Word: armstrong
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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During a Florida vacation in 1951, J. (for Joseph) Elgin Armstrong, a horse-fancying contractor from Brampton, Ont., took a fancy to a yearling filly named Helicopter. Half an hour later, he bought the little brown trotter from her trainer and part owner, Del Miller, for $7,900. Explains Armstrong now: "I wanted to win the Hambletonian...
Helicopter kept her new owners (Armstrong and his brother Edwin) guessing. Last year she won only four of 21 starts, but her purses repaid the purchase price, plus $85.41. This year she won four out of ten races, blithely coming in last one week and finishing first the next. Last week, finally entered in the Hambletonian, trotting's annual classic, the fickle filly again kept a crowd of some 20,000 guessing, including city slickers who jammed the gaily canopied grandstand at Good Time Park in Goshen, N.Y. In the first heat, Helicopter lost ground by breaking her gait...
...Helicopter was trotting second close to the finish. Then the leader, Allwood Stable's Kimberly Kid, broke his trotting stride. Laying on the whip, Helicopter's Driver Harry Harvey strained forward in his sulky, catapulted his charge a half-length ahead across the finish line. Elgin Armstrong's vacation hunch had paid...
...Hoot Mon, who set the Hambletonian's fastest heat mark of two minutes flat in 1947.* Driver Harvey, 29, a Vermont farm boy, was the youngest winning driver in Hambletonian history, no small feat in a sport-dominated by grand old men. And for Canada's two Armstrong brothers-the first foreign owners to win the race-Helicopter earned the biggest Hambletonian purse to date...
...Rickenbacker, 62, president of Eastern Air Lines Inc. since 1938, moved up to board chairman in order "to get young men on jobs where they can carry responsibility and to give me more time for policy matters and long-range planning." Eastern's new president is Thomas F. Armstrong, 51, treasurer and secretary since 1938, who joined the airline as an apprentice bookkeeper in 1928. But as chief executive officer, iron-fisted Rickenbacker is still the real boss...