The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [75]
This was the first jumper class in a horse show that would last three days. Already the crowd was rooting for the plow horse.
Marie Lafrenz, in charge of publicity for the Sands Point show, was up in the bleachers with her manual typewriter balanced on her knees. Orphaned as a child, Marie had grown up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, raised by her grandparents. She took up riding as a girl and was a fearless competitor—the first woman to win the Brooklyn Indoor Steeplechase, in 1939. During her years at New York University she began to write, and she now covered thirty annual horse shows as a stringer for the New York Herald Tribune. She also used her reportorial skills to drum up horse show publicity. This weekend, her job was to pound out press releases in the hopes that they would be picked up by the local papers.
Marie believed that horse showing had a future as a spectator sport. Harness racing, long a popular American pastime at country fairs, had recently started to win suburban fans. Attendance at Roosevelt Raceway, in nearby Garden City, sometimes topped fifty thousand people—and unlike thoroughbred racing, which was thought to attract an unsavory crowd of lowlifes and gamblers, harness racing was being pitched as a wholesome family recreation. Newly suburban Long Islanders showed up in droves to watch the races. Even an I Love Lucy episode showed Lucy and Desi at the Roosevelt Raceway, where she bet on a horse named Whirlygig. It seemed that the more horses disappeared from everyday life, the more iconic they became. By the 1950s, as families moved off farms and into suburbs, signs of nostalgia about horses—TV westerns, horse-themed books and movies—abounded.
Now a rarity, the workaday horse served as a reminder of a simpler time. In 1956, when an eight-year-old bay mare pulling a junk dealer’s cart took off up Ninety-second Street in Manhattan and jumped several street barriers, she was dubbed the winner of the “Broadway Steeplechase,” and received sugar, apples, carrots, and a half-page picture in the New York Times.
The horse as a fundamental archetype had lost none of its power. Newspaper sportswriters looking for good copy were happy to be fed a horse story. The pioneering sports promoter Joey Goldstein had already figured this out. Helping to promote nearby Roosevelt Raceway, he started a campaign to gather artichokes for a French trotter who supposedly thrived on a diet of nothing but the exotic vegetable. The papers grabbed hold of the story and covered it extensively, bringing out droves of ticket-buying spectators toting bags of artichokes. Perched in the bleachers at Sands Point, Maria Lafrenz was looking for just this kind of attention-grabbing yarn.
It was a tough time for newspapers. The new medium of television was gaining ground rapidly, putting huge pressures on daily papers, which increasingly fought for readers. New York City alone had dozens of daily newspapers, published every morning and evening, as well as at least one smaller paper serving every locale; but the years from 1956 through 1958 were brutal for these papers. The number of closures and consolidations was dizzying, with mergers producing weird conglomerates with long hyphenated names, such as the New York World-Telegram and Sun. Even venerable grande dames like the New York Herald Tribune were struggling—a palace coup in the Reid family, owners of the Trib, had replaced Whitey Reid with his younger brother, Ogden. Trying to broaden the appeal of his paper by grabbing some of the New York Post’s more working-class audience, Ogden Reid would change the Trib’s image as a place where writing and reporting excelled. Competition for market share was fierce. Papers that failed to hold on to their audiences disappeared.
Ever on the lookout for appealing stories to fill their newspapers’ pages, journalists often turned to press releases—short articles written up by publicists, like the story of the artichoke-eating trotter, that were geared to catch a newspaperman