My grandfather worked there. Now it’s becoming an Amazon warehouse.

I know, I start too many of these with the words "growing up in Mays Landing." I make no apologies. I am proud of it, and this one might be the article that finally explains why.

The Atlantic City Race Course was a big deal. Not a modest, hometown kind of big deal. A genuinely big deal. In its early years, Sinatra and members of the Rat Pack showed up regularly. Alfred Hitchcock filmed scenes for "Marnie" there in 1964. And in the summer of 1969, it hosted the Atlantic City Pop Festival — an estimated 100,000 people, featuring many of the same acts who would play Woodstock just a few weeks later. Our little corner of Atlantic County was, for one wild weekend, the actual warm-up act for the most famous concert in American history.

I did not experience that concert myself. But I grew up hearing about it in real time.  I was 7 in 1969 and the adults were all a flutter about it!  That summer, the town had hippies camping on people's front lawns. Traffic through Mays Landing was maddening for weeks. My parents' generation still talked about it decades later like it was our own small piece of 1969.

More than a concert venue

But day to day, year after year, the track was simply the track — thousands of horse racing fans pouring in from all over the region, summer after summer, making the drive through Mays Landing an exercise in patience for anyone just trying to get home.

It was also a major employer. My grandfather Mike worked there. For a lot of my friends from Oakcrest High School, walking horses in the early morning hours was their very first job, the kind of thing you did before school or during a summer that taught you what actual work felt like.

More personally, our mom and dad used to take us to the Saturday "Morning Glory" races — the family-friendly early card built for exactly the kind of audience we were. And our Cub Scout pack held regional events there. I remember our den doing a radio station theme for our scouting booth one year, and current Townsquare sister station WFPG doing an actual remote broadcast from that same event.

I have wondered since whether that is where this whole thing started for me. A kid, a scouting booth, a radio station theme, a real broadcast happening right there in front of him. It is as good a theory as any.

SEE ALSO: I was born in Atlantic City — and here's why I keep going back 

ACRC Grandstand in April 2010 at Turf Festival Race | photo by EJ

A racing palace, one last time

The track built something genuinely respected in the industry too. It opened in July 1946, funded in part by celebrity investors including bandleaders Harry James, Sammy Kaye and Xavier Cugat, along with Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra himself as a partial owner. Twenty-eight thousand people, including Grace Kelly, turned out for opening day — her father, Olympic rower John B. Kelly Sr., had helped design the track. Kelso made his two-year-old racing debut there in 1959. In 1983 it became the first U.S. track to offer simulcasting, pulling in a live daily program from the Meadowlands, a lifeline that kept it running years longer than it otherwise might have.

By the time I was old enough to really understand what I was looking at, the track was already fading. Casino gaming arrived in Atlantic City in 1978 and slowly pulled the crowds away. Race days shrank from 50 or 60 a year down to single digits. But it hung on, stubbornly, through a spring "Turf Festival" that I attended a few times myself in its final years, right up until the last race was run in 2015.

What's coming next

Now, more than a decade later, Amazon is finally moving forward on the site — an 84-acre fulfillment center, using robotics to sort and pack orders, expected to bring roughly 750 permanent jobs to Hamilton Township along with a 29-year tax agreement worth more than $120 million to the township, school district and county combined. Township officials have been clear that any attempt to convert the site into a data center down the road would void the whole deal. For a property that has sat rotting and vandalized for over a decade, that kind of investment is genuinely good news, even for someone like me who will always feel a pull toward what used to be there.

I am sad to see the old grandstand go, the way you are sad to see anything go that shaped you a little without your realizing it at the time. But it also makes me appreciate that places like Monmouth Park are still out there, still running horses, still keeping some small piece of that world alive.

Thanks for the memories, Atlantic City Race Course. My grandfather's Saturday shifts, my friends' first paychecks, a scout troop's radio booth, and maybe — just maybe — the very first spark of a career I am still living out, almost fifty years later.