"Hey, Dancer!"

The richest farmer around New Egypt, N.J., has not tilled a field since he was in his teens, and the only crops that grow on his 106 acres are grass, alfalfa and hay. But Stanley Dancer is no gentleman farmer. He is up at dawn, rain or shine, employs a staff of 27, meets a weekly payroll of $2,200 and personally markets his product all the way from New York to Florida and California. At 35, Trainer-Driver Dancer is the top man in U.S. harness racing.

Most successful of three racing brothers (the others: Vernon, 39, and Harold, 50), Stanley Dancer drove his first sulky at 17 at New Jersey's back-country Freehold Raceway. He wore borrowed silks, splurged $200 of 4-H Club prize money on a filly pacer, and lost the race. But the bug was there--and within five years, the man who loaned him the racing outfit was working for Dancer.

In his late teens, Dancer worked as a groom, mucking out stalls at New York's Roosevelt Raceway, and got himself a cot in the racetrack's tack room to cut expenses. Married at 20, he borrowed $250 from his bride to buy a crippled seven-year-old trotter named Candor that he patiently nursed back to health and trained on snow-covered bridle paths in New Jersey. Candor repaid him by winning $12,000 in three years, and Dancer built a five-room ranch house at New Egypt.

After that, every horse Dancer touched seemed to grow wings. He spent $1,200 for a lame pacer named Volo Chief, won $36,000, and added a two-bedroom wing to his house. Today, Dancer's Egyptian Acres boasts a heated swimming pool, fireproof barns, and air-conditioned dormitories for the stable hands. The 55 horses in his pastures are valued at more than $4,000,000, and Dancer employs a fulltime bookkeeper to keep track of operating expenses that amount to $350,000 a year.

In a stodgy sport dominated by older men, Dancer is still regarded as something of an upstart. But the $2 betters who jam the Eastern tracks admire Dancer's aggressive racing tactics ("I like to get out front fast and stay there"), crowd the paddock before each race pleading: "Hey, Dancer! You feelin! O.K. tonight! Hey, Dancer! Win us a few, huh?" His eight-year-old gelding, Su Mac Lad, has won more money ($567,849) than any other trotter in history, in 1961 became the only U.S. horse to win the Roosevelt International, and two weeks ago was named 1962's Harness Horse of the Year. Henry T. Adios, another Dancer-trained colt, is this year's pacing champion, was runner-up to Su Mac Lad in the Horse of the Year voting.

The other horses in Dancer's stable did their bit too: by week's end, Trainer-Driver Dancer had won 122 races, and his 1962 winnings totaled $950,000.

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