Taking a Minute to Pine about Some Good Old Days in Toledo, Ohio

My dad was a veterinarian who held three jobs. By day he worked rabies control for the City of Toledo. In the afternoon and on Saturdays he owned a small private practice. And by night, during the racing season, he was the State Vet at Toledo Raceway Park, a harness racing track. My sister and I sometimes had to go to work with him when my mom was busy, which meant we hung out in hot, dirty track barns, with itinerant horse groomers and trainers and drivers, until after midnight. There are probably people who would raise an eyebrow at that sort of environment for kids: late nights, gambling, drinking, swearing, loose women and randy men. But we were pretty well grounded. We just hung out, exploring the corners and shadows as kids are wont to do, and trying not to get into too much trouble.

Later, we each got jobs in the State Vet barn working for our dad. It was good pay back then--about $5 an hour when the minimum wage was under $2. We didn't have titles but my sister called herself a 'pissette.' Our task was simple: stand in a stall with a sterile jar on the end of a pole and wait for the winner to pee.  But horses wouldn't necessarily pee on command; there was art to it: Knowing how and where to stand, shaking fresh straw, whistling in low tones to distract them from other noises. Watching for the signs of imminent release. Hiding the pole until the last possible second. Making sure we were quick enough to not get shorted but not too quick to startle them into stopping. Knowing when to tie them up and when to let them free; when to use blinkers and when to not. And knowing when to hide in the secret room with the sliding panel. Even after all that, sometimes the horse would outlast us and my dad would have to draw blood from a neck vein.

I also worked a couple of summers in the horseman's cafeteria, where I washed dishes, mopped floors and developed a crush on the boss's daughter. Contrary to what you may expect, I never got a single betting tip worth a damn.

I bring all this up because today Raceway Park is no more. The current owners have decided to close down live racing and now you can only catch simulcasts from other tracks. But there is nothing like live racing, with the sound of the hooves on dirt and the smell of sweaty horses and used straw. Cameras cannot capture the violence of the jostling coming out of the gate, the angling for advantage going into the clubhouse turn, the grueling breadth of the back stretch, or the brewing storm as they explode out of the final turn and head for home. It all looks so flat and distant on TV, and if you've ever stood at the rail, if you've ever been close enough to feel the draft as they passed or see the nostrils flared as they reached for the wire, you will know that simulcasts can never replace live racing.

But this isn't about live racing at Raceway Park, which I really don't care about. They tore down my old high school and built a new one. They tore down my junior high and replaced it with riverside condos.  King's Taste is long gone. They moved the library, Canal Carry Out is now called Edgewater Bait and Tackle. I shouldn't complain, since I haven't been 'home' in a long, long time. It's just that as I'm getting older, it's hard to watch the pieces of my youth systematically disappear, is all I'm saying.