The Horse Parlor

On pages 64 to 67 of Honest Sid I wrote about one horse parlor in NYC that my father took me to when I was five years old.  Such a betting parlor was "illegal" but there were dozens spotted throughout the City all with the sufferance of the police who were paid off to turn their heads the other way. Although their were differences in the locations and physical characteristics of the horse parlors all of them had features common to  Charlie Goodheim's parlor described in the book. On p. 65 I write about my experience:

My father took my hand and together we walked through the back door [of the cigar shop] into Charlie Goodheim's horse parlor.  With its cement floor and bare stone walls, it looked like it had once been part of a garage.  Men in suits with fedoras pushed back off their foreheads stood around alone or in groups, or sat on folding wooden chairs lined up in rows facing a long chalkboard running nearly the length of one wall. All eyes were on that chalkboard. A man in shirtsleeves, wearing earphones connected to a long wire stood on a platform in front of the board, erasing numbers and writing down new ones.... Along another wall two men wearing green eyeshades sat behind the silver bars of the cashier's cages, counting out money with a snap and a flourish while a staccato voice coming, through a speaker box described a horse race in progress.  A heavy pall of cigarette and cigar smoke hung over the room.  The customers seemed subdued, speaking quietly if at all, but the atmosphere was electric.

On p. 66 I describe one of the race descriptions that came through continuously: 

In the sixth at Hialeah—the flag is up! They're off and running... Into the final turn and Ladybug is ahead by a length... Blue Devil is coming up fast on the outside... They're into the stretch! Neck and neck—and it's Blue Devil by a nose at the wire."  The announcer stopped talking for a few minutes after the race, and my father pointed to the chalkboard.  The Board Marker was listing the payoffs... numbers next to the horses' names changed as the Board Marker continually erased and entered new figures.  My father said, "He's changing them numbers to show how the odds shift before a race.  It depends how much dough people bet on a horse.  The more they bet that he's gonna win, the more the odds go down."