The long goodbye for Hollywood Park

Saturday will bring one more ripple to Betfair Hollywood Park's mostly quiet waters. So, you ask Richard Warren for a crowd prediction. It will be CashCall Futurity day, the last outing of the year for 2-year-old thoroughbreds aiming at the Triple Crown races. That's a legitimate attraction. Warren grimaces, then wrinkles his brow. You prompt him a bit. Maybe 15,000 fans? He finally shrugs and says, "Yes, maybe. It sure won't be like the old days." Warren is 86. He has worked at Hollywood Park since 1948. That's two years before Vin Scully sat before a microphone to do Dodgers games in Brooklyn and 10 years before Scully showed up to do them here in Los Angeles. The two are certainly not comparable in fame, but are in seniority and memory. With the track's final day, Dec. 22, looming, he has become, for the thousands who know him, a sort of symbol of past joy and current sadness. "People stop to talk," he says, "and none of them — I really mean none of them — still believe they are going to tear this place down for real estate. We've all been told that, but nobody seems to believe it." But then, he talks about his frequent sighting of "eight or 10 people, walking around, looking at everything, and one of them has a clipboard." That means, he says, they are taking inventory of the metal and copper that needs to be stripped before the wrecking ball. "We used to have 30,000 people on a Wednesday," Warren says, "and then we could get it up to around 60,000 on Saturdays. People were everywhere, zipping around, talking, trying to get into these seats. The job's a lot easier now." It takes a little coaxing, but Warren's personal memory bank opens. "I remember Fred Astaire, sitting in these boxes," he says. "Then, there'd be Lucy and Desi Arnaz and they'd be arguing about something and they'd be with Jimmy Durante and he'd be just sitting there, smoking a big cigar, and ignoring them." Most of the greatest thoroughbreds in history ran at Hollywood Park, and Warren says, to him, one was the most impressive. "I saw Citation in the post parade and I really remember it because he just stood out," Warren says. "I don't remember the year, or the race, or even if he won, but you looked at him and you knew he was special." Citation, the eighth of 11 Triple Crown champions, won the Hollywood Gold Cup in 1951. It was his last race and, with that victory, he became the first horse to top $1 million in winnings...more