Jim O’Donnell: Forty years later, an odd memory of the Arlington Park fire
ON WEDNEDSAY, JULY 31, 1985, the 58-year-old main grandstand and clubhouse building at Arlington Park burned to the ground.
The event was dramatic to all who witnessed any part of it. It was also curious to some who monitored the patterns of thoroughbred and harness racing in the Chicago area.
After decades without a devastating racetrack blaze in northeastern Illinois, South suburban Washington Park was suddenly reduced to ashes in the winter of 1977.
(For connoisseurs of embers, one day prior — Sunday, Feb. 6, 1977 — the Goldblatt's department store that anchored Mount Prospect Plaza was toasted. A hustling young Daily Herald city editor named Doug Ray — now long the publisher and CEO of Paddock Publications — was the first newsman on the scene.)
Washington Park was never rebuilt. Owner Gulf & Western received a $27.5M insurance settlement.
IN NOVEMBER 1978, WEST SUBURBAN HAWTHORNE RACE COURSE went up in flames. HRC reopened two years later with an upgraded main frame, one that today is in need of enormous renovation.
For the next five years (1980-85), general normalcy reigned over Chicago-area ovals.
At Arlington during that span, some notable events included:
· The inaugural running of the Million in August, 1981, a global event fathered by track president Joe Joyce and Daily Racing Form columnist Joe Hirsch;
· The firing of the supremely beloved Phil Georgeff in August 1982 by a nutmeg president named John Mooney, who improbably succeeded Joyce the previous winter under the aegis of Gulf & Western; and,
· The purchase of AP in August 1983 by a consortium consisting of majority money man Dick Duchossois, Joyce, minority stakeholder Ralph Ross and operations wizard Sheldon Robbins.
(The first move of the new management group was to fire Mooney. The second was to rehire Georgeff. The feisty bantam came back to the winner's circle by helicopter — from the Woodfield parking lot — four weeks later and told adoring railbirds, “Like MacArthur at Leyte Gulf, I have returned.”)
JOYCE WAS THE FRONT MAN and Robbins was the savvy brains. Ross was the affable silent partner.
As for Duchossois, he also stayed in the background. His Cliff Notes m.o. at the time was: fabulously wealthy businessman, capable of regal charm, widowed, dressed like understated European royalty with a baronial estate in Barrington Hills.
And that's the way it was on the morning of July 31, 1985.
WBBM-AM (780) WAS THE FIRST to report some sort of fire at Arlington. Initial news aired shortly before 5 a.m.
By 10 a.m., unofficial updates were that a fire near the track's exclusive Post and Paddock Club had been contained.
AROUND 11:30 THAT MORNING, Tom Finch — AP's director of marketing & promotions — stood alongside a bearded racing writer from the Daily Herald. They were in the parking lot on the Northwest Highway side of the track, directly east of the paddock.
The fire appeared to be out. So they decided to go into the building through a ground-level employee entrance.
They had no flashlight and there was no power inside the building. They advanced about 60 feet down a corridor before being dissuaded from any further exploration by smoke and the menacing darkness.
So they turned back and exited.
Still, the blaze appeared to have been extinguished.
SHORTLY AFTER 1 P.M., media were directed to a conference room in the Arlington Park Hilton, once track empress Marje Everett's grand Arlington Park Hotel, which opened in 1966-67.
Joyce stood in front of a large glass window that framed the track. Flanked by Duchossois, Robbins and Ross, he was providing the first official comments on the fire.
All of a sudden, through the window, attendees could see a startling wave of serious flames sweep over the track from east to west.
The media session was adjourned. AP was cooked.
Later that day, in a second press session in the same room, Joyce grimly stated, “We've loss the grand old lady.”
WITHIN DAYS, ANY LAMENT WAS REPLACED by forward-ho when Joyce and Duchossois — now appearing centerstage in tandem — told all that Million V would go on as scheduled three weeks later in front of temporary tents and bleachers.
(Lee Strobel, then the No. 3 man in the Daily Herald editorial department and today a distinguished Christian author/investigator, was the fellow who coined the phrase “The Miracle Million.”)
WITHIN 18 MONTHS, DUCHOISSOIS BOUGHT OUT Joyce, Robbins and Ross.
With RLD as sole proprietor, his palatial new horse course opened in June 1989 and died 32 years later.
But there has never been any question that the igniting event of July 31, 1985, altered a whole lot of paddock trajectories.
Jim O'Donnell's Sports and Media column appears each week on Sunday and Wednesday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com. All communications may be considered for publication.