Race Track Diary, Entry Number Five Rosslyn Hotel (Prospectors Room, April 2, 2025)

Introduction

This blog and some following blogs are sections from an informal diary of “visits to the race-track” at a particular time and place, by a person who has followed the races with varying levels of participation over a long period. These relate primarily to some visits to the track and/or off-track betting venues in the 2025 period and onward. They contain observations about the activity, both specific and general. Although these remarks are personal, they also reflect general cultural and historical trends, as they have impacted horse-racing, wagering and culture in general.

The setting is Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (population of about one million plus). However, I imagine that the observations would apply to many places in the world, as they are a reflection of how changing trends in technology, globalization and culture in general have affected this ancient and honourable activity of horse-racing.

For now, I will use what I call “polished point-form” for the narrative.

5 – Rosslyn Hotel (Prospectors Room) (Apr 2, 2025)

This off-track betting lounge is off the Yellowhead Trail and 97 Street in North Edmonton. Given the part of the city that this place is in (a major thoroughfare), the traffic was fairly heavy during the early afternoon.

It is not exactly the nicest area of the city, but it’s not dangerous area or anything like that. Still, it is a bit sketchy. There was one guy sitting on the sidewalk at the side of the hotel, who looked to be a homeless chap. However, he minded his own business and we did likewise.

It is close to the graveyard that my dad’s marker is in (military ground), so we have been there in the past (after Remembrance Day). Family members generally go to the cemetery for the November 11 flag ceremony, followed by brunch and possibly other frivolities. He was a sapper in WW2, I have written a book about that, linked below.

This place has a pretty decent restaurant and a nice lounge with slots and off-track racing facilities. The betting area and lounge is called the Prospector’s Room, though the neon lights for the latter part of the first word weren’t lit up. Thus, Pro Room. Not sure if that was an omen, and if so, what did it mean? The mind staggers at some of the possibilities. But surely the law and public morals haven’t dipped that low.

The lounge itself isn’t bad. There is a quieter area for sipping a drink and chatting, followed by a lot of loud slot machines, then finally the off-track horse-racing area. The track area had smaller than usual TV screens, which made things a bit difficult to read. Also, there weren’t the usual plethora of screens that one often finds, though there were enough.

There were a few other guys at the track area when we arrived. They were actually rather decent fellows. One guy gave us a little demonstration of working the machines that produce the racing programs and forms. He even noted that the proper racing form gave a lot more data than the usual programs, but at a higher price ($8.50 vs $2.50). I knew all that, but I played along anyway. His help was useful, though, since these machines can be rather counter-intuitive, until you get used to them.

Then we sat down and I noted to my brother Craig that I had forgotten to bring a pen to aid in handicapping. Quickly, a pen slid down the long table that we were standing at, from one of the fellows down the table. I guess he didn’t need it any longer. I thanked him, he nodded.

Along with the other fellow’s help at the program printing machine, I was reminded that the old comradeship of the horse player community still existed, here and there. Craig said that they probably thought I was a newbie to the horses, since I had a sort of sports jacket on, which may have made me look slightly out-of-place. It was nothing special, though, just some $140 job that I got from Tip-Top the previous year for Christmas.

It was mostly bucket-puller tracks running on this day (i.e. harness racing). The only thoroughbred tracks seemed to be Meadowlands and Turf Paradise, if I recall correctly.

I chose to play Turf Paradise, out of Phoenix again. I would have preferred Santa Anita (Los Angeles/Pasadena area), but it wasn’t running this day. That was probably a bad choice, as Arizona allows its tracks to charge very high takeouts (the money held back from bettors). Craig also played Turf Paradise, while waiting for his precious harness racing at Woodbine/Mohawk (Toronto), which started later in the afternoon.

I have done better at Santa Anita than Turf Paradise in the past. I don’t know if that is because it is a higher class track (thus better, more predictable horses, or so one assumes) or if it is just random luck on my part. The sample size is too small to draw definitive conclusions, obviously.

There was only one screen per track, so it was tough to follow the odds as the betting progressed, for each individual horse. The odds were focused mostly on the exotic pools, so you had to infer the odds per horse. That was a little bit annoying.

In the first set of races, I had a couple of close calls, betting exactors and or quinellas (I usually bet a favourite and a longer odds horse whose chart shows some promise). But they were nipped at the wire and close isn’t good enough.

I had a win on the last race, but the betting machine acted funny. It took my voucher (the bet) but then wouldn’t accept my bet. After a little while, I gave up on it. It was only a $4 voucher, I thought, so it didn’t really matter.

Then, the combination that I was trying to bet on did actually come in. It didn’t really matter much – the bet only paid about $6.50 on a $2 bet, since it was a favourite and a second favourite that came in, thus low odds, even on a so-called exotic bet. At most, I was out a sawbuck.

I had joked to Craig about that possibility, before the race started. I had even shown him the 1-8 combination that I wrote down on my program, as my intended bet (a quinella, where you bet the top two horses in either order). A young fellow in front of us gave me a consoling look, after overhearing Craig and myself talking about it. I am not sure what he said, as he had a rather incomprehensible Jamaican accent. But he seemed sympathetic to my situation, so that was cool.

There was another Jamaican fellow there who was quite excited by everything, cheering his horses on them damning them when they lost. He was an older guy, but he appeared to know the younger guy. These two seemed to be part of the after-work crowd now, as it was later in the afternoon. There was another fellow, of ambiguous ethnic background, who was also quite chatty. But he wasn’t too intrusive, so that was ok, as well.

I guess that’s a cultural thing. Some people (like Craig and me) like to feign an almost indifferent attitude to winning or losing (i.e. we can take it in our stride); others love to get into the excitement and emotion of the moment. It’s all relative, I guess.

There was also a guy in a wheelchair, who played the races for a while. He always stayed very close to a betting machine. It seemed like he might be lacking a leg or two, as he had a blanket over that part of his body. But, good for him, if racing got him outside of the house and interested in life.

I always said that gambling was the one dependable life-long “vice”. Drugs, booze, tobacco and wild women can shorten your life and bring you to a lot of other grief. Betting a few bucks at the track is just a pleasant mental challenge and few laughs, as long as you keep the investment within reason. Not everybody does, of course. As Hamlet would say, ‘there’s the rub’.

After that last race at Turf Paradise we called it a day. We took a route back to my place that went through downtown, but overall, the traffic was surprisingly light. Craig pointed out highlights as he drove, particularly the haunts of the down-and-out that he has observed (e.g. “there was encampment under this bridge last year”). He finds that interesting, an ongoing barometer of the state of society.

So, it was not a winning day, but there was some interesting race-track sociology to observe.

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Since I am running a book publishing blog, here is a plug for a horse-racing oriented short story that I wrote.

A Dark Horse, A Gothic Tale

In “A Dark Horse”, a gambler’s desire to hit a big win seems to lead him to make a Faustian bargain with a supernatural evil. Or is it all just a string of unnaturally good luck?

The story is just $0.99 U.S. (equivalent in other currencies) and about 8000 words. It is also available on Kindle Unlimited and is occasionally on free promotion.

U.S.: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

U.K.: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Spain:https://www.amazon.es/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Brazil: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01MDMY2BR

Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Here’s an interesting review from Goodreads

(BTW, the writer has never met the reviewer and was not even aware of the review until very recently – You can look up the review on Goodreads, if you like)

A Dark Horse

Every gambler is bound to run out of luck eventually, right?

By far my favourite type of horror is psychological horror. I was quite pleased with how Mr. Olausen frightened his audience without spilling a single drop of blood or so much as hinting at anything gory. He knew exactly what hints to drop for us that made us deliciously dread the next scene simply by throwing out hints about who or what the dark horse might actually represent. This is the kind of stuff I love getting scared by, especially as Halloween approaches.

It would have been helpful to have more character development in this short story. While I certainly wouldn’t expect to see as much time spent on this as I would for a full-length novel, I did have trouble connecting to the main characters due to how little I knew about them and how much their personalities seemed to remain the same no matter what happened to them. If not for this issue, I would have felt comfortable choosing a much higher rating as the plot itself was well done.

I must admit to not knowing much about gambling at all, so I appreciated the brief explanations the narrator shared about how placing bets works and why some people have so much trouble walking away from a bet. While I will leave it up to experts on these topics to say how accurate everything was, I did enjoy learning more about the main character’s addiction and what he hoped to gain from betting on just one more game or race. It gave me a stronger sense of empathy for folks in his position.

A Dark Horse – A Gothic Tale was a deliciously chilling story for the Halloween season and beyond.

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And since I mentioned my dad’s time in the army, here is a book about his unit that I wrote:

The Sappers' War: A History of the 12th Field Company Royal Canadian Engineers, Oct 1943 to Sept 1945

What follows is a review of the history of the 12th Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers, primarily relating to the time that the company was in the Italian and Northwestern European theatres during World War II. Though the book focuses on the experiences of a particular company of Canadian military engineers, it also discusses some of the wider issues of the second world war and how it affected the people wholived through the era, civilian and military. Among those are my father (a sapper or military engineer) and mother (a war worker in wartime Britain and ultimately a war bride).

Thus, this is meant to be an informal and unofficial history of the company, written by an interested party in an effort to understand what these men went through during this period, and how that experience affected them and other people who lived through the war. The military aspects of the company's history are there (e.g. training, fighting, building bridges, detecting mines, maintaining routes), as are the cultural factors that influenced them and their times (e.g. the movies that they watched, the drinking they did, the many diseases they faced, their interactions with the Italian, British and other civilians that they lived among, their worries for the future). Some focus on life on the British home front is also given, via the experiences of my mother and her family.

Since many people had family and relations that lived during this time, it is my hope that the account will be of general interest to them, and to any that have a particular interest in this critical interval in history. Also, though the text relates specifically to Canadian sappers, I believe that many of the experiences will be common to the soldiers and loved ones of other nations who lived through the war, especially Americans and those from Britain and the British Commonwealth.

The primary sources of this document are the 12th Field Company War Diaries and related orders, with some material from The History of the Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers, Volume 2 as well as various official histories by the Department of National Defence. Various other published sources are used as well, especially when discussing the wider issues of the war or the army experience (e.g. Churchill’s history of the war), or conversely when relating very specific episodes of the war (e.g. Popski’s Private Army in late 1944). Personal accounts of my father’s or mother’s stories also augment the narrative. I have tried to fit those in during appropriate time periods, though some stories are more general and have therefore don’t necessarily relate to the time period being discussed. Nonetheless, they do help capture the essence of “being there” during the war years.

The War Diary is a day by day account of the primary activities of a given unit, as recorded by personnel in the headquarters staff of that unit, and signed off by the commander of the unit. As such, it is an official record, though the writers often brought a bit of their own character into the document. Naturally, as a relatively brief document it can’t hope to capture the complexity of the individual stories of 280 or so men, so the family lore generally has no corresponding entry in the War Diary, though there are sometimes tantalizing hints and near-verifications of these personal accounts.

There are a number of other sources for the book, from official histories to popular history books. I include quotations and references from these works (an eclectic mix), as I believe that they also shed light on different aspects of this period of time, and besides that, are just interesting accounts, in and of themselves.

U.S.: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

U.K.: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Spain: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Brazil: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B09HSXN6Q2