THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 4, 1996 TAG: 9608020238
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: 78 lines
Lots of people have old pictures of themselves on a horse, but Chesapeake veterinarian Dr. Rod Hartwick has pictures with a difference. The horses he's riding are Thoroughbred racers, and he was the jockey who booted them home first in races all across the country.
In 1945, he'll tell you with a proud grin, he was the leading apprentice jockey in America. Now he's the bespectacled 64-year-old treating family pets at Island Wharf Clinic. Fifty years ago, he spent a lot of afternoons driving for the stretch on a thousand pounds of horse flesh pounding the turf at nearly 40 miles an hour.
Hartwick is a Michigan native whose father dabbled in a grab-bag of different businesses. Dad also liked to sneak off and go to a race track in Detroit. Before he went, Hardwick remembers, he would meticulously check the racing news and figure the best horses to bet. But then. . .
``Then,'' says Hartwick, ``he would get a so-called hot tip at the track and follow the tip. All the hot tip horses would lose, and the ones he planned to bet on would win. He'd come home mad every night.''
In the early 1940s, Hartwick Senior went from bettor to owner. He bought seven horses from a trainer who had been drafted into the Army. ``Seven old crow horses'' is the way Rod Hartwick describes them. Nevertheless, one of them, appropriately named U R A Winner, won its first race. The purse was $400, four times what Hartwick's dad paid for the horse.
Easy money, thought Hartwick Senior. Beginner's luck, said Fate. The Hartwick horses didn't win another race the rest of the season. They were sold to pay the bills.
``But Dad was hooked on racing,'' Rod Hartwick says. And the next season, with two better quality horses, the Hartwicks headed for a New Orleans track. Grandpa Hartwick, who had some training, would act as vet. Rod Hartwick would be the exercise boy, the one who worked out the horses.
``From the time I was in diapers I'd been riding horses,'' Hartwick says. ``You were supposed to be 16 to be on the track. I was 12 but I guess the racing commissioners felt sorry for us.''
Hartwick's promotion to jockey came in April 1945. His dad couldn't afford a jockey and someone said, ``Let the kid ride,'' mostly as a joke. That's how Hartwick found himself in jockey silks. ``Nervous but not scared,'' he finished third. On June 30, 1945, he won his first race at a track in Detroit. One of the more printable things the other jockeys did to celebrate the victory was paint Hartwick with shoe polish.
His racing career kept him on the move. In one year, for instance, he attended 16 different schools. One of his temporary alma maters was St. Aloysius, a New Orleans Catholic school. He was the only non-Catholic in a 2,000-member student body, but the fathers came to the track every Saturday to cheer him on. A newspaper story called them ``Hartwick's Gallery.''
He won more than 500 races in the three-plus years he rode. ``I remember every one of them,'' he says, but the one that might have been most memorable didn't happen. He was scheduled to ride an early favorite for the 1946 Kentucky Derby, but the horse was injured and withdrawn.
Watching races on TV, seeing the horses drive in a tightly bunched pack for a turn, you wonder if it isn't scary. ``You didn't think about the danger,'' Hartwick says. ``You concentrated on holding your horse steady and not giving ground. If you did, you might as well get out of racing.''
Whether he thought about it or not, the danger caught up with Hartwick in 1947. He took a series of three spills, breaking his collarbone twice and injuring his back as well. His weight climbed from 102 to 126, and he had to induce vomiting to get it back down and keep it there.
``No fun,'' he said. ``I decided to retire. I was going to go to school in Coral Gables, Fla., and be an exercise boy.'' His racing career had been lucrative, though. When the principal of the Coral Gables high school asked if he could take care of himself, Hartwick produced a $40,000 bankroll. Hartwick's dad had always wanted him to become a vet, so that's the career path he followed. Meanwhile, the ex-jockey had grown big and sturdy enough to win a football scholarship to Michigan State University. He got his vet license in 1959. Three years ago, he moved to Chesapeake from Kentucky.
Ask him about the future of Thoroughbred racing and he calls it a dinosaur because of the popularity of riverboat gambling. He doesn't gamble himself. ``You can't win,'' he says. Except that he used to get a welcome prize from the teachers at St. Aloysius.
``On days when I won three or four races,'' he says, ``they would excuse me from homework.'' by CNB