PROCEEDINGS IOWA FAIR MANAGERS ASSN. 157 



TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1921, 1:30 P. M. 



President Hoffman : We will come to order. The first thing 

 this afternoon will be an address, "Present Day Harness Racing," 

 by W. H. Smollinger, Secretary American Trotting Association. 



PRESENT DAY HARNESS RACING 

 By Mr. Smollinger. 



I am glad to be with you. Harness racing has since the fair started 

 been a fixed factor and is so closely allied with the fairs that I hardly see 

 how one could get along without the other. In the early days when fairs 

 were few and far between and when the implement manufacturers were 

 endeavoring to get their goods before the people they hit upon the lucky 

 plan of buying a few harness horses and staging a race at the fairs. They 

 would go from the Wisconsin State Fair to the Iowa State' Fair and down 

 into Illinois with these horses. Later on they became so enamored with 

 the sport that some of them became very prominent breeders. So that 

 harness racing has been a part of the county fair and without the fairs 

 harness racing would be sadly curtailed. 



As to the popularity of harness racing, there is nothing I can say that 

 so eloquently emphasizes its popularity as the scene which you witness 

 each day and late afternoon where the crowd turns and leaves all other 

 exhibits and fills your grandstand. That is only second to the splendid 

 feeling of the treasurer when the report is received of receipts from the 

 grandstand and his bank roll changes from an anemic to a plethoric con- 

 dition. So that harness racing is the foremost attraction of the county 

 fair and has had as much to do with the building up of the agricultural 

 and live stock interests of the country as any one thing. It is today and 

 always has been used as the lure to bring the farmer inside of the gates 

 to show him by ocular demonstration what it means to use pedigreed seeds 

 and pedigreed live stock. 



When you talk about organized racing the American Trotting Associa- 

 tion is the thing that first occurs in your mind; that is among the fairs 

 and race tracks west of Pennsylvania. The American Trotting Associa- 

 tion is your association and I wish to say I wish you would all take a 

 little more interest in it. It is your organization and I do not know 

 that any of you fully realize what you do and have done to keep harness 

 racing going. The American Trotting Association is a voluntary associa- 

 tion for the protection of its own members and for the keeping of records 

 and to give aid and information to the people engaged in harness racing; 

 There are filve such organizations, four other than the American. I am 

 glad to say that the American is the largest and the strongest of all these 

 organizations. Fully one-third of its membership is located in the states 

 of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Illinois leads with membership and 

 Iowa and Wisconsin are about a tie. The work of the ofl^ce of the Ameri- 

 can Trotting Association, about from seventy to eight per cent of the 

 work of the office is the correspondence with the horsemen. The balance 

 of it is with the associations. I want to impress on you that the wise 



