The alley called the “backstretch” meanders around the curves of the racetrack at Maywood Park, past barns and cinderblock buildings hidden from the view of the bettors in the stands.
People work here. And they live here. The gray cement buildings-wool blankets and towels pinned over their windows-are home to the people who wash, feed, clean and shovel up behind the horses.
They came here at the start of Maywood’s current harness racing meet last month. They move a lot, hauling their livelihoods-trailers, tack boxes and all-from one backstretch to the next, depending on which Chicago track is hosting a meet. It was Hawthorne Race Course last month. Balmoral Park next month.
Many walk the grounds in the footsteps of their parents and grandparents. They represent every aspect of the industry that puts on the show: trainers, breeders, ferriers, grooms, stable hands, tack merchants and drivers.
“This is my house and home,” says one trainer over a hand of pinochle in the backstretch canteen. “I’ve been doing this 30, 35 years.”
These are tough days for his obscure community. Riverboat casinos and other forms of legalized gambling have hurt the horse racing industry. Purses are smaller and some of those who live and make their living on the backstretch-people who grew up together on the track circuit, some second and third generations-say are talking seriously about doing something else.
– – –
Bob Marsh wears a thick beard and carries a pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. He feels predestined to his place here in the barn on the Maywood grounds.
A track worker wanders by.
“You know his daddy was the driving king of Chicago, don’t you?” he asks.
Marsh nods. His grandfather, Joe Marsh Sr., brought Joe Marsh Jr. into the business of training and driving harness horses. Joe Jr., in turn, introduced his two sons Bob and Ron into the business when they were kids.
Bob was only five years old when he harnessed his first horse. He was eight when he drove a New Zealander that went wild and ran away, with him bouncing along in the cart behind.
He and Ron grew up on the track circuit, moving from Balmoral to Hawthorne to Maywood to Sportsman’s and back-year round.
“This is the life I know,” Bob says with a shrug.
This life seems every bit like life on a farm, except that the business known as Robert Marsh Stables doesn’t actually include any stables. Bob lives in a house in Westchester, but boards and trains five horses for his customers-the horses’s owners-at the tracks’ barns.
This day, he got to the stables at 6:30 a.m. to jog the horses. They run five or six miles a day, year round, no matter what the weather. Usually Marsh or his fiance, Niki Wild, do the tiring work, but sometimes longtime family hired hand Reggie Wallace pitches in.
At mid-morning, Marsh washes the horses’ legs with cold water to cool them down, then paints their legs with iodine to soothe them before wrapping them tightly with tape. Two of the horses will run races later in the day.
Once the stalls are cleaned and horses fed, it will be time for afternoon races. There has been no time for a nap, but today it won’t matter; Marsh has hired his father and brother to do the driving.
“I guess you could say this all got handed down to me,” said Marsh. “My grandfather handed his knowledge down to my father. And my father and my brother handed their knowledge to me.”
In his father’s day, a family could make a good living training other people’s horses. But the decline in racing has made that harder.
The “purses,” or money awarded to the owners of winning horses, has been in general decline since the late 1980s, hurting the backstretch business people and workers, all of whom essentially work for the horse owners.
“We’re taking more out of our pockets to keep this business going, and not getting as much in return for racing our horses,” says Marsh. “Lots of times, you’ll sit back and kind of wonder, `Am I doing wrong? Is there something else out there I should be doing? Because it just doesn’t look like there’s a future in this anymore.”
– – –
Miguel Gallardo, 35, a ruddy-cheeked man from Guadalajara, spent the late 1970s and early 1980s traveling across the country as a migrant stable worker. He spent summers at the Chicago tracks and winters at California tracks, making the two “nightmare” trips back and forth each year in trailers alongside the horses.
Back then, he recalls, the horses he tended ran for purses of $6,000. Now, they run for $4,000. Stable hands said they are making $65 or $75 week for each horse they care for, without much change from their earnings five years ago.
In more prosperous times, the owners would give the trainers bonuses when their horses won, and the trainers would hand a portion down to the stable workers. That doesn’t happen as much any more, and never for Gallardo.
Nevertheless, he can’t afford to go back home to his wife and son in Guadalajara.
He sends home “good money,” he says. He won’t talk about his salary specifically, but mentions that a family can live half the year quite comfortably on $7,000. Meanwhile, he lives in the cinderblock dorms of the backstretch.
“I can’t afford to leave. This is a good job,” said Gallardo. “You get good money, you send it home.”
It’s a difficult life. Gallardo has to stop and think for a minute before he can recall the age of his son, Francisco, now 12. Gallardo hasn’t seen him since last June. He recently spent $90 to talk to his family on the telephone for 45 minutes.
“I miss them more in the winter,” says Gallardo. “I don’t have a car, just my bicycle. So I can’t go out and do much.”
Fidencio Diaz, 30, also would like to live at home in Durango, Mexico, with his five brothers, two sisters and mother. But, like Gallardo, he feels he is worth much more to them here. He works on the maintenance staff for the track, and sends $30 home every month. Once that is converted to pesos, it can buy good food and nice clothes for his mother.
Diaz is one of the luckier ones. He came to Chicago with his brother to work the stables at age 15 and, five years ago, landed a permanent job with the track. He lives on is own, away from the backstretch.
He would like to leave track life behind.
He is working on his graduation equivalency examination at nearby Triton College, and wants to eventually study law. He gave up the partying life that brings relief to so many backstretch workers.
“The life is hard,” he said. “You can’t do that and expect good.”
– – –
The stall where Doug Kress shoes horses is so dark that, upon opening his door to a visitor, he squints into the afternoon sunshine for a good five minutes before the wrinkles around his eyes begin to relax.
“I’ve been in here with that last one for an hour,” he says, shaking his head. “Sometimes people want one kind of shoe. Then, when I’m done, they change their minds.
“I should have said, `Yeah, well, we’ll try that one next time.’ “
In truth, Kress says he likes his tiny, mobile shop, which requires a stall only about the size of a one-car garage for him to make his living. He shoes about five horses on an average day.
He charges about $50 a shoe and makes enough money for him to live in a house in Plainfield.
He got into this end of the business eight years ago, simply by moving from one part of the backstretch to the other. Since age 16, he had been a trainer in the stables, but could never find a blacksmith who could fit his horses right.
Now, at 42, he has what he considers the perfect job. He gets to be around horses, he works by himself and is self-sufficient. He owns his own grinder, drill, forge, welder and a whole rack of hand tools that line the walls of the stall.
Kress is one of the few on the backstretch who says he doesn’t think about taking another job.
“What else is there?” he asks.
– – –
People on the backstretch know each other. Almost to a person, they describe their world as a “community,” their competitors as “neighbors.”
Many of them who populate the track grew up there. Other kids, in other places, may have spent summers at the pool. These kids shoveled stalls and watched races from the dusty fence railings.
“A lot of the sons followed in their fathers’ footsteps. Some daughters too,” said Richard Siegel, who grew up tending his father’s mobile general store. Siegel’s father started the tack store by selling plastic raincoats out of the back of the family Chevrolet in 1946.
Now the mobile trailer with “Siegel Turf Supplies” emblazoned across the aluminum siding belongs to Richard. This particular trailer travels back and forth among area tracks, dispensing hoof packing, harnesses, Murphy’s Oil Soap and the like.
Business has dropped off slowly but steadily since his youth, Siegel says. The horse population has declined and, with it, the customers.
But Siegel doesn’t want to abandon his father’s business, so he opened a second, permanent shop at Balmoral to supplement income. Fortunately for him, that has kept earnings level despite the decline in business.
He predicts that would not last for the long haul. But, then, he is 54 years old. His children, one a Harvard law graduate and another a college student who wants to be a social worker, aren’t interested in the family business.
“I think this is the last generation of Siegels to do this,” he said.
– – –
Concerned about the state of racing, Gov. Jim Edgar in February appointed a 22-member task force to scrutinize the horse racing industry, and come up with legislative proposals to improve things.
The backstretch people, of course, pay more than passing interest in these governmental affairs. Along with trading track gossip, lunchers in one corner of the canteen discuss the governor’s appointees to the task force.
But as evening falls at Maywood, the backstretch people focus on the show. As one race ends and another begins, the backstretch workers emerge from doors and stalls to watch their horses run, then lead them back to the barns.
Whatever ambivalence may have been on display during conversation of the day seems to fade with the first race.
Bob Marsh, for one, never misses watching a single race in which one of his charges is running.
“Oh, you think about quitting,” he says.
“Then the next horse you might send out will go out and win. There’s nothing better than the feeling of a horse that you trained, watching that horse cross the line first.
“There’s no words in the world to describe it. It makes everything all worthwhile.”
