Appropriately or not, he passed away on Belmont Day, prevented from placing a bet on Sovereignty, which I know he would have done, because he passed away quietly in his favorite wingback chair, hours before post time. He was 84, two weeks shy of his 85th birthday. No one lives long enough. There's always an end.
John and I started talking horses at a company picnic sometime in the early '70s. John ran a printing press in our duplicating department at Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield at 2 Park Avenue.
My wife Liz, who wasn't yet my wife, who also worked at Empire, knew John from the print room. So, at the company picnic John and I fell into conversation about the Sport of Kings.
One of my favorite stories about being at the track with John was in 1983, February 11, when we were holding down the fort at Aqueduct's Equestris bar. In those days I think that was the observance of Lincoln's birthday, and we had off.
Aqueduct basically ran the whole year round. They had a winterized inner track to keep the ponies going. We thought nothing of using the day off to taking Walter's Transit bus from Main Street Flushing and heading to the track. Weather report? Who pays attention to that when you're deep into the Racing Form?
Well, we're at Equestris seeing that it's starting to look lousy outside, but we still had no idea how bad it was getting from that high up. I can still see the bartenders start to put things away and tell us the track will be closing soon. Four races have been run.
We each get a rain check as we're leaving the track and realize, holy shit!, it's really! coming down. There's no visibility. Snow. A blizzard.
Head for the bus, but it's pulling away. I race to the bus, pound on the door as the bus is moving, feel my heart jump, bus stops, door opens and we get in and return to Flushing. I think 15 inches fell from that storm. Being stranded in South Ozone Park was not appealing.
As usual, I kept the program. I've framed the page for the 5th race and tell anyone who looks at it (not many) to try and tell me who do they think won the race? It's obviously a trick question, because the race was never run. We of course used the rain check in no time.
Nowhere will John be missed than going to Saratoga. He and I (and sometimes my wife) have been going for a week for over 20 years. We only missed because of Covid. It started when one of John's nieces (He has many. More on that later.) stayed at the Greycourt Motel on Route 9 in Queensbury, NY.
The Greycourt is an old fashioned motel with a nice swimming pool and perhaps 30 rooms in three blocks of buildings. All very clean, neat, and near everything. Additionally, there are 4 cottage-type buildings in the back that have two bedrooms. The landscaping is bucolic.
Owning this place happens to be an older brother of someone John went to grammar school with, Tom McDonough, and his wife Marianne. The motel was Marianne's mother's place, and she grew up working there. They have three daughters, one of whom works there.
The McDonoughs were a large Irish-Catholic family rom Rego Park, Queens, NY, as were the Mulligans. John was the middle child of 4 sisters, two older, two younger. I used to tease John that it's amazing he didn't grow up wearing a dress.
The room we always got, No. 9, opened with an old fashioned key fob, was always assigned to us. I called it the Gordie Howe, who always wore No. 9. The linen room was on one side, so it was always quiet. As they got older, Tom and Marianne got selective about who they rented anything out to. The VACANCY sign was often switched to on, even though the place was hardly full.
The motel's location was great for anyone going to Great Escape amusement park just down on Route 9, with miniature golf and go-karts across the street. Queensbury sits between Lake Gorge, a little further to the north, with Glens Falls to the south. It was no more than 35 minutes straight down the Northway to Exit 14 to get to Saratoga. We were Exit 19. Staying there was never prohibitively expensive. We probably got a bit of a discount due to John's boyhood relationship with the brother. A horse players' hideout in the Adirondacks.
And so the Greycourt remained a destination accommodation up to 2021 when the owners, due to their age, put the place up for sale. The deal hasn't gone through yet, but Tom McDonough's aim was to have the place run as it was. Tom, a lawyer, who when first marrying Marianne commuted from his Queens practice to Queensbury on weekends is adept at making his own deal.
Thus, our pilgrimage to Mecca at the finish line in 2022, 2023, and 2024 had to be accommodated at other places, which proved subpar. We stuck to the Queensbury area but wound up at places that we knew would be more expensive, but were also lacking in basic services, like making the bed up.
We decided this year to take a hiatus from going to Saratoga. We made this decision early in the year. Tickets to the track were not sought. All this before the passing of John.
When Saratoga was running racing at 6 days a week with Tuesday dark, we took in the races on Monday and explored the area as tourists on Tuesday.
We made many day trips to local places, none more memorable than to Ulysses Grant's cottage inside a prison's grounds, and another to the nuns at New Skete, who produce fruitcakes and cheesecakes from an industrial kitchen. They have an online business and hip anywhere.
Well, John didn't stop despite my telling him, and he apparently didn't hear the guard in the toll booth yelling at him.(I'm not sure they did.) As we reached the top of he drive we were met with a very angry prison guard whose car was blocking the road.
He didn't make us get out, but I think he might of checked the trunk for firearms, despite our telling him we didn't have any. Trust, but verify. We were contrite, and he let us park for the cottage.
The cottage is a decent take. The tour guide told us that when Grant died they stopped the clock by his bed to signify the time he passed away. That was the custom of the era. When I was allowed to return to my desk several days after the shootings at work in 2002, I looked at my desk calendar—one of those tear the page away kind—at the date: September 16. I kept the calendar, never tearing off the page. It was Grant's clock to me.
One other notable take was visiting the nuns at New Skete and their bakery in Cambridge New York. Years ago, on one of our Vermont leaf peeping visits when John came up with us to a cottage we rented for a week on Beebe Pond, we drove down Route 30 to Fair Haven Vermont, a town just inside the New York Border.
There is a great Greek restaurant, still there, the Fair Haven Inn. The dessert menu featured an item, cheesecake from the Nuns at New Skete. As good as Juniors. So, what's the story here?
Turns out the nuns run an industrial bakery and turn out a variety of fantastic cheesecakes and fruitcakes. The monks at the monastery train German Shepherds for the police and the blind. The nuns and the monks are part of an order of Orthodox Christians under the aegis of the Orthodox Church of America. New Skete refers to a type of smaller monastic settlement.
Cheesecakes are available for purchase, and if it's off hours you can enter the lobby and in an honor system take a cheesecake from the freezer and leave the money. Their cakes are available through mail order and at Hannaford supermarkets, a local chain. On the way home we passed a Hannaford and always bought a cheesecake.
The day trips ended when Saratoga went to 5-day race week, Wednesday through Sunday. There were no dark days for us since we either arrived on Wednesday or Tuesday and went to the track for 4 straight days, coming back on Sunday.
Aside from the pleasure of John's company, will be the void on who I can talk racing to. My wife has no real interest in racing, and just hears me when I talk out loud at the TV.
My friend Dave passed away in 2021. Dave was the inspiration behind naming a horse Fourstardave, the Sultan of Saratoga. I've written about this several times, and an adventurous reader can find out more using the link.
Until John's cars got totaled by being hit while parked in the Wild Wild West of Flushing driving, John was over the house regularly for dinner, always bringing a bottle of wine that he and my wife had no problem finishing during the course of the evening.
We would watching racing on TV. John lived ascetically and didn't bother with cable. There was a bit of a monk in his living. I was only ever in his Flushing apartment maybe twice in the 40 years he lived there, not too far from our house in Flushing.
His place was sparsely furnished, with really just the living basics. I'm not sure he even had a sofa, but he did have a wingback chair that was his favorite.
It was in that wingback chair that John's hastily assembled family found him after I altered them that something might be wrong. John was due to meet us at the bus stop by his building,—the usual spot—at 1:30 on June 7th, which was when we were picking John up to go to the high school graduation party in Pleasantville for my granddaughter, Emma. Emma's mother, my daughter Nancy, is John's Godchild.
Calls to John's landline and cell phone went unanswered. I had confirmed with him the date and time the day before. Gaining entry to his building and fairly banging on his door, produced no answer.
When we got to Pleasantville I still tried to connect: nothing. I alerted his brother-in-law who lives in Centerport that someone should get inside and check on John. They did.
The Emergency Services Unit police couldn't pick the lock on the front door. No one had keys to John's apartment. I think he might had a police lock on his door. His building is a pristine, old, solid building on Northern Boulevard and Bowne Street. The brother-in-law told me they eventually got in via the fire escape accessed from the neighbor's apartment. John was found dead in his wingback chair, likely from a heart attack. The clothes he meant to wear to the graduation party were laid out on the bed.
One of his nieces who came with the brother-in-law and a few others, is a nurse and had all the medical details for the police for John. She even arrived in her scrubs.
John had bypass heart surgery perhaps 12-15 years ago. He wasn't in any kind of bad health lately. His hearing had become a bit compromised due his print job, and apparently his stint in the army with a howitzer unit in Hawaii in the early '60s. No ear plugs then. No autopsy was needed. I don't know
who signed the death certificate.
John never married, and I never knew him to have a companion. He lived alone. Being from a family of four other siblings, the family is large with many nieces, nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews Live long enough and the number of relatives can increase.
He is buried in a family plot in St. John's cemetery off Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens, in with his mother, father, a brother who died in childbirth, and a niece who died from cystic fibrosis at a young age.
John is not missed more than when I watch racing and make a few bets. There is no one to readily share my track observations with these days. The four of us who I dubbed The Assembled are now three. We will likely meet again at Aqueduct in the spring, waiting for Belmont to open in October 2026.
Bobby G. will be over 90 when that happens, and I will be closer to 80. Jose, the youngest will probably make it in from Connecticut where he now lives. Of course, we have to be alive for all this to happen.
I like to think we'll make it to the new Belmont, its third iteration, and I will be able to get in touch with enough of John's relatives (the immediate ones aren't so young either.) and arrange for a gathering in a NYRA dinning room with enough people that they will name a race after him—The John Mulligan.
NYRA will name a race on the undercard for a sufficient party of people with a winner's circle presentation.. I have no idea what the cost will be. NYRA sets some extortionate prices these days. Dinning in the Easy Goer room at Saratoga for the buffet is set right now at $121 per person! Joey Chestnut couldn't eat that much to make it worth the price.
Based on the promo material that they're producing for the new Belmont, one has to worry that they'll charge $10 or more to get in, seating will be costly, and eating there will be prohibitive. They show a lot of upscale looking accommodations.
It would not be unlike NYRA to act they they're producing a Broadway show or an opera, and price accordingly. After all, how are they going to repay New York State the loan they got from Governor Hochul to finance the new Belmont for what is one big day racing, the annual Belmont Stakes, and one hoped for two days of racing for the Breeders' Cup, which rotates around, and I think is slated for 2027 for Belmont. Other than that, it's just people like me, all 2,000 of us who might show up on a given day of racing. NYRA is something else.
But we'll see. Until then, I'll continue to follow and bet on racing, and save up all my observations—Kendrick Carmouche is riding lights out right now; Linda Rice is right behind in the trainer stats beneath the perennials, Chad Brown and Todd Pletcher; fields are short due to program scratches that leave 4 horses in the starting gate; they misplaced the starting gate for a 11/8 turf race and ran it at 11/16, the rails out confused them; favorites are winning at about 40%, with win payouts not topping $10.00 very often; the Ortiz brothers, Irad Jr. and Jose own the jockey standings; Bobby G's friend, Richie, has had two starters at Saratoga so far, winning with one, Accelerated News, as the second choice, he goes again this Thursday; the other one, Fleeting Free, is pretty much a failure, running last; Dylan Davis, who we first bet on and won with when he was an apprentice is doing well; The trainer Christophe Clement passed away at 59 from an aggressive cancer; his son Miguel, who was always the assistant, has seamlessly taken over with success; Ricardo Santana Jr. is always worth a second look because he's been doing well —to silently tell him what's happening.
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Great tribute to John M, John C. What a lovely soul he was. May he rest in the peace the world can not give. May he be there when we play the horses again and May we pick them in the right order.
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