O’Donnell: Drones over Arlington Heights will only remind of racing fireworks lost

SOMETIME AFTER DARK THURSDAY, the resilient masters of Frontier Days in Arlington Heights will present a brief laser drone show.

The flyworks will be a first for the 50-year-old holiday festival.

It'll happen over the baseball field at Recreation Park named for Lloyd Meyer, the amazing local dairyman who coached the town's American Legion diamond team for 53 years.

They say 400 drones will be involved. That's a quorum in any air space. Each will be swooshing and “a glidin’” to try and fill a hole in the soul of the Northwest suburbs.

That civic crater is located about 15 furlongs west on Northwest Highway and was once known as Arlington Park.

THE TRACK WAS BRAZENLY CLOSED in 2021 and demolished shortly after, in large part due to the heartless cutlasses of corporate pirates from Kentuckiana.

To that final Fourth of July five years ago, Arlington Park was renowned for its annual fireworks show.

It was an evening of spectacle, community and aerial oohs and ahhs that was unmatched in the region.

MOST LEARNED RESEARCH AND RECALL INDICATES that the tradition began in 1976, on a Sunday night when all of America was celebrating the nation's bicentennial.

Gulf & Western was in the midst of a 14-year stewardship of the local oval (1969-83). A colorless former FBI agent named John Loome had given way as track president to Joe Joyce, a smooth operator from New York with a gift for gab and a showman's knack for promotion.

That first Fourth was billed as “The Disneyworld Bicentennial Fireworks Show.”

It was a free evening addendum to a full matinee of racing at Arlington Park, a historic date because it was the first Sunday of legalized racing in the state of Illinois.

CHRIS POLZIN, LATER ONE OF THE LAST RACING SECRETARIES in the history of Arlington, was beginning his determined climb up the Camptown vertical as a college-age parking-lot worker.

“The day, and night, was amazing,” he said. “I think management thought most of the bettors would clear out at the end of the card and then the families would come in. So they had us parking lot people work doubles. But that's not the way it worked out.

“A lot of the racetrackers stayed. And the families came early. The night was mobbed. The fireworks were spectacular. And getting all of the cars out was brutal, to the point that management allowed the backstretch to be used as a public exit way. That was unheard of.”

BUT A TRADITION was born. And so was an annual rite of keeping excitable horses calm underneath the rockets' red glare.

“You grew to expect two things on the backside on the Fourth of July,” said Jan Ely, long a trainer and now a horse-rescue operative around Midwestern racing.

“No. 1 was 'tranquing' (sedating) horses to the exact right thresholds so they could deal with the booms. And No. 2 was the epic partying. We may have been knocking heads day after day at the races but for that one night, we were an unbelievably congenial group.

“You'd go barn to barn drinking beer, eating chicken, whatever. It was great.”

CALMING HORSES PRACTICALLY GREW to being a science, according to Polzin.

“Very few could deal with the noise without something. And many had quirks. We had a particularly skittish horse named 'Rocket' one year. We couldn't go overboard with him because he had to work the next day.

“So, in desperation, we took him out of the stable and let him look up in the sky. Suddenly, he relaxed. Apparently all he wanted to do was enjoy the fireworks too.”

IN AUGUST 1983, THE FOUR-MAN CONSORTIUM of Joyce, Dick Duchossois, Ralph Ross and Sheldon Robbins purchased Arlington after the sudden death of Gulf & Western chair Charlie Bludhorn.

“It was understood that there'd be no messing with the fireworks on the Fourth,” said Ross, the last surviving member of the purchasing quartet. “Sheldon was the numbers guy and he said the total cost was about $10,000 and it was all written off under 'goodwill.'”

(That number is believed to have ballooned to closer to $50,000 per year during the final Fourths of the Arlington new-mill timeline.)

“It was a thank you to Arlington Heights and Palatine and Rolling Meadows and all other communities impacted by our operation. And part of that was making sure that mayors and board members and families and friends were taken care of with food, drink and great viewing perches.”

AFTER THE CATASTROPHIC ARLINGTON PARK FIRE of July 31, 1985, and the four-year rebuilding sequence that followed, the stunning pyrotechnics went on hiatus until the grand reopening weekend in 1989.

Except for Duchossois's strategic shuttering of the oval in 1998-99 and his star-crossed rekindling with Churchill Downs Inc., Fourth of July fireworks at Arlington were a calendar mainstay until the gloom of September 2021.

Now it will be laser drones in Arlington Heights on Thursday, July 2.

And darkness on the edge of town, above 326 forlorn acres where spectacle, community and aerial oohs and ahhs once regally ruled the Fourth of July skies.

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.