Vintage 1980s San Juan Racing Stock Certificate 📜 Coca Cola of New York 1978 Takeover Bid El Comandante Puerto Rico

What Does a Puerto Rico Racetrack Have to Do With New York Disco Radio? 🐎 A Vintage 1980s San Juan Racing Association Stock Certificate, El Comandante, Puerto Rico

Size: 12" x 8"

Hold this and you're holding both - a Caribbean racetrack and one of the most famous disco stations in New York. It's a real, issued COMMON STOCK certificate of SAN JUAN RACING ASSOCIATION, INC., INCORPORATED UNDER THE LAWS OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF PUERTO RICO, par value $2.50, engraved in blue and black by the SECURITY-COLUMBIAN BANKNOTE COMPANY. 100 SHARES sits in both top counters, the facsimile seal reads INCORPORATED 1954 PUERTO RICO, and in the corner a bare-chested figure leans on a pedestal holding a sundial while a jockey drives a numbered racehorse past behind him. It's ISSUED SUBJECT TO THE TERMS OF THE LICENSE GRANTED BY THE RACING BOARD OF PUERTO RICO, transferable in New York or Jersey City, with The Chase Manhattan Bank as registrar and Registrar and Transfer Company of Jersey City as transfer agent, and the printed facsimile signatures are the Secretary's and the President's - Hyman N. Glickstein.

Turn it over and there's my favorite line: as a condition of getting the certificate, the holder represents that he has never been convicted of a crime and is not a person of ill repute. That's racetrack stock for you.

📅 The 1980s

There's a CUSIP number printed on it, so this printing is from 1968 or later, and the company was winding down its business through the 1980s. The one you get will carry its own date, number, owner and stamps, and may look a little different from the one in my pictures.

🌴 El Comandante

San Juan Racing Association ran Puerto Rico's thoroughbred track. Puerto Rico racing history holds that a horse named Waiter, the island's first Triple Crown winner, stirred up so much excitement that the old courses couldn't hold the crowds, and El Comandante was born out of it. The first El Comandante ran in Carolina, just outside San Juan, from January 1957 until October 1976, when El Nuevo Comandante opened at Canóvanas on October 31 - Halloween. Today it's Hipódromo Camarero, still the only thoroughbred track on the island.

📻 Disco 92

Here's the part nobody expects. Alongside the track, the company owned radio stations on the mainland: WKTU in New York, WYSP in Philadelphia, WJMD in Washington, WQAL in Cleveland, WKLS in Atlanta and KRLY in Houston. In Philadelphia radio history, SJR is remembered as shorthand for San Juan Racing, the owner behind the WYSP call letters. The New York station's story is the one people still tell today: FM 92.3 went from soft rock to Mellow 92, then in 1978 flipped to disco as Disco 92 - and within months WKTU was the number-one station in New York City. A company known in Puerto Rico for horses and betting windows lit up one of the most famous call signs of the disco era.

🥤 The Coca-Cola bid

And here's what put Coca-Cola in the title. In December 1978, with Disco 92 riding high, Broadcasting magazine reported that a new group headed by Larry Israel - the former president of the Washington Post Company, now running the broadcasting arm of Coca-Cola of New York - was bidding $20 a share for all 3.3 million shares of San Juan Racing, about $66 million, for the track and its ten radio stations. Coca-Cola of New York was a big regional bottler that also owned Mogen David wine and the Delta Queen steamboat, and it held 51% of Israel's company, which had bought WIXT-TV in Syracuse the year before. The same story noted that San Juan Racing's earnings were being dragged down by its money-losing Washington Diplomats soccer team. SJR still owned WKTU in 1981, when it sold the station to Infinity Broadcasting.

👤 Hyman Glickstein

The president's signature belongs to Hyman N. Glickstein, a Manhattan-born, Columbia-educated lawyer who'd been active in New York City politics before helping found San Juan Racing in the 1950s. He ran it as president and chairman for nearly 35 years, and by his obituary's account the company also held interests in Madison Square Garden, Roosevelt Raceway and Shenandoah Downs, until the racing operation was sold off in the 1980s.

🖨️ The printer

Security-Columbian came out of the 1957 merger of the Security Banknote Company and the Columbian Bank Note Company, founded in 1904, and later became part of the United States Banknote Corporation, which went on to buy the American Bank Note Company itself.

🐎 About these

They're 12 by 8 inches, engraved on heavy paper. Frame one for a horseplayer, a Puerto Rico wall, or anybody who danced to Disco 92. The supply is finite - San Juan Racing is long gone, nobody's issuing its stock again, and once these last ones are framed, they'll be very difficult to acquire.