A Hurricane and a Horse

A hurricane and a horse

Not meaning to downgrade the importance of being prepared for Hurricane Sandy, every time I hear reports of a hurricane coming I’m reminded of one that cost my Aunt and I over $250.00 that never came.  It has to do with a horse-racing story. 

I was brought up by my paternal grandparents in Astoria, a suburb of New York City, after my mother died at the age of 29 from complications of childbirth following the birth of my younger sister.    Two years after my grandmother died in 1931 my grandfather retired and built - with the help of some friends - a little bungalow in Lindenhurst, Long Island.  The building materials cost all of $2,200.  My cousin, Kitty, two years my senior, was also being taken care of by my grandfather so off we went to Lindenhurst in time for Kitty and I to start school in September.  One year later my Aunt Grace and Uncle Tom came with their two year old daughter, Jacquelynn, Tom died not long after.

With those details behind me, I’ll get to the story I want to tell.  When my grandfather suffered his first heart attack in 1939, Jerry, our barber, used to come to the house to cut his hair while he was recuperating.  Jerry was a real racing fan – the horses, and was getting my grandfather and my aunt and me interested.  The girls had other interests.  Jerry was telling us about all the things to look for in the Racing Form and the kind of systems he would follow to “dope things out.”  It wouldn’t be too much later that our basement would be a library of Racing Tabs, Man-O-War tout sheets and whatever.  There was a bookie in town that would take quarter bets.  The pari-mutual payoffs were, and still are, based on wagers of two dollars.  A twenty five cent wager on a winner netted one eighth of the pari-mutual payoff by the bookie.  I soon became the runner for my aunt and grandfather’s bets and also placed my own when I had the money.  Having good street smarts as a young teenage kid, whenever I would go to Izzy’s poolroom to place the day’s wagers and not see a paper in sight I would know that the word was out that the State snoops were in town and I wouldn’t even approach Izzy.  The local police had more important things to be concerned about than worrying about the harmless past-time of people betting on the races.  I would just saunter around and leave.  

After returning from Tripoli in 1946 where I worked as a cryptographer with a wing of the Army Air Corps called the AACS - Army Airways  Communications System – I bought a little old 1928 rumble seat Model A Ford with winnings I had from a fantastic run of cards I had in the final month and a half I was overseas.  There was a federal program underway at that time called the 52-20 club.  It gave veterans $20.00 a week for 52 weeks or until they found work. 

I would get my check out of the box at the Post-Office and invariably get home and say to my aunt working at the kitchen sink, “Let’s go.”  There are many racing stories to tell about but there’s always one that comes to mind when I hear warnings about a hurricane.  It’s about one that’s associated with the hurricane that never came. 

We were sitting in the grandstand at Jamaica Race-track this one day; my aunt with her fifty cent Racing Form and I with mine, quietly, silently, doping things out.  Once in awhile we would point out something to one another that we thought was worth taking note of.  I couldn’t separate two horses, Whatucallum and Deep Texas, and couldn’t make up my mind who I liked better.  Then I saw a horse by the name of Equate who had an impressive workout – four furlongs in 48 seconds - and decided that that was my play.  He was 25-1 on the board.  When I knew my aunt had her mind made up I stood up and said, “Who ya got?”  She said, “Equate.”…“Me too.  The workout, right?”…”Yeah.” I took her two dollars and went and placed the bets.                 

It was a six furlong race with the horses starting at the back of the back stretch.  From the time they broke from the starting gate Equate was close up.  In the final eighth of a mile he left the pack in the dust and won going away.  It was a thrilling finish.  He paid $56.00.  My aunt and I agreed that the horse was in tip-top shape and we vowed that we’d be here again for his next outing.  We figured we’d still get pretty good odds. 

And now for the climax of the story.  About ten days later we see Equate listed in the first race at Jamaica with morning line odds of 8-1.  But the news reports are raging about a hurricane that’s coming.  With each report they’re getting more and more intense.  We came to the conclusion that there surely wouldn’t be racing if the storm was coming and decided not to go.  My little tin-can, 20 year old, model-A Ford, that had a top speed of 35 miles per hour would be blown off the road.  I decided to spend the day white-washing the unfinished basement walls with a process my younger brother and I was using that he showed me when I was living with my father and siblings in North Arlington, New Jersey for twenty months.  We used to go house-to-house to see if people wanted their trees white-washed.  While I was working I heard the radio report that the races started at Jamaica and they came on with the result of the first race.  The winner was Equate.  I thought to myself, “Well, he might not pay that much seeing as how he won so impressively the last time out.”  I all but collapsed when the race was declared official a few minutes later and they gave the prices.  He paid $129.00.  I vowed from that day on that I would never let a weather report stop me from going ahead with my plans.  The horse must have been stepping up in class to pay that price.  My aunt and I probably would have played him win and place or across the board if we had been there, considering the odds.  He must have been listed on the board at odds of 60-1.  We would never put a horse with that price into a daily-double.  We might if he was in the second race.  We’d still have a chance to play him if our horse in the first race lost.       

If Equate had been going in a later race we very likely would have placed a bet with the bookie once we realized they were running the races.  We could at least have been able to get odds of 30-1.  That was the limit the bookies paid.  

         

Second Presidential Debate

Second Presidential Debate

Nice act Mr. President – go with righteous indignation when you can’t answer the question.  The fact is you didn’t provide the security the ambassador asked for.  And if you weren’t spending so much time in Las Vegas and on entertainment shows like The View etc., your eyes might have been open to seeing what was happening in Libya and other places in the region that might have given you reason to beef up security before it was even asked for.

Your Secretary of State was on the air the very next day using a video that very few people even knew about to give cover for why the attack on the embassy happened.  It only served to publicize the video and start riots by Muslim fanatics all over the world. 

Another disingenuous moment for President Obama was when he was saying that Governor Romney paid only 14% in income taxes.  Obama deals in perceptions.  He knows that very few people know that that 14% was being paid on income from investments.  Doug McKelway on Fox news this morning, the day after the debate, said exactly that.  He pointed out that monies invested that Romney already paid income tax on was invested and the income was taxed at 14%.  McKelway pointed out that Romney will pay tax a third time when inheritance tax is imposed on his estate at time of death.  I call it the confiscation of peoples’ property that cause many businesses to have to shut down.  The other shoe that falls is that many people wind up out of work collecting unemployment checks from the government and less money is in circulation to drive the economy.

And how about what Romney, Obama and Biden give to charity.  It was recently reported that Romney gave 19% of his income to charity in 2011.  He also gave the entire inheritance he got from his father to charity.  Biden gave $300 or .0013% and Obama gave one percent.  Aren’t we happy that the Socialists are in charge of our purse strings???

New Taxes

Check out this link to see the new taxes that will go into effect in January:

January taxes

The VP Debate

The VP Debate

I thought VP Joe Biden was more successful last night in getting his points across than Congressman Paul Ryan.  There are some very strong arguments that favor the Republicans that they never seem to make.  One is that they continuously let the Democrats get away with saying that President Obama’s inheritance of an economy in shambles was one that he got from President Bush.  

For the last two years of the Bush Administration the purse strings were fully in control of the Democrats.  A veto-proof Democrat Congress was seated in January of 2007 as a result of the 2006 elections.  That election turned on peoples’ weariness with the Mideast war, not the economy.  People tired of hearing about sons, fathers, brothers and sisters dying and being maimed in a war that looked like it would never end.  In January of 2007 the unemployment rate was 4.6%.  People were working AND PAYING TAXES.  That’s where the revenue comes from – not from raising the taxes that puts a dampener on business.  Fifty four months of economic growth would soon be coming to an end with the seating of that Congress.  But the real dampener to the economy – and the only one beside me that I ever heard mention it was Glenn Beck – was when OPEC declared economic war on us in 2008 and gradually raised the price of their crude oil to $147.00 a barrel.  Gasoline and all fuel prices soared.  It particularly stressed the transportation industries and every household and made it very difficult for people to manage the family budget and keep up with the mortgage payments on their houses.

Speaking of mortgage payment crisis, check out this link:

Home Mortgage Crisis 

When the Bush tax cuts expire on January first they will weigh even more heavily on an already suffocating business environment burdened with overwhelming regulation and taxes.  And if the nationalized health care law is not repealed and replaced by something more sensible it could be the coup de grace that would be the deathnell of the Republic.

There ought to be a system the taxpayers could be asked to pay for for those who cannot afford health insurance that really need it and leave the 85% alone who have been able to pay and have been satisfied with the programs they have had.  Of the fifteen percent that have not had insurance, only a portion of that percentage really needed it and couldn’t afford the cost of it.  That group included well-to-do people who chose to pay as needed and a category of healthy young adults that chose to take the gamble that not paying a yearly premium would be the better part of the gamble.  This group was choosing that over a ten or twelve year period of not paying premiums that paying for whatever medical expenses they’d have would be less costly than the insurance premiums.  It’s called “liberty,” the choice to take the gamble whichever way they wanted.

A young businessman friend of mine, who has about six people in his employ, is already thinking about shutting the business down and taking advantage of accepting a position open to him with a larger company.  How many other small businessmen/women are there that are thinking the same thing???  This does not help lower the unemployment rate.

There’s a lot of talk that the inheritance tax will be renewed or is under consideration to be renewed with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in January.   I have one example in my memory book of why this 55% confiscation of a family’s business is so devastating to the economy.  When the tax was in play years ago, Wheatley Stables, a famous horse racing farm, had to sell off their property and whatever they had of their business to pay the taxes.  Thanks to the inheritance tax, employed people who were paying income tax on their earnings were now collecting unemployment insurance from the government and less money was in circulation by people who could afford to buy things.  So where was the benefit of the inheritance tax?  And how many other businesses went under and had the same effect as what happened when Wheatley Stables went out of business?       

    

Obama Reflections

Obama Reflections

In reading President Obama’s book Dreams From My Father, I can’t help thinking about a very famous football player who made a choice between living a beautiful life-style among his sports reporter friends or making the choice of practically cutting the head off his girlfriend and living a life of exile.  We all know who that was.  I’m still only into the first 140 pages of O’s book but I wonder how far into the book I’ll be before I stop seeing his preoccupation with race and how it seems more important for him to even a score than to simply be thankful for all the gifts God gave him.  He has a beautiful family, a rock star show-business personality; an education where he’d be in great demand in the business world wherever he’d choose to hang his coat and is already materially comfortable enough for the rest of his and his family’s life.  It seems that more important than anything else in his life is the quest to serve justice on the nation for all the ills ever perpetrated against the blacks that have ever lived here.   

In the early part of the Chicago chapter, 22 year old Barack tells about how he went to work for a consulting house to multinational corporations as a research assistant.  The company was very much impressed with him and he was soon promoted to the position of financial writer.  “I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank.”  But he couldn’t overcome his driving ambition to be a community organizer.  The chapter opens with him saying, “….Change won’t come from the top, I would say.  Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.  That’s what I’ll do.  I’ll organize black folks.  At the grass roots.  For Change.”  He resigned from this job after being with the company only a few months and sought work as a community organizer.  A month later he was offered a job “by the director of a prominent civil rights organization.”  He says, “I declined his generous offer, deciding I needed a job closer to the streets.”    

This book is written (so far) as if he has a grudge against this country.  The old term “method to his madness” comes to my mind when I see him putting the country deeper and deeper into debt.  It’s the perfect formula for bringing about despotic rule.   The Scottish historian Alexander Tyler, writing about when our republic was established in 1787, said that every democracy eventually collapses due to loose fiscal policy and it’s always followed by dictatorship.      

That very first paragraph in the Chicago chapter where I quoted his statement of organizing the “black folks” also says this: “When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly.  Instead, I’d pronounce the need for change.  Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds.  Change in the Congress compliant and corrupt.” 

These kind of statements give indications of the young Barack Obama

being a very bitter man and the way he keeps talking about “change” today, that bitterness has not dissipated.  Just what kind of a change does President Obama have in Mind???