shoemaker

The hotel’s grounds will include a well-known feature from the original racetrack, the life-size bronze sculpture of jockey Billy Shoemaker riding famed racehorse Swaps at full gallop that greeted bettors for decades.

Swaps and Shoemaker won the 1955 Kentucky Derby, and the thoroughbred also captured the Hollywood Gold Cup, Hollywood Park’s signature race.

In 1991, when an impaired Willie Shoemaker was paralyzed in a car accident that nearly took the life of the world-renowned jockey, Downey wrote:

Jac Venza, a shoemaker’s son who almost single-handedly delivered to the proverbial “vast wasteland” that was American television in the 1960s and ’70s an oasis of cultural programming, including “Great Performances,” “American Masters” and “Live From Lincoln Center,” died on Tuesday at his home in Lyme, Conn. He was 97.

Salvatore Rubino, also known as “Sal the Shoemaker,” admitted in court to running card games and operating illegal gambling machines inside his former shoe repair business and to kicking profits to the Genovese crime family.