Walter
Wellesley “Red” Smith, in case you’ve never heard of him, was a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist and one of America's most widely read sports
columnists.
Here’s
an excerpt from his column about Keystone:
One-month-old Keystone Race Track in
Cornwells Heights, Bensalem Township, Bucks County, Pa. is the youngest
gambling hell in the land but already far gone in wickedness. There on the
outskirts of staid Philadelphia, and nowhere else in America this year, a man
can win a $100,000 race and lose his immortal soul on the same weekend. The
Heritage Stakes, the last $100,000 event in this country for 1974, will be run
there tomorrow afternoon, and 24 hours later Keystone will conduct its first
program of Sunday racing, plunging the community headlong into sin. It is
curious that Philadelphia, “the most pecksniffian of American cities,”
according to Henry L. Mencken, should precede New York into iniquity, but by
the time Belmont and Saratoga start desecrating the Sabbath next summer,
horseplayers in William Penn’s greene countrie towne will be hardened
characters, probably beyond redemption.
As
human depravity is measured, it was only yesterday that Pennsylvania lowered
its standards to permit such profane pursuits as baseball and fishing on
Sunday. This just goes to show what happens when the first crack in the dike
goes unrepaired.
Next thing straitlaced old
Philadelphia knows, she’ll be wallowing as deep as sin as she did in her
earliest, purplest past. Though it is seldom remembered today, Penn himself had
been in the slammer several times before he even saw America, and the town he
founded was no better than she should be. As early as 1699, in fact, Penn
imported the stallion Tamerlane and two mares to Philadelphia. A decade before
the American Revolution his grandson, Richard, was president of the
Philadelphia Jockey Club, easily the fanciest such organization in America,
candidly created “to promote the Pleasures of the Turf.”
It is frequently related how young
bucks of Ben Franklin’s time endangered pedestrians by racing horses up and
down Sassafras Street and persisted in this reckless behavior in the face of
municipal disapproval until the thoroughfare came to be known as Race Street,
the name it still bears.
The Gallows Game
That wasn’t Philadelphia’s first race
course, however. An earlier one is described thus by William H. P. Robertson in
his “History of Thoroughbred Racing in America”:
“Penn’s plans for the City of Brotherly
Love included a group of vacant squares intended as public recreation grounds,
and one of these areas, Centre Square, was frequently used for racing, accounts
of which include a description of horses ‘dodging in and out among the trees.’
(The trees might have been somewhat preferable, at that, to the Square’s later
accoutrements; Hervey reports that when it was cleared and converted into a
common, the Square was utilized for public hangings, and the horses raced
around a gallows which stood in the infield.).”
Penn was both a racing man and a
breeder and he noted in his “Reflexions and Maxims” that “men are more careful
of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.”
The first Sunday program in
Pennsylvania consists of three allowance races and six claimers. Daylight being
a trifle skimpy this season, first post at Keystone is 12:30 p.m. on weekdays,
but the law says 1 p.m. on Sundays. In Colonial days, Maryland forbade racing “near
the nearby meetings of the people called Quakers.” Today Pennsylvania forbids
it until Quakers get out of meeting and make it to the mutuel windows.
Red Smith
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