00:00Joe, your Hollywood background, how much do you think that influenced you in running Delmar and how much that was
00:09important to put a show on with you there running Delmar?
00:13Well, I think it was, you know, I grew up in the picture business.
00:17My grandfather was the Cecil B. DeMille.
00:20He made the first movie in Hollywood and made 70-some movies.
00:25The Ten Commandments was a big one.
00:27I got to be in The Greatest Show on Earth as a circus performer, and The Ten Commandments, I played
00:32a Hebrew slave.
00:33But I'll tell you, I saw a photo of makeup in me, and I looked more like an Irish paperboy
00:39in a bad wig, but not a Hebrew slave.
00:41But I managed to pull it off, but it was a lot of fun.
00:45And you do learn a lot about what to put on a screen and how it works.
00:49I spent some years as a cinema photographer, and you see the world a little different when you look through
00:54a camera.
00:55And I think that probably had an impact on me to understand how you bring people to a theater and,
01:02as well, how you bring them to a racetrack.
01:05You know what, too?
01:06I mean, the track has been littered with Hollywood, too.
01:09If I'm not mistaken, I think you told me that Bing Crosby was the major factor at Delmar when it
01:16was first, you know, opened.
01:18And he was a major, major player in this, and many of the Hollywood people were major players in it.
01:23And that's kind of the background of what Delmar is, too.
01:26It's a show.
01:27And if you've never been there, like you said, you don't understand it until you've been there.
01:31But it's always been about, really, theater and Hollywood.
01:36Yeah, it has.
01:38Bob Hope was a friend of mine.
01:39And I asked him one day, I said, how did you end up with, and he said, well, Bing Crosby,
01:44who was a singer and an actor, and so he wasn't beholding to any particular studio.
01:50A lot of, in those days, early days, you were a contract player, even if you were a star, you
01:55did everything the studio told you to do.
01:57But Bing had a little more, you know, sway.
02:01And so he came down, and when he, Hope told me, he said, when he tells you to come down
02:06to Delmar for the day, you came down.
02:08So that was Bing's marketing.
02:10I mean, it was amazing.
02:11You could come down here.
02:12There was no TV in those days.
02:13So if you wanted to see a movie star, go to Delmar, because they were all there.
02:18Bing brought them all down, Bob Hope and all these other guys from the, you know, from the 30s and
02:2440s.
02:24So it worked.
02:26What makes Delmar special, in your opinion?
02:30I mean, what makes the track, what makes the environment, what makes the setting so special for people to want
02:36to come to?
02:38Well, I think where we are, not just who we are.
02:43You know, I mean, I'm sitting here in my house looking at the Pacific Ocean, which is about, you know,
02:48100 yards from the racetrack.
02:51You know, it's a great place.
02:52It's a resort city.
02:53That's really helpful.
02:54And we've tried to market it, not just the racing, but where we are.
02:58We've put on all kinds of special deals.
03:01We've had concerts.
03:02We have family fun days.
03:04We, you know, go through the taste of Delmar.
03:07We do all that stuff that's beyond just looking at the pretty horses.
03:13So I think that I've never left the fact that we're in the entertainment business where we're, yeah, we're entertaining
03:20with a racetrack, but we're in the entertainment business and we need to get the people out here that not
03:24necessarily because they want to see a horse, but because they want to have fun and eat some good food.
Comments