The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

-LESS-THAN-0096-Author's note: Current Times publisher Imbert Matthee asked me to pen a few words about the Days of Real Sport since this does appear to be the 100th anniversary of the event. My perspective is mainly from the point of view of our participation in producing the programs for each year's races and how that changed over the years.-GREATER-THAN-0096- O rin Walker, a former county commissioner and local historian, explained to me where the title of the meet came from. A cartoonist for the Spokesman Review drew sketches of some of the joys of growing up in the West. He covered events such as a group of barefoot boys on a fishing expedition, or some lads playing sand-lot baseball games.

The examples I have seen were non-political and kinda like a Tom Sawyer approach to life in a small town. The thought must have appealed to some of the early horse folk enough to name the event after this homespun cartoon.

The first race meet our family worked on was in May 1964. The newspaper was a hot-type letterpress operation as was the race program. Here is how the schedule went:

Folks with horses to race would start to arrive midweek for the Saturday Sunday meet. In those "early" days the immediate area was home to many, what I would call, "Mom and Pop" stables. A couple, interested in horses and in racing, would make it a point to arrive in Waitsburg on race week where they would find a stable for their steeds. They might be drawn for a race, or maybe not make the cut, but they enjoyed the ambiance of the horse race culture. That particular type of horse race fan is no longer a part of the scene.

A veteran staff of local volunteers took care of documentation of the mounts and, with the advantage of a number of years of experience, were able to set up conditions for each race to use the largest number of horses. Each race had only eight horses because that was the size of the starting gate. As in any track, there might be eligible horses who would be moved up into starting positions if one of the drawn horses was scratched. A horse might be scratched because of an injury, for example, or if a jockey was not available.

Force behind the race

The board of the DRS was the power center. Herman and Kenneth Gohlman were an integral part of the management, ably assisted by Delores Gohlman who handled all the extensive paperwork of notifying horse owners and lining up entries for the two days of racing. Kenneth Smith, who was very generous with both equipment and manpower to prepare the track and take care of the stables, was a man who gave the final nod on most decisions. His wife, Erma Lee, was a long-time chaperon for several of the courts and daughter DeeDee (Mrs. Perry Dozier) was Queen.

Ernest Mikkelsen and Bill Payne were part of that power structure as well as J. V. and Don Glover. Don Glover invented one of the first photo finish systems in the Northwest. Some of his early equipment is on display at the Waitsburg Historical Society Museum. The Gohlman brothers were genuine horse race fans, and often traveled to Spokane or Seattle to enjoy the sport there. If anyone came into the grocery store and announced that he/she was heading for the out-of-town horse races, they were handed some money and given instructions on what races to bet on and which horses to pick.

Get with the program

The Racing Form was a real source of information for the committed. The printer I had worked for in Denver printed programs for both horse and dog races. I remember one day being at the track, standing next to "Dolly" Jones and looking at the large infield. I commented "That would make a great place to have a dog track." "Dolly" Jones was a true horse race fan and my comment was not met with what you might call enthusiasm. Never made that mistake again.

Each of the horses which arrived in town was noted on an entry sheet which gave the vital information: The owner, the trainer, the jockey, the pedigree of the horse, probable odds and jockey weight. During the "draw," these entry sheets were randomly chosen and then listed in order of their gate assignment. The conditions of the race would be something like 3-year olds who had not won a race that year. The race conditions were joined with the entry forms and they were the copy from which we set our program in hotmetal type. We had to proof each page and check the copy with the entry forms to ensure correctness.

We normally got this copy from the race office at the track about 7:00 p.m. on Friday night and were expected to have the programs finished by parade time on Saturday morning. That meant an all-night session at the print shop. Normally the copy for the Sunday programs didn't arrive until 8 or 8:30 p.m. Saturday night, so we arrived at Sunday school a little bleary-eyed, suffice it to say. A favorite picture from a race program night was young (at that time) son Loyal sound asleep on the feed board of the 35x46 Miehle newspaper press. That particular machine has made its home in the Blue Mountain Insurance garage since it was placed there in 1975 by Ron Miller (all 11 tons of it).

Once these pages were made up we locked them into position on a press and printed four pages at a time. This printing was done on a Little Giant Press which had a 14x10 bed. This press was at the Times when we purchased it from Carl and Virginia Dilts. A salesman for the American Type Founders, which distributed this particular piece of equipment, once told me he didn't have any customers he disliked enough to sell them a Little Giant. But I had learned to run one in Colorado in the mid 40's so I was acquainted with its idiosyncrasies.

Hot off the press

After we printed the pages we gathered and stapled them into booklets. I think the first ones we printed were sold by DRS for $1, a figure which eventually worked its way up to $3. The FFA were always tasked to sell the programs, and they received a part of the proceeds for their work.

Another project for the print shop in the early days, prior to the advent of the Japanese copy machine, was the Railbird picks. A local tout set up a list of which horses he thought would be in the winner's circle. We set the list in type and ran off a couple hundred of them on a small hand-fed Chandler and Price "snapper" and he sold these at the track. It is a traditional track pick sheet. Forget how much he charged for them, but they sold briskly if he was successful in the first couple of races.

During each night we printed programs, we would always have folks drop into the shop to see if they were done. The touts always wanted to have a jump-start on which horses were running. We normally told these folks to wait and buy their program from the FFA.

Our program crew varied over the years depending on Times staff. Our fromscratch programs were about 4.5 inches wide and 9 inches deep. Later when we used the computer-furnished copy, the pages were 7.5 wide and 10" deep. Over the years, our steady crew involved Bettie Chase, Doris Hulce, The Baker Family at various times. Another good helper was Jan Eastman who came down from Spokane to help us in the bindery and to enjoy the races.

One year that I remember, the DRS was scheduled for a three-day meet for some reason. I don't think it was Memorial

Day weekend because Dayton Days was always held then. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but our staff, the Lions club cook "shackers,"and the racing officials were all so pooped after the third day that we never ventured on that journey again.

Making hay

We were about the only people in town who consistently made money on the races. Many other downtown business people worked at the track as volunteers without pay. Since not too many folks showed up at midnight on race nights to assist, we did not feel too guilty about getting some financial benefit from the races. The downtown stores did a land-office business on parade day since the event drew goodsized crowds.

In the early days, any advertising for the programs was sold by various members of the DRS board and the association was billed for the cost of the programs. This sales duty became less popular as the years went by, so we eventually agreed with DRS that we would sell the advertising, collect the revenue, and produce the programs at no cost to them. That system worked well for many years.

Our staff was pretty gungho in the early days and some of us went out to the track, after pulling an all-nighter at the print shop, and work in the betting booth. When the locals ran the whole show, we had about four folks who sat in a computation room and figured the payoff for each race.

The tickets in the pre-state involvement days (by the Washington State Horse Racing Commission) were all printed by Pat O'Neil at the Dayton Chronicle. He had purchased a multiple-head numbering machine so he would print a full sheet of tickets and then number them in full sheets and cut them apart so they could be sold out of trays. The system was ingenious.

The first ticket on top of the pile was always numbered zero, so that the number showing was the number of tickets that had been sold on that horse or that combination. The computing room would get a sheet which indicated how many tickets had been bet on each horse, which horse had won, and we would figure the payoff which would be the total pool, less the 15% commission for the track divided by the number of winning tickets.

We had to figure the payoffs on each race for win, place, show and quinella. It kept the fingers flying for a few minutes because all the bettors were eagerly awaiting the results. After working on programs all night and then spending the afternoons in the calculation booth, by Sunday evening our energy levels were flagging a bit. But thankfully, we were much younger at the time.

On the cover

One year Herman Gohlman, one of the race managers, came in and asked if we could print pari-mutuel tickets for an eleventh race. We puzzled that one out but tackled the problem and that was a project that finished with the dawn patrol. But we did it. Each year we would take pictures of the DRS court members and feature them on the cover of each race program. Occasionally, at the whim of the board, some long-serving helper would be honored on a special race day. I remember days for both Herman and Kenneth Gohlman as well as Ken Smith and David McConnell. David was the track announcer and did each race just like the pros do for the Kentucky Derby. He was ably assisted by Jill McConnell and the call to the colors was bugled by Charlie Baker, keeping it in the family.

For many years David was the emce for the Queen's dance held downtown. A court would be selected and tickets printed. The girl who sold the most tickets would be selected as Queen. The announcement of the winner was always a time of great anticipation, and David was a master at drawing the palaver out so that the girls would dissolve in celebration when the winner was announced.

Small town no more

All this above, of course, was done when this was just a friendly little country race meet run by folks who had done these tasks for years as a volunteer endeavor.

I can't say for sure when the State of Washington decided that it needed to get its governmental nose under this particular equine tent, but it changed a lot of things. In the early days the programs were quite similar, but one of the first changes was to bring in machines to sell the pari-mutuel tickets. The early machines were cast-offs from larger tracks and were not all that dependable. But they accounted for the tickets mechanically which made figuring payoffs more expedient. One major change was that a "state" man was in charge of the betting and a state man was in charge of the horse draws and conditions. Some purse money came with the oversight so no one complained too loudly. A representative from the state was also assigned to manage the jockey crew.

Occasionally a jockey from California would drift into the system and ones with some valid experience would do quite well. With the three tandem meets on three separate weekends: Walla Walla, Waitsburg and Dayton-a pro could be making a good mark by the end of the third weekend.

A poignant picture in the archives of The Times depicted the end result of a young man who didn't mind his mother. The tale is told that this lad wanted to be a jockey but his mother strictly forbade him to do that. A new jockey had to prove to a horse owner that he/ she was capable of taking care of the thoroughbred during the rough and tumble of a race. Older jockeys were more sly and knew some tricks that the younger ones had yet to master. Apparently this young man was able to convince a horse owner to let him ride.

During the race an accident occurred in which the young man fell and was kicked in the back of the head by one of the other horses in the race. It was a fatal blow, and this picture shows Dr. Hevel kneeling by the young man along with many other DRS officials such as Martin Dorsey from Prescott and Ernest Mikkelsen of Waitsburg. As far as I was able to discern, this may have been the only fatal ride in DRS history.

The betting game

Prior to state funded purses, the system was set up so that each horse owner contributed an entry fee to the race, and the winner took a certain percentage of the total "purse." Since additional funds were needed to make the winners feel good if not only a bit richer, the association sponsored some crab feeds in the early days. These were interesting endeavors. Don Thomas was one of the managers of the events and thus ended up having a building at the track named in his honor. They featured a free seafood meal and different types of games such as blackjack, poker, 4-5-6, dice and varieties of the same. These were held in the spring usually at the Legion Club. Since such gambling was technically illegal, it was done under a "tolerance" policy with the county sheriff. The sheriff once told me it was a nervous time because if someone decided to stage a holdup and do some serious profit-sharing at one of these events, it would cause some major heartburn in deciding how to handle the legal side of it. The most notable event was on a year when a man from Oregon, who was known by the managers of the crab feed, lost about $3,000 and signed an IOU for the amount owed. The next weekend, returning from a Las Vegas trip in his private airplane, the man unfortunately ran into a mountain, killing him and his family. The crab feed proceeds that year were a bit shy.

With the advent of personal computers (we are talking Radio Shack Model 4) the ticket selling machines printed out the sales results but the payoffs still had to be calculated by hand. LED calculators had made their way into the scene, but it was still pretty manual. Knowing the system, I set up a program on the Radio Shack computer which would figure the payoffs a lot faster than with four people working on little calculators. I was brave enough to take the program to Dayton to use in calculating their payoffs.

The ticket machines moved then to a coordinated effort so that a computer was attached and it went directly from the data on the individual machines to the payoff figures. A major change in the appearance at the track was the "tote" board-the piece of equipment which displayed the odds on each horse and other details like the race time and payoffs. In the early days this was done by two volunteers sitting behind the board, getting information via intercom and writing it on erasable wooden panels that rotated on an axis. That was not fast enough for Roman Miller, one of the first State managers of the meet, so eventually the tote board was hooked electronically to the ticket sales machines and was updated on a minute-byminute basis.

The introduction of mechanical ticket machines made the pari-mutuel system much more flexible. In addition to a Daily Double (pick winners of first two races) and Quinella (pick winner and place of a race) the machines could accommodate Tri-fectas (pick win, place and show in a given race). At small tracks the horses were pretty well known, and often a Quinella would pay just a bit more than the winning ticket. As bettors know if one picks a horse to show it will pay off if the horse finishes in the top 3. Often, the favorites had to pay a minimum so if you bet $2 on your favorite nag, you were guaranteed to receive at least $2.10. The big payoffs came when long-shots came in, but that was normally few and far between. Betting was to have been restricted to those over 21 years of age, but it was not impossible to note that some younger bettors were able to participate.

Higher math

About this time a coordinated program change took place. Instead of the old system where we took information from the entry sheets and set it up on a page, this computer system would not only list the horses and the pertinent information but would give a record of the last five or six races that the horse had run with times and competitors. So the program then resolved itself to picking up these pre-printed computer pages and laying them out so they would appear in sequence in the program, then printing them on a small offset press 2 pages at a time, gathering and stitching them and getting them ready to sell.

The program also had general track information about how odds were figured and who all was involved in managing the meet. In the later days we would start by preprinting several general pages and get ready for the race days when all we had to do was to print the current race pages, merge them with the pre-prints and staple them together. One change from country track days was the inclusion of the Preakness in our program. Because of computer technology it was possible for our race meet to receive all the information regarding the Preakness race at Pimlico Racetrack in Maryland. Local bettors were able to place bets in Waitsburg on that race held back east. The odds were the same and the payoffs identical to what was happening at the larger eastern track.

One very helpful change came from Terry Hofer who was a vital worker in setting up the races. One of the premeet activities consisted of time trials when there were more horses than positions and a choice had to be made to pare down the fields. I asked Terry one day if the time trials could not be held on Thursday rather than Friday. This would certainly relieve our all-night schedule. That change was made and we henceforth did our printing by the light of day. We would receive Saturday copy on Friday afternoon and Sunday copy at parade time on Saturday, and it made things much nicer at the print shop.

One side note involves the number of programs printed. In the mid 60's, when horse racing was about the only above-board legal way to gamble, we would print some 1200 or 1400 programs for each day.

After the state got into lottery and Indian casinos and many other ways to capture the gambling dollar, the program totals dropped to 400 per day or less.

Again in the "early" days (from my perspective) the Waitsburg Lions Club was an instrumental part of the race scene. The members manned the "Cook Shack" and one of the major funding source was the income from serving burgers and fries for each two-day meet.

The Days of Real Sport was a unifying factor for our community. As a community celebration, it brought excitement and activity. Many people had specific tasks from selling sno-cones to working with the jockeys to managing the pari-mutuel betting process, and it gave all of us a sense of ownership.

The tie with a horse culture went back to the early days when Main Street would be filled with animals that displayed the pride of ownership. The early racing culture challenge "My horse is faster than your horse," was played out year after year. It is with a certain sadness that we see the end of an era caused, not by a lack of enthusiasm, but by bureaucratic manipulation and the threat of liability lawsuits. Those of us who enjoyed those days will have a storehouse of memories from which to draw.