The Horses

All through my college years, I worked several nights a week and often during weekends at a McDonalds in Andover, Massachusetts. It was there that I was introduced to gambling. Joe Picarelli¹ was the day shift manager, and he claimed that he made big money betting the horses at nearby Rockingham Park, affectionately known as “The Rock”. The Rock had a unique form of horse racing called “the trotters.” The horses pulled little 2-wheeled carts called sulkies where the driver sat. And the horses had to run the race in a trot, not a gallop, a “two beat diagonal gait” in which they always seemed to have two feet on the ground.

I was intrigued by Joe’s stories, and so at his insistence I decided to try it out. Being a bit of a geek, I naturally kept track of my winnings, or loosings as it turned out, in a small spiral notebook.

When it comes to horse racing, there were various levels of participation. The first level was the general public. The general public got their information from the racing form printed daily in one of the Boston newspapers. The racing form listed all the horses in the upcoming day’s races, their recent performances, and the odds of them winning this time. Students of the sport would spend lots of time (often in the bathroom) studying the racing form, looking for mismatches such as a horse that has performed well but is given long odds, or a poor chance of winning. But of course since this same information was pretty much what the odds makers used to determine the odds, so the chances of anyone getting ahead were pretty slim. Nevertheless, thousands of people would place bets at the Rock every day based on studious examination of the racing form.

The second level of participation was called “in the know.” These were folks who perhaps know a trainer or a driver, or who spent long days listening to small talk in the stall area or watching horses exercise. Those “in the know” thought they had access to information beyond the racing form, like how a horse was feeling that day, what their recent workouts were like, or most importantly, which horses had been holding back on previous races to try to get the odds up for a big score.

Which brings up the third level of participation. This was the shadowy level of those who were “connected.” The mob was a real presence in the Northeast when I was young, and it was widely believed that the mob controlled horse racing. Those who were connected had access to knowledge of “the fix,” and knew when to bet on an unlikely winner when the “the fix was in.” It was universally accepted by the general public that “the fix was in” quite often, and the only way to really make any money betting on horses was to be connected. Yet in spite of this knowledge the same general public religiously studied the racing form and bet piles of money at The Rock every day of the racing season.

So Joe and I would study the racing form, and several evenings a week would go up to the Rock to make try our luck. I didn’t bet too heavily, but even so by the end of the season my ledger showed that I was eighty dollars in the hole. I knew Joe was down a lot more than that, and he complained bitterly that this was “the first year in a long time” that he had had a loosing season.

I remember the last night that I went to Rockingham park. As usual I had carefully studied the racing form, and I had a good feeling about my pick for the “daily double.” This was a bet on the winner of both the first and second races, and the odds, or return if you won, were pretty high. In this case, the odds were eighty to one, and a win of my two dollar bet would pretty much even out my entire summer’s effort.

My pick won the first race, and I was feeling confident. My confidence grew during the second race as my horse had the lead at the inside rail on the back stretch. Rounding the last turn, he was ahead by a buggy length. But as they entered the straight, my horse seemed slower, and bit by bit the second horse gained. It was a close enough finish that they put up the photo. My horse had lost by a neck, and in the photo you could see my jockey leaning way back, pulling back on the reins for all he was worth. The fix was in, and once again we the general public were left out in the cold.

Notes:
1. As always, names are fictitious, and any resemblance to a real person is purely accidental.

Learning To Fly

Once, in a dusty attic in my grandmother’s house, I saw the remnants of the model airplanes my father had made as a child. Long as a grown man’s arm, they were made of tiny sticks, lacy and delicate, covered with the thinnest of tissue paper. I could imagine them floating in an open field, like a butterfly, carried on cushions of air.

The models that we made were very different. Their construction was crude, about the size of a serving plate, made of light slabs of balsa wood for wings, body, tail and rudder. At the heart of these models were tiny gas motors which, even with an attached fuel tank, were about the size of a one quarter measuring cup. Once started, the motors screamed like a thousand angry bumble bees. Our ears buzzed, fumes flowed in the blast of air and coated the hands of the boy holding back the plane, while the “pilot” raced to where the control handle lay in the grass.

These models were called “control line” models. Two thin wires ran from one wing of the plane to a handle maybe fifty feet away. The “pilot” held this handle at the center of a circle, and turned in place as the plane flew round and round, restrained by the two wires. Dizziness was always a danger, as was wandering away from the starting place as we turned. If the pilot wandered, the circular flight path could move to where there the edge of the house or the laundry post out in the field would cause a mid-air disaster.

The motors were strong relative to the size and weight that the plane, so the models didn’t so much fly as trail desperately after the propeller as it clawed its way through the air. These models flew fast, so our learning process was about what you would expect. The plane would take off; our attempts at control would cause a few quick up and down oscillations and then finally a dive into the grass.

In spite of our complete lack of mastery of these simple models, we began to build a larger more sophisticated version. This was a completely different project. The wingspan was the width of a kitchen table, and the construction was more like a real airplane, with ribs and bulkheads forming a skeleton which was covered by balsa sheeting. The motor was larger, and surgical tubing ran back from the motor to a separate aluminum tank, the size of a small coffee cup, nestled in the middle of the fuselage. This model took us about a month to build and paint, much longer than the simple slab models we had been flying.

The big day finally came. We had heaver control wires to handle the additional power and weight, and they were longer too. Since we were using up a lot more of the back field and there was less clearance to the various obstacles, we arranged a 4 foot diameter circle of red bricks around the pilot pivot point, so that if we started to wander as we turned round and round, the bricks would warn us and keep us in the right spot.

After a couple of spins of the prop, the motor came to life. Rather than the frantic high pitched scream of the smaller motors, this one had a more satisfactory tone, like a chain saw in full song. My brother held the tail of the model, I ran to the center of the circle, picked up the control handle, pulled the slack out of the control lines, and gave him a quick nod to release the plane.

The plane was still fast, but not as fast and frantic as the smaller models. I actually felt like I had some control, and instead of crashing after a couple of turns I was able to keep it airborne turn after turn. Finally we were really flying!

The crash was so sudden it seemed the world stopped. One instant there was the plane circling fifteen feet off the ground, its red stripe along the side clear in my memory. The next instant all sound was gone, the lines were slack, and pieces of balsa, fragments of fuselage and wing and tail, were sailing through the air. I had somehow wandered out of my circle of brick, and drifted over so that the plane had collided squarely with the six inch thick twenty foot high cloths line post. And what I remember most clearly of all was the aluminum fuel tank, free of the fuselage, gleaming in the sun, as it performed a slow cartwheel, painting a filmy arc of fuel in the clear air as it turned.

We never did much flying after that.