Which Celebrities Love The Del Mar Thoroughbred Club?

For owners of Old Del Mar homes, a membership to the Thoroughbred Club is a tradition that beckons the days of old Hollywood. For some, it simply provides an opportunity for owners of  Old Del Mar homes to collect  thousands of dollars per week, when they rent out their Old del Mar homes to avid race fans at the height of the season.  But more importantly, the Club has deep roots in history that helped shape the town that we all love to call our home.

 

 

Here are some important links to the modern day Club, so that you can take a look for yourself, after you have finished reading about the celebrity past below!

• Del Mar Profile

•  Fan Forum

•  Chat Room

•  Silks Del Mar

• DMTC Wallpaper

•  Surfside Raceplace

 

It was magic back then, in Old Del Mar.  A magnet for the stars. Del Mar provided them a set extraordinaire, a backdrop of the Pacific with the track as their playground. It was a time when Jimmy Durante could walk down the street and everybody knew who he was. And nobody hassled him. The warmth that surrounded Jimmy was as wondrous as the sun on the Pacific. And that warmth was for everybody.

Joe Harper, the longtime general manager at the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, used to go to the track as a boy with his mother in those days. "Every Saturday night the Turf Club was open for dinner," he remembers. "At that time there were really no restaurants in Del Mar. You had to go to La Jolla to eat. A bonus at the Turf Club was that Jimmy Durante was there, and he would play piano and sing out on the patio."

Jimmy's widow, Marge, who still goes to the track every day during the meet, says that in the old days Jimmy would tell a few jokes and they'd hang out at the track with Jimmy's buddy, Clement Hirsch, and Georgie Jessel, Harry James and Betty Grable.

Hirsch remembers: "We'd do a lot of offshore fishing in front of the house-sometimes as late as 1 or 2 in the morning. Jimmy liked to do that. He went to the races a lot, too, and he'd bet on a number of horses. He might bet on five out of a 10-horse race. He'd jump up and down. After one race I asked him how he did. He turned around and said,

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