Depending on who is making out the list, it's either a very long list, or just a short one. And since right now I'm making out the list, it's a short one—where do all the characters who've passed away go these days?
We know Robert McG. Thomas has long since passed away himself, the obit writer who gave us The Goat Man, a woman who knocked over more duck pins than anyone, the man who invented kitty litter, a pool hustler, an aviator who flew the wrong way... And they weren't the only ones he found somewhere on this earth after they left earth. Other obit writers would marvel at his sources.
And when you find genius, you tend to find it in isolation. It's not easily replicated. There was only one Mozart, one Ted Williams, and one Robert McG. Thomas. But Jesus you guys at the Times, you can make an effort to give us people other than the ones you've been feeding us lately.
Not that these people don't deserve a tribute obit, but consider the source of their fame:
Academic who soured on the American dream,
Filmmaker and provocateur,
Composer and synthesizer innovator,
Kidney transplant expert,
Eminent geneticist with a sharp pen,
Curator who focused on African art,
Dance teacher with human touch,
Defense secretary during Iraq War,
Lionized composer with radical roots,
C.I.A. chief in world capitals
All accomplished in their own right. None of them funny, or quirky. In other words, nothing to make you identify with them.
The most recent obit that came close for me was the ballerina who retired, went to the West Coast, and opened a hamburger joint with her husband.
I don't know what threshold a deceased has to cross to rate a tribute obit in the Times. Obviously, space is an issue, but that can't be all of it. You can tell by glancing at the paid obits from families that accompany a photo of the deceased and an often lengthy self-penned bio that they felt they rated a tribute obit, didn't get one, and are willing to shell out beaucoup bucks to tell the world about their departed loved one. It's their money.
I can't help but think there's a certain snobbishness to the selection process that prevents the obits desk, perhaps a bit cloistered, from knowing anything about what went on in New York with regard to horse racing. A deceased's life's achievement has to be academic, artistic, political, literary, or be a sports great. You can't be a horseplayer.
Despite the fact that horseplayers are among the most colorful of all characters, the NYT has failed to provide us a tribute obit for Harvey Pack, who at 94 has passed away. Harvey is well known to legions of horseplayers of a certain age who spent some of their time looking up at television screens in OTB parlors, or encountered him at Saratoga in Siro's parking lot holding forth as the emcee for handicapping sessions before the day's races.
For me, Harvey should have won an Emmy with Pete Axthelm, sports editor for Newsweek, for their coverage of the Breeders' Cup races at Aqueduct (the second Breeders' Cup in 1985) when together they made a four hour show about horse racing interesting and funny.
To open the show showing the audience how to get to Aqueduct via the Subway Special at Times Square, passing under the steel horseshoe shaped arch at the base of the stairs with "Good Luck" painted at the apex, was inspired television. Harvey knew what any horseplayer in Manhattan knew: a large token that was then $1.50 could get you on a train that made only one stop, at Hoyt-Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn, before reaching the promised land Aqueduct in South Ozone Park, Queens, the only racetrack still within the city limits.
The New York Racing Association, (NYRA) and of course the Daily Racing Form had nice obits for Harvey. There are some links in these releases to podcasts with Harvey, as well as taking advantage of one with Peter Fornatale (@loomsboldly), Harvey's co-author on his one and only book, 'May the Horse Be with You,' Harvey's signature line as he threw the program in the air at the end of a telecast.
The gesture of throwing the program accurately reprises what horseplayers used to do with their programs/Racing Forms at the end of a day's worth of racing. Win or lose, there is nothing more useless than a program or a set of past performances after the races have been run. If a day old newspaper is meant to wrap fish, a discarded program/Racing Form is meant for wrapping fish as well—on the same day. After the last race, the trash barrels fill up.
I say "used to" because there is barely anyone at the track these days who acts like they did when I first was going out in 1968, and after. Few tear and throw their losing tickets on the ground. There is very little litter at the track these days. There is very little live crowd, and those who are betting are doing so remotely through their Advance Deposit Wagering (ADW) accounts, or betting through their phone accounts—even while at the track. It's electronic these days.
The gambit used to be to pick up sufficient losing tickets if you hit an IRS payout, so that when it came time to file your taxes to get what was automatically withheld on a big payout, you could "declare" losses near or equal to your winnings. Make it a wash, so there is no tax exposure.
It's a position I've never been in, having never hit a so-called IRS payout. But others continue to hit them, so I wonder how they present losses. Not my problem, though.
Like a lot of horseplayers, Harvey's interest in the sport came from his father, who would give him $10 to take the train from Penn Station to Belmont and get there and reserve some seats for his later arriving father and his friends. Reserving seats in those days, and when I started going out, meant tearing off some unneeded pages from your program or Morning Telegraph and stuffing them, or taping them to the seat. In a moving box in my clothes closet I recently came across the pencil with now faded tape I used to wrap a quantity of masking tape around so that when I got to the track I could secure seats for myself and a few others, and really establish secure territory with taped newspaper. The code was that a seat with newspaper on it was a "reserved" seat. These days, with few in live attendance, that whole seat saving routine is passé.
Because of what then were large crowds at the track, before on-track wagering cut into the attendance, saving seats was essential. Harvey mentions it in his book, but big attendance days were of course weekends (no Sunday racing) and holidays, but also Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashannah. Harvey, himself Jewish, knew this because instead of going to the synagogue, the men would play hookey and head for the track.
So, not only was it impossible to buy a #10 envelope in NYC in that pre-Staples era because all the stationery stores were closed, you had trouble getting a seat at the races unless young Harvey was sent ahead and plopped some newspaper on some seats.
Born in 1927 Harvey would remember the hand-book days when wagering was done through on-track bookmakers, and illegal off-track ones. These were the Damon Runyon years when high stakes gambling was done by gamblers on horses as well as on visits to one of the few casinos in Vegas. The action was on horses.
In what would be middle age, Harvey fell into his tub of butter when he started doing race "replays" on the radio as legal off-track betting proliferated in New York City, starting in 1971. Eventually, there were some 114 OTB, Off-Track Betting parlors scattered throughout the five boroughs. Legal bets could now be made by those who didn't have to break a leg to get to the track by 1:20, ten minutes before the 1:30 first race post, to make playing a bet on the Daily Double, then the only exotic wager you could make.
There was no funnier sight than seeing guys nearly jump off a moving train as it approached Belmont if it was running late and was endangering their chance to get down on the Double. Amazing, but I never saw anyone get electrocuted. God was watching. Likewise, they would come charging off the subway at the Conduit Avenue, Aqueduct stop if making the Double was in jeopardy. Olympic track and field athletes were born.
Quick-witted and with a warehouse of stories to tell, Harvey's popularity grew. You only have to take in one of the telecasts with Andy Serling, or a podcast with Peter Fornatale, to hear of those in his circle who might have known Bugsy Segal, or others who are not named, but who are familiar.
Aside from the quick wit, I always thought Harvey's attraction was his voice, a sincere cadence with clear annunciation, free of rough New York inflection. If he wasn't doing what he did, he could have brought you the evening news, or make money doing voice-overs on commercials. In a sense, he was delivering the news: results.
Andy Beyer, a racing writer for The Washington Daily News, would make an appearance on the dais in conjunction with a big weekend, say an upcoming Travers, or Alabama. Andy Beyer wrote some seminal handicapping books, and will be forever enshrined for his proprietary Beyer speed rating figures, an exclusive feature of the Racing Form, and his analysis of a race based on "trip handicapping." (I'll never forget he picked Raven's Past to beat Curlin in the 2008 Breeders' Cup Classic. And it happened when Curlin hated a then synthetic surface at Santa Anita.)
Andy Serling was really just getting started then as a public handicapper (now doing it for NYRA), and he had then, as now, acerbic opinions about certain horses in an upcoming race.
I'm not sure who started it, but Harvey would make Andy wear a tall dunce cap the following day if one of his "can't win" rants turned out completely wrong, and the horse did win, easily, even if it was a short price.
Sure enough, one day we were there, Andy went on and on about the lousy chances of a horse who was a short-priced favorite, who didn't deserve the short price, and would surely finish up the track. There was no "value" there. When the horse that day won easily, Little Andy was wearing the dunce cap the next morning. Harvey made sure.
After one of these handicapping sessions I approached Harvey with a program opened to a page of entries and asked for his autograph. Now knowing Harvey passed away at 94, he was probably somewhere in his 80s then, still quick-witted, missing nothing.
Harvey signed the page I had opened with what was really just a squiggle, but did comment that I had it opened to a New York Bred race and said he wished he was signing his name to a "better" race. (Even then, New York Bred races were considered inferior to other races. That has changed.)
The press release from NYRA tells us that David O'Rourke, President and CEO of NYRA, says there will be a way NYRA remembers Harvey in the future. That probably means naming a race after him. Fitting. But my hope is despite Harvey being a New York bred himself, NYRA doesn't name a New York Bred race after Harvey.
He might not like it.
http://www.onofframp.blogaspot.com
May he rest in the Peace the world cannot give.
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