Archive of the Day

I head up to Saratoga in a couple of hours, and I'll be posting a lot from up there, some about horses, some not. For now, this from famous racing writer Joe Palmer, written when the Saratoga racing season was four weeks. It's now six.

For four wonderful sleepy weeks -- a small voice, calling itself experience, here says, "You mean sleepless weeks" -- racing makes at least a partial return to the unhurried, graceful and leisurely atmosphere in which it was born. This flavor lingers in but a few places and is consequently the more precious.

Saratoga has its critics, of course, but it is customarily shelled from long range. Let a man hang around the place for a while and drink his breakfast from the clubhouse porch and you have no more trouble with him. Saratoga is slightly contagious, though you can't catch it at Jamaica.

There is a story that Lily Langtry once upset Saratoga's slow decorum by appearing publicly in red slippers. She would have to go a little deeper than that now, for I suppose a man can see more curious things going up and down Saratoga's Broadway in the morning than he could see in the same time at the Bronx Zoo. But a man has no business on Broadway in the morning. He ought to be either at the race track or sensibly in bed.