Getting Down: An Unveiling of the Horse Racing Industry: Its Insiders, Workers, Patrons, and Me

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© 2013 David Nalick. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse  04/25/2016

ISBN: 978-1-4817-4618-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-4619-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013907464

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

FOREWORD

I decided to write this book because in not too many years from now there will be no one left to write it. At least there will be no one around who experienced what I experienced. I will use the real names of people when I can. When it seems prudent to use a fictitious name, I will. I say this for two reasons: 1) there is no sense hurting the feelings of the relatives of some of the dearly departed characters I write about, and 2) some of these characters are certainly still alive, and I don’t want anyone banned from the track because of what I say about them. When speaking about celebrities I will, of course, use their true celebrity names.

This story begins with a little bit of the history of horse racing in California from its inception to the mid1940’s when the sport began in earnest. But it’s not a story about horse racing itself. The meat of the story begins with my entrance into the racetrack scene in 1960. Yet, it is not my autobiography. Indeed, my life’s story is irrelevant in terms of the things that happened in this industry—other than its connection to certain events and conditions that occurred at the particular track at which I was working during my long career. More than anything else, I was merely a witness to most of those events and conditions. When I felt it was necessary to include some of my own history, I did so, knowing that it would add a measure of color to the story I was telling.

Getting Down is not a typical racetrack story (novel). Seabiscuit, Swaps, Man O’ War, John Henry, Secretariat, and Zenyatta may well be mentioned, but this story is about the people of racing, not the horses. It’s about racetrack workers, on both the back and front sides of the track. It’s about racetrack owners and managers. It’s about those who own the horses and train them, and it’s about those who ride them. It’s also about the people who pay to go to the races—the patrons, including the rich and famous, along with the not so rich and famous, all the way down the economic ladder to the out and out homeless. These categories include some of the strangest, meanest, most dangerous, most pathetic, most ruthless people on the face of this earth. (Warning: if foul language gets you all flustered, you better think twice before you peruse these pages.) On the other hand, my list of characters also includes some of the nicest, kindest, most generous, funniest, happiest people one could ever hope to meet.

I have been calling this work a story because I don’t want you to think that it’s a novel with a beginning, middle and an end. At the risk of horrifying my publisher, I’m just going to call it a story (actually a series of stories) about the horse racing industry, mainly the racetracks in Southern California, but much of what I say applied/applies to racetracks around the world—including the workers and the people who go to those tracks to gamble.

If you have never before set foot on a horse racing track, you may as well put this book down as you will neither understand nor even begin to appreciate what is contained within its pages. Quite possibly the only people to appreciate what I have written will be those who have worked in this industry. On the other hand, if you do read it from cover to cover your curiosity may well be tweaked, and you may soon find yourself entering through the gate of some famous racetrack, and if you do you just may be amazed at what you will discover.

Getting Down is about getting down. The term, getting down, is racetrack lingo having to do with the process of successfully putting one’s wager on a given horse, in the right race, before getting shut out. In other words it’s about successfully making one’s bet before the race begins and the betting for that race is terminated. But the scope of this story is, as you will see, much broader than that. Indeed, it is a story about life, because in one way or another, in one form or another, life itself is about getting down.

CHAPTER ONE

Lucky Baldwin loved horse racing. He loved it so much that he carved out a splendid racetrack on part of his 63,000 acres in an area now known as the cities of Arcadia and Monrovia, both located near the foothills of the majestic San Gabriel Mountains some fifteen miles east of the city of Los Angeles. He called his track Santa Anita Park.

It is not necessary to include a complete biography of this man. Let it suffice to say that he was a wheeler-dealer with a penchant for women (married four times); he was shot twice, by women; he loved to gamble, and he especially loved horse racing.

Before Baldwin came on the scene, this large estate was part of Rancho Santa Anita and was owned by San Gabriel Mission Mayor-Domeo, Claudio Lopez, who named the area after a family member, Anita Cota. Evidently he thought she was a Saint. The ranch was eventually purchased by a Scotsman, Hugo Reid, who later sold it to Baldwin, who then opened his track in 1904. Unfortunately, Baldwin’s track closed in 1909, and it burned down in 1912.

Not much happened with the track until 1933 when California legalized Pari-Mutuel wagering. On December 26, 1934, it reopened under the ownership of a group headed by movie producer, Hal Roach, and Dr. Charles H. Doc Strub. They would call their enterprise the Los Angeles Turf Club. Of course the name, Santa Anita, simply, stuck.

During those same years, Hollywood Park opened its doors to horse racing, for years competing neck and neck with Santa Anita for purses, attendance, and horse racing history. Then Pomona Fair opened (now called Fairplex Park) with its own brand of exciting small track racing. Later, Los Alamitos opened its doors with quarter horse racing, and eventually harness racing. Finally, in 1937, Del Mar joined in the fray with Bing Crosby waiting at the finish line to congratulate that track’s first winner.

As for Santa Anita, two years after Seabiscuit won the Santa Anita Handicap, its doors closed once again. This time it was because of the Second World War. From 1942 to 1944 the track was used as a Japanese-American internment center with up to 17,000 people being interned in and around the horse stables and barns. In 1945 the Japanese were relocated and the track opened once again by the entity mentioned above; it has been open ever since.

In 1997 the track was acquired by Meditrust, which then sold its interests to Magna Entertainment Corp, whom I believe still owns it. All of this occurred in Southern California. But let’s not forget Northern California. Just as important to racing fans in the north have been/are tracks such as Golden Gate, Bay Meadows, California State Fair grounds, Sacramento (Cal Expo), and a number of smaller seasonal tracks.

Okay, so much for the history lesson. Now for a bit about me.

I’ll cut to the chase by saying that a mere sixteen years after the Japanese left Santa Anita’s internment camp this author came on the scene. And what a scene it was! Born in New York, moved to San Gabriel when I was two, moved down to Temple City when I was eight, attended and graduated from Temple City High School in 1959, I managed to scam my way into Pasadena City College which I attended for the next three years. When I neared the age of twenty-one, I was asked by a friend who had landed a job at Santa Anita racetrack (Los Angeles Turf Club) if I was interested in getting a weekend job there. My friend, Gary Martin, got into the Union with the help of his father, Ivan Martin, who was a charter member of the racetrack union, Pari-Mutuel Employees Guild, Local #280. In other words, Martin’s father was there since the beginning in 1934.

Fortunately for me few outsiders could get a job at this or any track if they were not related to someone already working there, or had a very good friend already working there. It’s called nepotism. Everyone is supposed to hate that word and what it stands for, but it was a damn good system, for the racetrack at least. Why? Because the relative or friend that got you in was responsible for you. If you screwed up the boss not only got on your ass, but on the ass of the person who helped get you there. And you sure didn’t want that to happen! It was looked upon as a disgrace! In other words, one had to be very careful whom one recommended. It was nepotism at its very finest.

I desperately needed a part time job to help me through college, so I told Gary that I would indeed like to work at the track. I must admit that I didn’t know much about Santa Anita other than when the horses rotated there, on December 26th , about eight million freaking cars would make their way up and down Baldwin Avenue, and every race day after that, making that street almost impossible to cross except at a light. Unfortunately, I lived on a side-street that ran into Baldwin (with no light around for several blocks) so I’m sure I cursed the racetrack more than once during my early life while living in Temple City.

Knowing that I wasn’t familiar with the ins and outs of horse racing, Gary sat me down in my parent’s living room and explained the entire betting process to me. Below is a summary of what he told me:

When a patron wanted to bet, he, or she, would get in a sellers line. Let’s say this bettor wanted to get a five dollar ticket on the number three horse to win. He would get in a five dollar win line, and when he got up to the seller he would say, Number three, and place his five dollars on the top of the seller’s machine. If he wanted to bet twenty dollars on the three horse he would say, Number three, four times. Simple enough.

Now, if the number three horse won, the patron would take his ticket or tickets to a cashier and the cashier would pay the patron the amount the ticket was worth. The cashier would have to first look at the ticket to verify its authenticity. He would do this by looking at the color of the ticket, the race number, the number of the horse on the ticket, and last, but most important, the bar code at the top of the ticket. This code was changed in every seller’s machine, every race, and was comprised of a series of letters, numbers, and pictures that would be specific to that one race. A code might read: A-N-3-R-(a picture of an owl)-Q-(and a picture of a beach ball). In other words, it was rather difficult to counterfeit the ticket between the time the race ended and the end of that day. Of course, there were ways to alter the tickets and then cash them later, and everything under the sun was tried, sometimes quite successfully. But that story will be told a bit later.

Once the ticket was cashed the next patron would present his or her ticket, and so on until there were no more tickets to be cashed for that particular race. When the next race went off, the cashed tickets from the previous race would be collected from each cashier by a Runner who would take his assigned lines of tickets to the ticket room where the tickets would be verified, one-by-one, by the ticket checkers, and then put in little cubbyholes until the following day. Previous day bundles of these tickets were then stored for future reference, if necessary.

A ticket checker had to count and verify literally thousands of tickets in a span of about twenty minutes. After a short reprieve, the next race’s tickets would come in and the ticket checkers would then verify those tickets (from that new race), and so on until after the last race of the day. If a cashier counted wrong, or paid out the wrong price for a ticket, or if the ticket was NFG (no effing good—also known as a PIGEON) the cashier would have to make up for it by having that amount taken out of his paycheck at the end of the week! And believe me, at $38.00 per day—a great wage in the 1950’s and 60’s—it could get pretty costly! Many a cashier had to come up with $500 to $1000 dollars for his mistake, which was a horrendous loss as his paycheck for the entire year might have been little more than eight thousand dollars back then.

I told Gary that I would like to be a ticket checker, like him. Great! he replied. Then he told me that he was glad that I wanted to work as a ticket checker as the only opening at the track was in the ticket room. For some reason he thought that was quite funny. He then told me that I would have to be tested in terms of my dexterity and ability to handle the job. Gary suggested I practice a bit before that test, so he brought home several large stacks of tickets for me to practice with. Actually, he wanted me to be proficient in this task before the test as he didn’t want to look bad by bringing in some idiot with ten thumbs.

This test included not only my ability to count fast (in excess of forty tickets every ten seconds), but it also tested my ability to catch and pull the pigeons out of the stack being counted. Picture the code I mentioned a moment ago. Now imagine counting the tickets while at the same time looking at both the code and the number, and a different code suddenly popped up. It would immediately catch your eye as you passed it by. It was like looking at an old time crank movie machine. If someone inserted a picture of a Polar Bear in a film about rabbits, it would immediately catch your eye. So, the ticket checker would pull out the pigeon, give it to the head of the ticket room, and the cashier would be charged for his mistake. The cashiers also made mistakes in their counting, so the ticket checker had to verify his count as well. And, of course, the number on each ticket the cashier cashed had to be a valid winning number.

The ticket room was not an easy job; not everyone was capable of doing it. They had enough ticket checkers during the week at most major tracks, but on the weekends when more people attended the races, the bigger tracks always needed to hire extra help. And I seemed to be just what they needed—at least at Hollywood Park, where I took the test.

I applied for the job (as a permit worker) and the head of the ticket room, Jack Cassidy, not knowing that I had practiced counting tickets for a week, tested me to see whether or not I could hack the duties of a ticket checker. When he saw me count the stack of tickets he had handed me, he exclaimed, Where the hell did you learn to count like that? Without waiting for an answer, he said, Go fill out these papers; you can start next Saturday. That following Saturday was the first day of my half century employment at California’s racetracks, in that I soon found myself eligible to work weekends as a permit worker at Hollywood Park, Del Mar, Pomona Fair, Los Alamitos, Santa Anita, and later at Oak Tree/Santa Anita.

Resuming my education at Cal State, Los Angeles, I continued working at the track (mainly at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park) never thinking that I would be working at the track my entire adult life. After all, I was going to be a school teacher, a respectable position in life. But school teachers had no strong union in those days, and that bothered me as the Pari-Mutuel Union was a strong union. But I was looking for respect, and you didn’t get much of that working for the racetrack. At least not the kind you got being a school teacher.

Okay, I know, I said this book is not my autobiography, but my appearance will often be necessary to mention; after all, I was a witness to much of what went on over the years, so stay with me.

CHAPTER TWO

The Pari Mutuel Employees Guild is indeed a union. As I said, it was a very strong union. After several political shifts it became affiliated with S.E.I.U. and it is still under the auspices of that organization today. In the old days our ability to bargain collectively enabled us to make considerable gains in terms of our salary and benefits. Our Union members made a great living, often making as much as fifty dollars a day more than the average worker in other jobs. And our Union negotiated for its members the best medical coverage one could get. I doubt if many workers on the outside had any better coverage at the time. What’s more the clerks were worth all those perks for two distinct reasons: One, not just anybody could handle the work; and two, it was (and most likely still is) the only industry where the workers are 100% responsible for their own errors. Work in a bank and go short and they don’t like it; go short too often in that bank and you’re liable to get fired. Go short working for the racetrack and they’ll just take the money out of your paycheck. Go short twenty-five times in a period of weeks and they’ll warn you, and they’ll continue to take their money out of your paycheck each week until your debt is paid. If you keep going short they might make you go through retraining. Go short ten thousand dollars because you bet on a horse with the racetrack’s money and you will go to jail. It’s all quite simple. Always has been—always will be.

When it came time to negotiate a new contract during the early days, the negotiating table would be long, filled with union reps on one side and white shirts and ties on the other. And during negotiations, someone close by would often hear fists pounding on the table, accompanied by the ashes from a dozen cigarettes and cigars bursting into the air as both sides screamed at one another to make their points, oftentimes using every foul word in the English language to accentuate those points. But, in the end there’d be a compromise and the tracks would go on making millions, and the Union would get much of what it wanted, and everyone would be happy for the next three or four years. And no one would get hurt—on either side. Those were real negotiations—strictly between the owners, their managers, and their lawyers on one side, and the Union reps and their lawyer on the other side. Nothing was rigged in favor of either side of the table.

After working weekends for a year or so I was asked to join the Union as I had only been a Permit worker. They had not opened the Union to new members for quite a few years—except for a few people like my friend, Gary Martin, but they felt the time had come because the tracks needed more workers. Actually, I didn’t really want to join. It cost two hundred dollars and I just couldn’t afford it. Two hundred was a shit-pot full of money back then! Besides, I was going to be a teacher; I wasn’t going to work for the racetrack my whole life!