During the course of many years of employment on the racetrack, I was fortunate enough to visit several small but picturesque tracks in the United States: Green Mountain, Scarboro Downs, Lincoln, Narragansett, all of which are now closed. A similar racetrack, although the term “picturesque” was hardly applicable, was Raceway Park in Toledo, Ohio. A winter spent at Raceway Park was all anyone needed to heighten their appreciation of the facilities we enjoy when racing on the Ontario thoroughbred circuit.

Oh, not that there weren’t perks to winter racing in Toledo: the people were wonderfully friendly, the track kitchen served possibly the best meals ever prepared on any backstretch as well as a form of blackberry brandy to warm up even the coldest of grooms, and the ancient apartment/hotel where I stayed provided me with a bed that pulled out of the wall. But generally speaking, it was cold and miserable and we were just a bunch of “gypsies” with cheap, sore horses trying to get through until spring.

I was running horses for a Canadian-based trainer in order to support my first racehorse, a $1,500 claimer named Riding High who did as little as possible to support himself. Possibly the most intelligent horse I have ever run across, “The Rider” was totally sound in his day-to-day training but had obviously learned how to read during the course of his career. As soon as his name appeared on the overnight, he would present himself as dead sore. His mysterious ailment would invariably disappear minutes after scratch time so I can only conclude he had learned that when his name appeared in the entries, “Riding High” actually spelled “trouble”.

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