Word: tod
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...frightened look of the sick poor dropped from his wizened face as newshawks approached. "Hell!" snapped the little man. "There's nothing wrong with me. Be out of here in a week." But reporters knew that, perhaps for the last time, they were seeing and hearing James Todhunter ("Tod") Sloan, great jockey, famed rounder, spender, one-time friend of millionaires and occasional toast of royalty...
Todhunter was not his name. The Kokomo, Ind. barber who was his father used to call him "Toad." By the time he was a stable boy at Guttenberg, N. J. James Sloan's hard little fists had changed the offensive nickname to "Tod." When in 1900 he returned from England to the U. S. with a secretary, a valet, ten trunks, a monocle and an English accent, open-mouthed newshawks asked what "Tod" meant. Replied he: "Todhunter...
Such was Sloan's prowess that when the late William Collins Whitney in 1900 determined to beat his Wall Street rival, the late James R. Keene, in the Futurity at Sheepshead Bay at any cost, he sent to England for Tod Sloan. It cost him the traveling expenses of the jockey and his absurd retinue, plus a reputed fee of $25,000. Astride Financier Whitney's Ballyhoo Bey, Sloan won a masterful race, quickly returned to his glories abroad. His downfall came when the English Jockey Club revoked his license on charges that...
...Tod Sloan still had barrels of money. He spent it with enormous gusto on a Sheepshead Bay mansion, a yacht, roulette, dice, loud clothes, parties at Shanley's, Rector's, Delmonico's. In 1907 he married Musicomedienne Julia Sanderson who divorced him a year later. Most of his fortune vanished in Wall Street because he attempted to "play" along with the rich men for whom he had ridden...
...some 15 years Tod Sloan has been broke. His third wife and daughter Anna, 10, have long been cared for by Mrs. J. P. Cudahy of the packing family. Now and then he picked up a little money as a racetrack tipster, a baseball umpire, a film extra. Once he and his good friend "Kid McCoy," oldtime prizefighter and ex-convict, were in such straits that McCoy wheedled climes from a street crowd to view "the strangest dwarf in the world." When he showed them Sloan, McCoy explained: "I bet you never saw such a big dwarf in your life...