NEWS
A debt of remembrance
Posted: Saturday, February 24, 2001
Racing owes recently deceased Tommy Luther for his role in founding the Jockeys' Guild
We have a tendency to remember what we would most like to forget, and forget what we would be best served to remember.
For jockey Tommy Luther, the memory he couldn't extinguish seethed in his head for 70 years. Riding on the lead in a race at Winnipeg's Polo Park in 1927, Luther didn't see Vesper Lad, a horse well behind him, stumble. He didn't see his best friend, 16-year-old Earl "Sandy" Graham, flip from Vesper Lad's back and slam into the ground, nor did he see trailing horses trample Sandy's body.
What was seared into Luther's memory was not an image but a sound: a sharp, arcing shriek that escaped the mouths of spectators as they saw a jockey fatally injured. For Luther, the memory was attended by a rush of emotions, chief among them guilt: Until the trainer had changed plans just before the race, Luther, not Graham, had been slated to ride Vesper Lad.
Thus began a nightmare and a journey. When Luther returned to the scales, Graham was still crumpled on the track, moaning, his back broken and chest crushed. Polo Park, like all tracks, had no ambulance, so someone carried Graham to the jockey's room, lay him on a saddle table and left. Luther begged officials to take the boy to a hospital, but no one did. The riders couldn't do it themselves; all were contracted to ride in upcoming races, and to leave the jockey's room would probably have cost them their livelihoods. Luther passed the hat to raise cabfare but couldn't scrape up enough; in most cases, jockeys were denied a cut of purses, leaving most with such meager earnings that they couldn't escape grinding poverty. So for an entire afternoon, all Luther could do was sit with Graham, trying to drip water into his mouth. At day's end, someone finally drove the boy to a hospital. Help came far too late to save him.
Graham had no savings or insurance, and his family was impoverished, so there was no way to send his body home. He was buried in a pauper's grave. Luther, overwhelmed with grief, moved on to another track. There, he received a letter from "Mother" Harrison, who ran the Winnipeg Turkish bath where Graham and Luther had reduced. Harrison wrote that Graham's grave was unmarked, and she wanted to dignify it with a headstone but couldn't afford it. Luther mailed her what little money he had. Soon after, she sent him a drawing of the new headstone and the sprig of flowers she had placed beside it. Luther carried the picture for the rest of his life.
In the ensuing years, Luther's career blossomed. He was rider of the year in 1927. In '28, he racked up 90 wins in one 70-day stretch and won the $92,700 Coffroth Handicap, the world's richest race, on Crystal Pennant in Tijuana. In the 1930s, he became renowned for his reinsmanship aboard Phalanx, Top Row, War Relic, and the brilliant Time Supply. But he remained haunted by that day in Winnipeg, troubled by a death he believed had been avoidable and outraged over the fact that Graham's appalling treatment was no anomaly.
In that era, spills were far more common and deadly than they are today, yet there was no system to protect riders' welfare. Most jockeys couldn't begin to afford the stratospheric insurance premiums that their profession necessitated and, in consequence, were often turned away from hospitals. Tracks offered no workers' compensation and were so ill-prepared for accidents that severely injured riders were often carted to the hospital in the least suitable vehicles, including, in the case of Seabiscuit's jockey Red Pollard, a laundry basket.
Track aprons were littered with riders left penniless by injury, many resorting to panhandling or selling pencils to feed their families. "If you were hurt," remembers Luther's wife, Helen, "you either got well or starved to death."
Luther came to believe that on that fateful day in Winnipeg, the riding assignments had been switched and his life spared so that he could devise some way to institute reforms to protect jockeys. The logical solution was to form a union to force the sport to improve conditions, but that would be impossible.
With union strikes bedeviling industries across the country, racing officials were ready to squelch any effort to organize. For 12 years, the problem simmered in Luther's mind. "I was thinking it over," he recalled, "all those years."
In 1939, thinking became action. On the day Luther arrived for Santa Anita's winter meeting, he and fellow riders Noel "Spec" Richardson, Francis Maschak, Allen Gray, and Charlie Corbett sat down for coffee at the golf club across the street from the track. They spoke of the horrifying toll injuries were taking on riders. Nineteen had been killed in the previous five years, and many more had been crippled and left destitute by injuries. As he listened to the casualty list, Luther's frustration boiled over. He made an impassioned speech about Graham and implored the other riders to join him in confronting the problem. The idea they began discussing was simple but unprecedented: Jockeys could give $20 per year, plus a dime per ride, to a non-union "community fund" to assist injured and impoverished riders. The jockeys in attendance liked the idea and agreed to gather the riding colony for meetings at the golf club.
The stewards learned of the plan. The next morning, they summoned Luther to their offices, accused him of starting a union, and delivered a Draconian punishment: Luther was summarily banned from riding at Santa Anita. Tracks nationwide followed suit, and Luther found himself unable to earn a living.
The ban was a major financial blow to Tommy and Helen, and both knew that there was a good likelihood that if he pursued the community fund idea, he would never be allowed to ride again. But with Helen's support, Tommy stood his ground. On the appointed days for the jockey meetings, he went to the golf club.
While many riders stayed away in fear of the stewards' wrath, more and more began to show up, emboldened by Luther's willingness to give up his paycheck and risk his career. By the time the Santa Anita meet ended in March 1940, several dozen riders from tracks across the West Coast were in attendance. Harry Richards was named president of the new Jockey's Community Fund, Eddie Arcaro vice president, and a mission statement was drafted.
With the close of Santa Anita, the jockeys dispersed. Luther went to New England, where he was ultimately permitted to ride again. Several jockeys who had attended his meetings went to Belmont Park. There, Arcaro, Richards and three other riders worked to complete the job of founding a jockey's organization. In May 1940, two months after the last golf club meeting, the Jockey's Community Fund and Guild Inc. was formally incorporated. The original golf club proposal of $20 dues and ten cents a ride was put into effect, and Luther took up the reins as the New England representative. It was the beginning of a dramatic improvement in the lot of jockeys. Thanks to the Guild, riders would win insurance, legal representation, vastly better pay, safer conditions, and better injury care. A quiet, modest man, Luther wasn't given to singing his own praises, but in private moments he told his friends that the role he had played in the genesis of the Guild was the greatest accomplishment of his life.
Somewhere along the way, that accomplishment was all but forgotten. While the Belmont riders who finalized the Guild's creation have been celebrated for it ever since, Luther, who made the greatest sacrifice to ensure that the Guild would be born, is almost never mentioned. Arcaro was quick to acknowledge Luther's role, as was Ron Farra, author of Jockeying for a Change: Saratoga's Tommy Luther. But others weren't so generous. "Who the hell is Tommy Luther?" one of the Guild co-founders reportedly told a journalist. "He had nothing to do with it."
Apparently, as a result of statements like this, Tommy Luther's work has been obscured.
Luther was profoundly wounded by the fact that virtually no one remembered the Guild's ultimate origins. It wasn't that he wanted the fanfare others had received, he only wanted modern jockeys to know that the benefits they enjoy, and sometimes take for granted, came at a price: the life of Sandy Graham and countless other riders, and the sacrifice Luther and his wife made in Graham's name. The Guild, he said, wasn't born at Belmont. "Where it really started was in Canada," he said, "when that boy fell."
Clutching Helen's hand, Tommy Luther died on January 27, at the age of 92.
The sport's memory of what he did for it died long before him. His monumental accomplishment survives, as does our monumental debt.
Laura Hillenbrand, a free-lance writer based in Washington, D.C., won an Eclipse Award for feature writing. Her book Seabiscuit: An American Legend is due out in March.
