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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B09HSXN6Q2
