore, but he began as humbly as possible. He started his working life in New York City, first as a doorman and then later as one of the laborers digging the Holland Tunnel. An ambitious young man, he capped off an exhausting workday in a night school classroom where he studied business all evening.
He returned to Baltimore in 1921 and discovered a world of opportunity. He founded his own business, Mahoney Brothers, a hauling and paving company. He entered that field but without a high probability of success. In the late 1930s a four-company consortium had a stranglehold on the city’s paving contracts, making it nearly impossible for anyone else to break through and flourish. But Mahoney succeeded through a kind of frugal cunning. His first office was in the basement of his parents’ small row house. His vehicles and equipment were low-cost army surplus purchases.
With his overhead fixed and low, Mahoney devised a foolproof plan for defeating the consortium and winning city business. He bid projects so low that he was losing money on each one. But those deficit deals allowed him to force his way into the club of companies paving Baltimore. And anyway, he didn’t lose money for long. By the end of the decade Mahoney Brothers was making more than a million dollars per year.
Mahoney became so wealthy, in fact, that he lived like a Vanderbilt. He bought a 325-acre horse farm just minutes from Sagamore Farms, and with that he entered the privileged world of thoroughbred owners. He was still only a horse novice when Governor Herbert O’Conor, a buddy from his old East Baltimore neighborhood, appointed him to the racing commission. It wasn’t long before Mahoney was its chairman.
Mahoney came to power as part of a good old boy network, but with his new money he had all the earmarks of an outsider. He had absolutely no qualms about sticking it to the fat cats, and in fact, he seemed to take a certain delight in it.
As head of the Racing Commission, Mahoney rocked the boat hard. He was a zealous investigator who found corruption under every stone and pebble. Decades before Ronnie Franklin or even Buddy Delp had ever come through Pimlico’s gates, Mahoney uncovered fixed races and doped horses there. In late 1945 he administered saliva tests to the animals, looking for trace amounts of drugs. It was one of the first such efforts in the United States, and it bore plenty of fruit.
Five tests returned positive for “narcotic drugs.”
The stables that owned the tainted horses and their trainers were suspended from Maryland racing. At Mahoney’s request, federal drug agents raided the barns at Pimlico. Drugs weren’t his only target. His policies also put two horsemen behind bars for using ringers.
Mahoney saw himself in messianic terms, claiming that his efforts gave horse racing “a new lease on life.” “Racing could not have continued as long as drugging or doping went undetected,” he said. “Soon or late, dishonesty would bring about its collapse.”
Mahoney’s crusading hardly endeared him to the members of the state’s horse racing fraternity. They labeled him a grandstander and felt he was out to embarrass them all by dragging the industry’s private matters before the press and public.
The entrenched power structure didn’t take it lying down. The president of the Maryland Horseman’s Protective Association threatened to advise his 550 members to leave Maryland until Mahoney was “out of the saddle.” The Jockey Club’s directors were particularly incensed. One of their group, Vaughn Flannery, a noted artist and publisher of a weekly newspaper in Harford County, Maryland, lampooned Mahoney as “Silk Hat George.” In an editorial cartoon Mahoney was depicted kicking out horse racing experts in favor of meddling politicians.
In fact, Mahoney’s progressive ideas were a demonstrable improvement. With corruption cleaned up and a fairer game in place, requests for stall space at Maryland tracks increased to record levels. And while Maryland tracks faced stiff competition from neighboring states, both attendance and betting remained strong in Maryland. Because of these accomplishments, the Baltimore Sun wrote that the state could not “afford to lose Mahoney . . . in these critical times.”
And yet the powers that be were aligned against him. When Mahoney’s old pal Governor O’Conor resigned, his replacement, William Preston Lane, gave into the pleas of the wealthy horse racing interests and fired Mahoney. Instead of crushing Mahoney politically, however, firing him made him something of a national folk hero. “Like all fighters for the little people, [Mahoney] stepped on some important peoples’ toes and is being attacked for it,” one New York scribe sympathetically wrote in his column.
The Association of State Racing Commissioners, an important and prestigious governing board, rebuked Maryland’s governor by adopting one of Mahoney’s key reform recommendations and by electing him third vice president of its organization, a fast track to its presidency, even though he was, in fact, no longer a state racing commissioner. It should have all added up to a graceful and satisfying exit from the public scene for Mahoney—except for a couple of things. Mahoney had acquired a taste for populism, and he was out for revenge. He would soon transition from corruption crusader to the symbol of the very worst impulses in American life.
In 1950 Mahoney challenged Governor Lane in the state’s Democratic primary, utilizing a resentment-based campaign that featured the tag line “You’re the Boss.” Many Maryland citizens liked it. Mahoney gathered fifteen thousand more votes than Governor Lane. But he lost the election anyway owing to a complicated primary structure that was later ruled unconstitutional.
Mahoney nevertheless accomplished what he’d set out to do. He weakened Lane so much that the Democratic governor lost the general election to his Republican opponent. Mahoney couldn’t quite win, but he had proven that he had the power to burn it all down if he wanted to. And from that point on, he would be a thorn in the side of his own party and a boon to its enemies.
Mahoney reached his nadir in 1966, when he ran for governor yet again. A great racial reckoning was under way in Maryland, as it was in the rest of the country, and policies and customs that had segregated neighborhoods by race and religion for most of the century were under fire.
For Mahoney the righteous movement toward equality was merely something to oppose for political purposes. He had found out a long time ago that defiance gathered a crowd. This time Mahoney’s tag line was “Your home is your castle; protect it.” It was an unambiguously racist statement that aligned him, and the state of Maryland, with Alabama governor George C. Wallace, the intellectual leader of the segregationist movement.
In the short term, Mahoney’s message created deep divisions and raised levels of hate in his state. And yet, his tenor reverberated for decades and utterly changed American political behavior. First, although he was a Democrat, he opened the door for significant Republican victories, including for his own opponent in the Maryland governor’s race, Baltimore County executive Spiro T. Agnew.
Many Maryland Democrats were so aghast at Mahoney’s abusive and nakedly racist rhetoric that they left their own party and flocked to the polls in support of Agnew. Agnew played along, masquerading as a moderate. He contrasted himself with Mahoney and pledged his support to a limited open occupancy law. It was the first law of its kind south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and it was a small but significant step in ending neighborhood segregation forever. He also overturned an old Maryland anti-miscegenation law that banned marriage between whites and Blacks.
But all of that was only window dressing. Once Agnew was safely in office, he showed that he was far from a racial moderate. “He wasn’t who the voters thought he was,” said Michael Olesker, for many years a top columnist and television commentator in Baltimore. “He fooled everybody.” That became apparent when Agnew refused to meet student protestors at historically Black Bowie State College; the students were merely asking for better facilities at their school. Not to be denied, two hundred of them came to Annapolis for a sit-in protest there. Rather than ignore them again, Agnew had them all arrested.
Agnew picked a poor time to exacerbate racial tensions. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated just a few hours after the students were arrested. And then everything snapped. Baltimore, a city more combustible than most, blew up. Riots and raging fires broke out, and then it was Agnew calling for a meeting with the city’s Black leaders.
At first, Agnew said he needed their help in ending the calamity. But instead he ambushed them. Grandstanding for political gain, Agnew bizarrely accused the Black leaders of not speaking out against “Negro racism.” With their dignity strained, the Black leaders walked out of the governor’s meeting, saying they would not return until Agnew was ready to speak to them as “ladies and gentlemen.”
The absurdity and indecency of the moment was not lost on national Republican Party leaders, who looked at chaotic Maryland and liked what they saw. They nominated Agnew for vice president on the same ticket with Richard M. Nixon. Together, Nixon and Agnew turned the party of Lincoln into the new party of the segregationist South. The bitter racial divide they created would go on for many decades more.
People had long forgotten that so much national corruption began with the corruption at Pimlico. They didn’t remember that Baltimore’s famous race track had a large enough platform to elevate the profile of a humble man, with limited education, and make him a prominent national figure and newsmaker. And yet George Mahoney’s very fine work at Pimlico was the catalyst for so many calamitous American ills. Even after Mahoney left the State Racing Commission, Pimlico remained a place of bare-knuckle brawling between monied and political interests.
Governor Lane named Stuart Janney Jr., a legendary steeplechase jockey and old-line lawyer, to replace Mahoney. In a sense it was a restoration of order, a return to aristocratic rule. Janney was a graduate of the prestigious Gilman School, Princeton University, and Harvard Law School. He was also a respected barrister with the old-line Venable, Baetjer, and Howard firm. Janney was no barbarian from the lower rungs of new money like Mahoney was; he was solidly establishment, and the Jockey Club saw him as one of their own.
And indeed Janney was on board with the Jockey Club’s agenda to break out of Old Hilltop; shut it down; and move lock, stock, and barrel to Laurel. Because Governor Lane also backed the move, everything appeared to be in place to end racing at the historic venue.
It was a sad moment for traditionalists, but the truth was that Pimlico had always had its limitations. For one thing, it sat on but 115 acres, shoehorned between residential neighborhoods, large country residences for the wealthy on the east side of the track and humble row houses and storefronts on the west. Laurel, by contrast, was in an expansive pasture with a luxurious 325 acres under its control.
More to the point, Baltimore was just beginning a slow and painful postwar decline. As its manufacturing base eroded, high-paying blue-collar jobs were slipping away while white middle-class residents were abandoning the city and moving to the suburbs. Laurel, on the other hand, was suburban. It was the type of place where white people were moving. Laurel wasn’t in suburban Baltimore. It was a Washington-oriented town, and many of the residents had stable, high-paying government jobs.
Still, Pimlico had charm and history on its side. The track’s “Old Clubhouse,” a post–Civil War structure built in 1870, had the bearing and appearance of an antebellum plantation house. The patina that had settled over the rest of Pimlico did not apply to the Old Clubhouse. It was one of the most elegant architectural elements associated with any sports venue in the United States. The building looked like an iced gingerbread cake that had been baked in three layers of magnificent beauty. The building had loomed over the races at Pimlico since Preakness, the horse, had won the first stakes race. It was a moment so ancient that the fans on the porch that day had worn black armbands in respect of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who had just passed.
The Old Clubhouse was renovated and lovingly restored to its original opulence in the mid-1950s, and every little touch was a reminder that horse racing was a toy of the rich and elite. The walls were covered in Waterman Collection wallpapers. Georgian chandeliers hung from the ceilings. And imported Victorian drapes framed the windows. In the Old Clubhouse’s dining rooms headwaiters wore tuxedoes, the gentlemen were attired in jackets and ties, and the ladies were canvases for the finest fashion designers.
The Old Clubhouse was also home to the greatest memories in racing. Pimlico had assembled a museum-quality collection of racing memorabilia and a Jockeys’ Hall of Fame, much like Cooperstown, New York, had done for baseball. There were hand-painted master works of each of the Hall of Fame members framed and hanging on the walls. Eddie Arcaro, the winning rider on two of the first eight Triple Crown winners, was one of the first inductees. George Woolf, the winning jockey in the Seabiscuit–War Admiral challenge race, had his crimson-and-white silks on display there.
These collections, galleries, and the Hall of Fame were not only Pimlico’s gift to the racing community; they were also a sign of Baltimore’s place at the heart of it all. The potential shuttering of Pimlico was not only a rebuke of the facility but also a sign of Baltimore’s declining influence and fortunes. But for the gentlemen of the Jockey Club, and the governor too, it seemed to be only about money. The mania to move was like the lifting of a veil; everyone could see that history and tradition meant nothing to racing’s stewards. All they cared about was cultivating more bettors.
The directors of the Jockey Club believed that moving to Laurel was a sure thing, but they never considered the one and only thing that could derail them—political cowardice. Governor Lane was solidly in their corner until Baltimore legislators convinced him at the last moment that he was angering voters and endangering his reelection possibilities. That was all he needed to hear. He folded his hand and withdrew his support. Instead, at 10:30 p.m., under the cover of night, he pushed through a compromise solution that gave the Laurel and Bowie race courses ten additional racing dates each year but that also preserved racing in Baltimore.
So it was pusillanimity that saved Pimlico.
But fate accomplished what politics could not one calamitous night in June 1966, when one hundred years of elegance and history were consumed by fire. A blaze sprang to life in the front portion of the Old Clubhouse at around 11 p.m., and by 1:00 a.m. it was an eight-alarm catastrophe.
Like everything else about the building its destruction was spectacular. The flames leapt high into the night, stretching forty to fifty feet beyond the roofline. The flickering light could be seen many blocks away, and the heat was so intense that wooden ladders hanging on the sides of the fire trucks blistered and smoked. By 2:00 a.m. the entire building had burned to the ground. The only things that had survived the blaze were a brick chimney and the horse-and-rider weather vane that sat high atop the ornate cupola.
It was a tremendous blow to Baltimore’s ego and self-image. Even worse, it was a suspected though unproved arson. The flames that danced across the Old Clubhouse’s balconies, kitchens, libraries, and art galleries consumed more than a building. They destroyed the words, images, and objects connected to racing’s past and its glory, its noble animals and human heroes. The flames had wiped clean the institutional memory of the entire enterprise.
Pimlico bounced back to have many more great racing moments. In 1973 Secretariat bolted his way to victory at the Preakness and then the Triple Crown. A few years after that Seattle Slew and Affirmed, in 1977 and 1978 respectively, both won the Preakness and the Triple Crown.
And yet with the death of the Old Clubhouse and the bonfire of its memories, racing was never quite the same again. As an enterprise, racing had always toddled the thin, unsavory line between sport and gambling venue. After the fire, that line all but disappeared.
So it was a very different Pimlico than the one of lore that Ronald Franklin came to in the mid-1970s. There was no more genteel Old Clubhouse or paternalistic Vanderbilts, no more beautifully attired women or four-star meals.
Even the neighborhoods surrounding Old Hilltop had changed. The once well-kept houses and stores around the west side of the track were crumbling under the weight of predatory landlords and impoverished residents. And a host of urban ills struck, especially the rise of the drug culture, both inside and outside the track gates.
This was Ronald Franklin’s Pimlico, the place he came to live in the mid-1970s, when he was only a teenager freshly moved out of his parents’ home. By then, “Ronald” was “Ronnie,” close to the Delp family and in particular to Gerald, Buddy’s young son, who was also a teenage hot walker.
In Gerald, Ronnie found a soul mate. They were close in age and had a similar outlook on life. They both had dropped out of school and yet had retained a certain exuberance. Gerald was an easygoing and companionable young man with a good sense of humor.
Before long Ronnie and Gerald were not only best friends, but they were also roommates at the track, living in one of the apartments above the stables on the backstretch. It was a place made for guys like them—hot walkers and grooms, the working poor.
The living quarters were spartan, basically an empty room. The resident of the moment furnished it, usually with little more than a hideaway bed. There were no closets, and garments were usually kept in a bag or simply strewn on the floor. An enterprising and fastidious tenant might drive a nail or two into the wall to hang things up.
There were no kitchens in those rooms, and hotplates were strictly forbidden. Bathrooms and showers were in the stable area. To prevent even the allegation of sexual assault, women were banned after dark. The male residents, despite their low status and lack of financial assets, were known to be industrious and nonthreatening. “A lot of the grooms were Black men who came up from Virginia or North Carolina,” Cathy Rosenberger remembered. “They were generally very kind, gentle people. In fact, many of them asked me to pick up necessities for them, such as toothpaste, because they were afraid to leave the confines of the track due to the crime they heard about in northern cities like Baltimore.”
But not all of the worries were outside the gates. There were many unhealthy lures right on the grounds. Willie Brown, an exercise rider similar in age to Ronnie, knew all about the delightful dangers and temptations. “Anything was available inside or just outside the gates of Pimlico,” Brown said. “Heroin, coke, pot, pills [ups and downs], whatever you wanted.”
Brown was introduced to drugs at Pimlico, and ultimately that led him to many decades of substance addiction. But Ronnie Franklin was different, Brown said; he resisted the urge to experiment. “At that time Ronnie was focused on chasing his dream,” Brown remembered. “He didn’t want to get ruled off. He was more focused on getting his jockey’s license than anything else.”
That dedication paid off. Although Cathy Rosenberger couldn’t convince the Delps that Ronnie had the qualities of a rider, Gerald did. He talked to his father quite a bit about his new friend. “Dad,” Gerald said, “Ronnie looks like a jockey; he’s strong as an ox.”
Buddy noticed when Gerald told him. One day after work he called Ronnie into his office and told the kid that he was sending him to Middleburg, Virginia, for jockey training.
For Franklin it was the realization of a dream. At the beginning of the year he had been nothing more than a fast food worker. Just a few weeks earlier he was still sneaking rides and clutching the saddle to keep from falling off. But now, thanks to Buddy Delp, he was going to one of the top horse-training facilities in the world to ride honest-to-God racehorses and to learn the finer points of being a jockey.
His life was in full gallop.