History
Maywood Park was originally the home of Cook County Fairgrounds, where in 1932 and during Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition years of 1933 and 1934, non-wagering harness racing purse programs were held.
Maywood has conducted race meets with wagering since 1946, the longest in the state's standardbred history.
In June 1947 the first full harness race program to be televised anywhere in the country took place at Maywood Park, and the opening night of the 1957 spring meet was televised by NBC on The Tonight Show.
In 1979, boxing champion Muhammad Ali won a seven-furlong exhibition race, a fundraising event to benefit Provident Hospital of Chicago.
In 1984 Maywood Park became the first Chicago-area track to host a Breeders Crown race. The Two-Year-Old Filly Pace Final carried a $550,000 prize, the largest purse ever offered at a Chicago area Standardbred track.
Maywood Park has been the scene of numerous world records, including She's A Great Lady's 1:51.2 mile in 1995, a record that still stands for a three-year-old filly pacer on a half-mile track.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)