By Brad Flory
JTV
Remembering Jackson Harness Raceway has suddenly grown into a surprisingly big deal.
One day of exhibition races was set July 8 as the last hurrah for a horse-racing tradition that lasted in Jackson from 1948 to 2008. The subsequent outpouring of love for that old track is remarkable, and it’s a love that did not always seem obvious when the raceway was still in business.
The celebration is the brainchild of Mike Way, a county Parks Commission member who senses the psychology of the Jackson community far better than I do.
From the start, Way said the event would give the community “closure” for the racetrack’s demise. To be brutally honest, I suspected he overestimated Jackson’s emotional attachment to its former racetrack.
Boy, am I stupid.
Many sponsors and volunteers stepped up to help Way make it happen. Sixty-one horses were entered, a phenomenal number for an exhibition program. Familiar harness drivers jumped at the chance to race at Jackson one final time.
Paying tribute to a defunct track must be rare, because Jackson’s example has attracted national attention from what remains of the harness-racing industry. The United States Trotting Association wrote a news article about it, and “the official podcast of harness racing” will come to Jackson for the event.
All this love may seem a tad bittersweet to those who watched the slow death of Jackson Harness Raceway with the sense that Jackson’s civic leaders did nothing to save it. Many racetrack patrons felt that way, including me, and it is a hard thing to forget.
Ten years have passed since the closure, and my guess is that’s long enough to bathe Jackson Harness Raceway in nostalgia. Like electric streetcars, the amusement park at Vandercook Lake, and Delaware Punch, the raceway now represents happy memories from a bygone era.
Jackson Harness Raceway was founded in the post World War II era by industrialist Leon Slavin. Many people in attendance on opening day could remember the horse-and-buggy era. Sixty years later, the track was still going in the age of Millennials, people who anticipate the takeover of driverless cars.
Remembering Jackson Harness Raceway is easy for me, because I became a regular patron when I moved to Jackson in 1985. It was a fun place for a person in his 20s.
I remember my girlfriend putting my handicapping skills to shame by winning four races in a row with her system of picking gray horses. I was so impressed I married her and we begat two children. I remember meeting Detroit Tigers pitcher Milt Wilcox under the grandstand. I remember the editor of the newspaper (my boss) and Jackson’s city manager hooting in drunken glee over an exacta win one night, much to the horror of their wives.
One night back in the late 1970s, my brother confused me by driving from our house in Saginaw County to Jackson Harness Raceway.
“Why go to Jackson?” I asked. “Hazel Park is closer.”
He said Jackson’s horse track had the best vibe in Michigan. He said it was old-fashioned and intimate and friendly. That is my first memory of Jackson Harness Raceway, and his opinion proved correct in my later experience.
If closure is what this celebration of Jackson Harness Raceway is all about, I am compelled to say something about that bittersweet feeling mentioned previously: Ten years of continuing trauma in the horse-racing industry proves it is foolish to keep blaming Jackson civic leaders for what happened.
Jackson civic leaders were no more capable of saving Jackson Harness Raceway than they were capable of saving electric streetcars or Delaware Punch. They were all great things rooted in a different era. We can never go back, but we can appreciate what we once had.