An offer I couldn't refuse

I thought I was very lucky at the end of my freshman year at Kent State University when I was hired as a summertime reporter at the Syracuse Herald-Journal.

My parents, however, were less than thrilled. They knew that at $40 per week my Herald-Journal salary would do little to finance my sophomore year.

Halfway through the summer my father came up with a solution. He was then mayor of Solvay and one of the most prominent Democrats in the notoriously Republican Onondaga County. However, a Democrat, Averill Harriman, was governor of New York, which meant that the opening for a state auditor at Vernon Downs would be filled by – you got it – another Democrat. Vernon Downs is a harness racing track about 40 miles east of Solvay, easily accessible via the New York Thruway. My f ather figured I'd be able to keep my day job at the Herald-Journal and fill my evenings adding figures at the track.

The $150-a-week Vernon Downs job was a political plum. About four people classified as state auditors were employed at the track to verify the parimutuel totals. Before money was paid to winning bettors, state auditors, adding figures manually, had to agree with track auditors who did the same, and with another state auditor who used an adding machine. (It was 1956; we didn't have calculators.)

My father was told he could send one candidate to Utica to apply for the job. A Democratic bigwig from Utica would send someone, too. A state official would choose between us.

I arrived first and was summoned to be interviewed, but when I entered the room I knew from the interviewer's reaction that something was wrong. Apparently there'd been a misunderstanding, the man said, because a person had to be 21 to be a state employee at a racing track. We talked for several minutes anyway and he apologized for my wasted trip.

On my way out I noticed the other job candidate in the waiting room. Years later, while watching The Godfather, I would think of that day in Utica. The man in the waiting room was a dead ringer for Luca Brassi.

Which is why – seconds after I arrived back home – I received a phone call from the man who had interviewed me.

"I don't care about the law," he said. "Can you start work tomorrow night?"

For the rest of the summer I mostly tabulated the Vernon Downs win pool, the simplest task because only one payoff is involved. Eventually, when I convinced a supervisor I could add numbers with the best of them, I briefly did the more complicated pools for place (two payoffs) and show (three payoffs).

From my first night on the job I discovered the horses weren't the only ones racing at Vernon. The state auditors and the track auditors treated tabulating as a competitive sport. As I recall, the state team usually won.

The state rotated the auditors in charge. There was one chief auditor for every New York State track. Each would spend a week at one track, then switch to a different one the next week. One of these auditors was 45, which I remember only because he bet his age on the daily double every night – horse number 4 in the first race, number 5 in the second, regardless of their record or the odds. I can't possibly be remembering this correctly, but I think his name was Burt Schulman and that he was the brother of Max Schulman, the humorist and author (The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Barefoot Boy With Cheek, Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys). In any event, this auditor hit the 4-5 daily double three times during one of his weeks at Vernon Downs, though one of them was at Saratoga which he had attended one afternoon.

I managed to avoid placing a bet until late in my last week on the job. Each night we were free to watch a race. Finally I bet on one, having noticed a horse that seemed to tower over the rest of the field. What's weird is that I'm sure I'm the horse's name was Buckaroo. What is it that allows people to recall so vividly things that were so unimportant?

Ever cautious, I bet two dollars on Buckaroo to show. I might have picked him to win if his name were Buckaroo Hanover, since all the good trotters at the time seemed to be Something Hanover.

Well, Buckaroo may have been huge, but his long legs didn't do him much good. He finished fifth. However, I caught a break. If you're familiar with harness racing, you know lots of things can go wrong, which is what happened in this race. Two horses were disqualified and Buckaroo was awarded third place. When I drove home that night I was about three dollars and twenty cents richer.

Which made for a much happier story than one told by another auditor who, weeks before my arrival at Vernon, had bet on a horse that was leading – until it was struck by lightning and killed.

Thanks to my time at Vernon Downs I accumulated enough college money to satisfy my parents, though they never endorsed my chosen field of study. You'll never get rich as a journalist, they said. And they were correct, of course, though things eventually worked out a lot better than any one of us could have imagined. But it sure took time. Four years after graduation I still wasn't making as much per week as I did during the summer of 1956 at Vernon Downs.

And I wouldn't have had that job if it weren't for Luca Brassi.

– JACK MAJOR

The painting of the Solvay Process limestone pile, once a well-known village landmark, was done many years ago by artist Edith Noble, a teacher at Solvay High School.