Thirty Tons a Day: The Rough-Riding Education of a Neophyte Racetrack Operator

About this book

From dust jacket notes: "Being of sound mind and in reasonable possession of my faculties I marshaled my forces at the tender age of fifty-four and marched upon the city of Boston Massachusetts like a latter-day Ben Franklin to seek my fame and fortune as the operator of a racetrack. Two years later fortune having taken one look at my weathered features and shaken its hoary locks I retreated smiling gamely. -Bill Veeck- The title of this book has to do with what its author calls the end product of the romance of horseracing. When Bill Veeck the famous maverick from baseball took up the challenge of managing Bostons semi-moribund Suffolk Downs racetrack in early 1969 he had yet to learn that the normal daily output of some sixteen hundred horses (including straw) would amount to so much or be so hard to dispose of....In the tough-minded and tabasco-tongued prose that is his trademark Bill Veeck lines out the battles he won and lost the fun he had what he discovered about horseracing at Sufferin Downs and the friends and enemies he so open-handedly made. With wry elan he provides a wealth of track lore - about Joe Fan the first all-girl-jockey pari-mutuel race the re-enactment of the chariot race in Ben Hur and more - opening the readers eyes to the fact that flat racing has more ups and down than a cordillera...."