Known for an easy, welcoming smile that his distinctive handlebar moustache could never conceal and an ever-present glint in his eye, Foley worked for more than three decades as an in-demand exercise rider after his jockey career ended. He also took a job as a valet on the New England circuit, and parlayed that gig into various racing official positions in the Suffolk Downs jockeys' room that he held until the East Boston oval ran its final races in 2019.

The combination of being a local kid with a reputation for aggressively riding claimers of dubious soundness endeared him to the hardscrabble Suffolk railbirds.

Growing up in the nearby Day Square neighborhood only a couple of furlongs from the track, “Fast Freddie” graduated from East Boston High and landed a job as a construction laborer before getting a late start in the saddle in his mid-20s. He used to laugh when recounting how he grew up right down the street from the track, yet never once attended the races until some buddies in an amateur hockey league suggested his lithe, 5'4″ 115-pound frame would suit him better to horsebacking than body checking.

“I used to go past Suffolk all the time, and I never realized what it really is–a city within a city,” Foley said in a 1983 press profile. “But once I went, I knew this is what I wanted. Once racing gets in your blood, forget it.”

So Foley quit his job and took a forty dollars-a-week gig as a stablehand in the 1970s. Even though the backstretch meant a cut in salary, he looked at the opportunity as “going to school and getting paid for it.”

Four years later, he finally got a leg up as an apprentice rider. But Foley was so raw and unpolished that he couldn't secure an agent to book his mounts.

His “bugboy” allowance lasted an unusually long three years (an apprenticeship in Massachusetts expires one year after a jockey's fifth win). It  might have lasted longer had Foley  not resorted to drastic measures to kick-start the process.

Two years into his apprentice period, at age 27, Foley decided to launch a gung-ho assault on the dangerous Massachusetts county fairs circuit. He said his logic in going all-out on the perilous half-milers during the summer and fall meets at Marshfield, Northampton and Great Barrington fairs was to make trainers think, “If this kid can ride these sore, old horses, we'll put him on some at Suffolk.”

The plan worked–sort of. In 1982, Freddie won the Great Barrington riding title. But a Boston Globe write-up the following season serves as the only documentation of his most remarkable riding feat: After winning four races one day on the Marshfield half-miler, Foley got dropped on his head by a subsequent mount while careening through the hairpin turn.

The next day he was still groggy, but insisted on riding at Suffolk because he had a rare opportunity to pilot a “live”  horse named Royal Wedding. Then he had six more mounts at Marshfield that same afternoon. (This was an era of such abundant racing in New England that on some summer Fridays in the 80s, Suffolk ran in the mornings, Marshfield afternoons, and Rockingham Park at night. There are now no tracks operating in the region.)

“I got to the quarter pole on Royal Wedding, and my neck and shoulders were so sore from the Marshfield spill I couldn't move,” Foley told the Globe. “But the horse was still in contention, so I kept going.”

Royal Wedding won, igniting the tote board to the tune of $17.80. But it was Foley who paid the price. “I couldn't even pull the horse up, the outriders had to catch me. I couldn't even unsaddle. The stewards at Marshfield took me off my mounts there.”

Yet Foley concluded the interview in characteristically upbeat fashion: “I'll keep hustling,” he said, “because I don't know any rich people.”

Foley remained a long-shot specialist, good for 30 to 40 wins a year through the middle 80s. But injuries, illness and bad timing took their toll. In 1987, he flipped his car on a patch of ice and spent a week in an intensive care unit, where he was treated for a punctured lung and had his spleen removed. Shortly thereafter, Suffolk closed for two years. After the track reopened in 1992, open-heart surgery kept Foley off horses for longer than he liked.

Bowing to practicality, Foley traded his jockey license for a weekly paycheck. He settled in as a valet, and if he had any regrets about being forced into a less glamorous career switch, he didn't voice them publicly. Instead, he toned down his run-and-gun horsebacking style to better suit morning training, and was soon considered one of the most accomplished workout riders on the circuit because of his reliability, deft hands, patience with young horses, and level-headed demeanor.

Suffolk Downs | Chip Bott

I vividly recall a conversation I had with Foley in the spring of 2000. Then 45 years old, Foley was in better shape than most racetrackers half his age. In addition to being a sought-after exercise rider, he kept fit by skiing and playing ice hockey, and was content to relax while fishing from his home's front porch alongside a quiet little pond up in New Hampshire.

At that time, Foley had not ridden in a race for 11 years. But he had started allowing himself the luxury of dreaming about the adrenaline rush of winning. When I ran into him that morning in front of the Suffolk Downs backstretch kitchen 23 years ago, Freddie was zipping from one riding engagement to another, flak jacket swinging cavalierly from his sinewy frame, battle-scarred riding helmet in hand. He told me, with his characteristic big grin, that what he really wanted to do, more than anything else, was to be a jockey again–but only for one more race.

Foley had been working out a maiden who had drawn rave reviews from clockers as a well-meant runner who would score first time off a layoff. Foley had previously schooled the colt's brother, a stakes winner. “I've been working him like this,” he enthused, jamming his fists together and pulling them close to his chest, the universal symbol for a horse hard held. “He's going to win. And I want to ride him.”

Foley didn't have grand, unrealistic aspirations. He fully intended to ride just once, on that one horse, for that one race. Foley had actually won the last race he rode back in 1989. But one more time, he wanted to go out a winner. The trainer told Foley she was all for it, and would even pay his license fee and vouch for him in front of the stewards.

When I next saw Foley a week later, I was shocked to hear his request for a jockey license had been flat-out denied. Apparently, the stewards nixed the idea for the one-time comeback because of his history of heart trouble. Their stated reason was that they feared being responsible if he suffered cardiac complications during the few minutes he'd be out on the racetrack.

Foley pointed out that his heart doctor had long ago cleared him to participate in any activity he wanted; that he was one of the fastest skaters on the Suffolk pickup hockey team, and that he already possessed a license–issued by those very same stewards–to exercise horses during morning training.

“They asked me for a reason, and I said because I thought it would be fun, that I wanted to ride one more time in my life,” Foley told me.

“Then the stewards told me that racing wasn't supposed to be 'fun,'” Foley added, a touch incredulously.

“'Fun,' they said, 'isn't the reason we're all here.'”

Although crestfallen, Foley not only hid his disappointment, but refused to bad-mouth the stewards or criticize their decision, taking the high road.

Yet he proved those officials wrong in the long run: Yes, racing is all about fun.

Fun–or at least the tantalizing possibility of it–is the very reason we're all here.

f you were lucky enough to hang around Freddie Foley on the backstretch or in the jockeys' room, there was no denying it.

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As dusk and state police cruisers descended upon the scene, my father, Paul, asked a trooper to have the dispatcher phone nearby Green Mountain Park in Vermont. He knew the stewards would never believe a trainer telling them he needed to scratch because his horse just jumped off a cliff.

That horse–Box County–not only survived, but miraculously jogged back up the embankment, apparently none the worse for wear. “Just like the Lone Ranger's horse,” my Dad–now 15 years retired from training–marvels every time tells this story.

Yet when he got to the top, Box County could not be coaxed into stepping over the guardrail he had vaulted like the Grand National.

Jockey Bobby Marshman, riding shotgun on the 150-mile journey from Rockingham Park so he could pilot his only mount of the night, volunteered to lead the horse down a nearby path to the valley, where my Dad would meet him with the repaired trailer. Marshman and Box County endured a brutal trek through the woods at nightfall, battling swarming mosquitos and then a menacing pack of dogs before a taciturn farmer wondering what all the barking was about let them take shelter in his barn.

Later in the season, horse, trainer and rider would make a return trip around that notorious sharp curve–minus the steeplechase antics–and Box County would win a bottom $1,500 claimer at Green Mountain, cementing his standing in our family's racetrack lore.

I made that same drive last week on the way to enjoy a few days of hiking in the serene little slice of New England where Massachusetts, Vermont and New York intersect. You can't stop and gawk at the hairpin turn–the Golden Eagle Restaurant & Lounge at the bend has blocked off the parking with orange barriers. But the drop-off wasn't the focal point of my exploration.

I was aiming for Green Mountain itself, wanting to pay respects before a teardown destined to happen once the owner and local officials figure out what to do with the land in the aftermath of a 2020 blaze that gutted the long-abandoned, five-story grandstand and clubhouse. It was one of those weird instances in which I was feeling nostalgic for a time and place I had never actually experienced.

Why Pownal?

Even by early 1960s standards, when operating a racetrack in America was widely believed to be the equivalent of having a license to print money, it is unfathomable why anyone would choose Pownal, Vermont, to build a horse track. To this day, there are still no interstate highways within 35 miles in any direction.

At the time of Green Mountain's 1963 opening, Saratoga Race Course–before it blossomed into the tourist mecca that we know today–sat an hour to the northwest, while Berkshire Downs, a seasonal, leaky-roof outpost in Hancock, Massachusetts, existed 17 miles to the south. The then-vibrant Massachusetts fairs had half-mile tracks in nearby Great Barrington and Northampton, and the region's commercial Thoroughbred circuit at that time consisted of (in pecking order) Rockingham in New Hampshire, Suffolk Downs in Boston, Lincoln Downs and Narragansett Park, both in Rhode Island, plus Scarborough Downs in Maine.

Despite an audacious $6 million price tag (the equivalent of $57 million in 2022), Green Mountain would vie with Scarborough, Berkshire and the fairs at the austere end of New England's racing hierarchy.

Its developers chose a 140-acre boot-shaped cornfield along Route 7, even though the skinny, oblong lot precluded a one-mile oval from being built. The grandstand got shoehorned 300 feet from the flood-prone Hoosic River, and the backstretch ran parallel to active railroad tracks.

A big reason people believed Green Mountain would flourish was because its highest-profile backer, Lou Smith, said it would. A shrewd dealmaker who cultivated an avuncular, charitable persona, Smith had bought the defunct Rockingham during the Great Depression and turned it into New England's showplace track. “Uncle Lou” was the dean of New England racing, and his ideas and political clout carried tremendous weight, even way out in the boonies.

Vermont has always been an outlier, embracing its iconoclastic reputation. Drill down even further, and you will find that Pownal itself has a centuries-old reputation as the state's epicenter of oddity.

Shortly after the town's incorporation in 1761, Pownal was the site of Vermont's only witch trial. In 1789, a traveling minister described the village this way: “Poor land–very unpleasant–very uneven–miserable set of inhabitants–no religion.”

In 1874, it supposedly rained hot stones that then inexplicably rolled uphill in Pownal, and in the 1940s, the town was the home of one of the nation's most sought-after clairvoyants. By 1960, when the town's quarry and cotton mill had gone belly-up and the tannery was well on its way to designation as a toxic superfund cleanup site, Pownal decided to bet its future on Thoroughbred and Standardbred racing after Vermont legalized pari-mutuel betting.

Chad Abramovich, who writes an engaging blog titled Obscure Vermont, in 2020 described the town like this: “Pownal's always done things a bit differently, in ways that seem to almost be a few shades deeper into the mystic that's masqueraded by a rough enchanting landscape…. Some environs look like they have been untouched by modern headways–like you've stumbled into a deep southern Appalachia…. I honestly don't think that this racetrack project could have happened in any other spot in Vermont.”

Off and running…

The May 24, 1963, opening of the two-month Thoroughbred meet was expected to lure 12,000 fans to take in the racing over the unique 13/16ths of a mile oval, which had an inordinately long stretch of 1,106 feet. But only 4,700 racetrackers showed up, betting only about half the afternoon's projected $400,000 handle.

According to an un-bylined (but very thorough) historical account of Green Mountain at the website Race Tracks of Yesterday and Today, business was so bad that employees were being laid off within two weeks and rumors were rampant that the track would fold. Management sliced purses from the promised $1,800 per race to $1,200, shifted from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. twilight post times, then hit on the idea of trying night racing–but there was a catch.

“Never anticipating to run night Thoroughbred racing, there were only enough lights to cover the 5/8-mile harness track,” the racetrack blog explained. “Three more towers were hastily erected and after a month, on June 24, Green Mountain was running under the lights….. From there things started to pick up, so much so that the planned fall harness meet was scrapped and another Thoroughbred meet would be run.”

Standardbred racing finally debuted in 1964, and Green Mountain trudged along while gaining an offbeat reputation for trying out new concepts. At a time when daily doubles were as exotic as wagering got, the track was among the first to adopt the multi-race Twin Double, and later the Big Perfecta.

But Green Mountain's biggest innovation occurred in 1968, when the Vermont Racing Commission–despite religious objections–granted permission to conduct Sunday racing, unheard of on the East Coast at the time. Enjoying an “only game” monopoly for several seasons, buses from as far away as Philadelphia delivered a huge influx horseplayers up Route 7 every Sunday, winter or summer, harness or Thoroughbred.

Emboldened by the Sunday crowds, Green Mountain staged its first-and-only running of a marquee race–the $15,000 Green Mountain Gold Cup H.–on Oct. 12, 1969. New York-based trainer H. Allen Jerkens shipped in Misty Run for Hobeau Farm, and Ron Turcotte wired the four-horse feature aboard the 3-10 favorite, lopping three full seconds off the track record for 1 1/16 miles.

But Uncle Lou Smith died that same year, and Green Mountain backpedaled as off-track betting dawned in New York in the early 1970s and rival New England tracks added Sunday racing and expanded to year-round schedules.

The Rooney family that owned the Pittsburgh Steelers and several Eastern tracks bought Green Mountain in 1973, keen on ushering in what at the time was thought to be the “next big thing” in pari-mutuel betting–converting the track to also conduct greyhound racing.

For bettors, the greyhound action was billed as non-stop (races every 12 minutes on marathon day/night programs). For Green Mountain management, the overhead costs were ridiculously low ($3,000 in nightly purses for dogs versus $14,300 for Thoroughbreds). On Sept. 24, 1976, Green Mountain received national publicity for becoming the first track in the nation to host three breeds of racing at the same venue in one calendar year, and it was widely (but wrongly) predicted that many other major tracks would follow suit.

No one realized it at the time, but 12 days earlier, Green Mountain had staged its last-ever Thoroughbred program. Jockey Thomas Arroyo fell from his horse and was trampled in the fifth race on that Sept. 12 card, but his death received scant notice in the press because all the attention was focused on Green Mountain's “going to the dogs” ad campaign.

Five miles of heated copper tubing got installed underneath the new quarter-mile configuration so 18 kennels of 40 dogs each could race uninterrupted through the winter. Green Mountain management gave Thoroughbred racing the boot as soon as the calendar flipped into 1977, and the harness horsemen were told to get lost the following year.

Green Mountain persisted for the next 15 years as one of the lowest-level greyhound tracks in the country before ceasing racing for good in 1992. The property changed hands several times and hosted outdoor concert festivals like Lollapalooza during the 1990s, but eventually fell into disrepair and became a magnet for lawless behavior.

Over the decades, souvenir hunters carted off anything worth taking and locals smashed what was left, careening through the grandstand on all-terrain vehicles and setting interior bonfires during all-night drinking parties. One such blaze on Sept. 16, 2020, is believed to have been responsible for the massive conflagration that took 10 fire departments from three states to extinguish.

Fast-forward to the present…

Prior to last week, the only previous time I had driven up Route 7 was in 2005, when taking the scenic route from Boston to Saratoga. The stable area had still been standing at that time, and the property was under heavy video surveillance with numerous trespass warnings prominently posted.

Last week, I first saw that the stables had been razed, replaced by a solar panel farm. What had once been the horsemen's entrance on Lovett Cemetery Road was blocked off by concrete barriers, but you could still drive into a portion of the 8,000-car-capacity customer lot about a mile farther up on Route 7.

A couple of battered vehicles were parked at this entrance, and one perturbed graybeard sitting behind the wheel of a lopsided pickup returned my nod of greeting with a scowl and a shake of his head that subtly signaled “no.” I got out and walked over the barriers that kept you from driving over the railroad tracks, then stepped through a series of rusted chain-link fences that had long ago been cut open and/or were falling down. The asphalt was choked with a jungle of weeds and small trees, studded with shards of beer-bottle glass.

I  stepped around a final bend in the road and there it was–the skeletal, rust-flecked shell of the green-and-white grandstand, its massive, plate-glass front windows shattered in a crazy grin of broken, jagged teeth. I figured I was standing at about the top of the homestretch, although it was hard to tell for certain where the racetrack had once ended and the viewing apron began.

I had yet to see a single “no trespassing” sign, and that was going to be my excuse if anyone in authority questioned my presence in the building. But before I could step forward for some interior exploration, I caught a flash of movement along the back perimeter, and got the distinct feeling I was being watched.

I stayed put and snapped a few photographs. Then I looked through the magnified viewfinder and caught a glimpse of three sketchy folks over by the far tree line waiting to see what I'd do next.

Getting caught trespassing into a condemned building might be the least of my concerns if I went inside, I deduced. It was dusk, I was a solo interloper on other people's turf, and I had taken everything of value out of my car and was carrying it with me because I hadn't trusted that unsettling guy in the truck back where I had parked.

I've made some colossally bad decisions at racetracks in my life and saw no reason to add to the list. I took one last, long look at the verdant mountains framing this eerie Thoroughbred relic, knowing that I would likely never have the opportunity to be in this spot again, and left.

I figured Box County had used up my family's allotment of Green Mountain good fortune back in the early 1970s, and I saw no reason to press my luck.

The post Green Mountain Park: Long Gone. Still Weird appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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“Look for my maroon car with the flashers on along Route 7,” Kenny told me over a land line held by the nice woman in charge of the local post office.

Now a spry 82, the trim Mr. Pruden still has the eye of a competitor and is as fit as the proverbial fiddle. He looks like he could still work a set in the morning for any trainer in America.

Kenny Pruden at home in Vermont

Kenneth Gene Pruden was born in 1938 in Albert Lea, Minn., a town just north of the Iowa state line. He was one of eight children (five brothers, two sisters) born to his farm family parents John and Helen. The children were small in stature like their mother, but none lacked for work ethic, key to any agricultural success. While Kenny thrived on the farm – he was a member of the Future Farmers of America (FFA) – by his own frank admission he was a “bad actor” prone to finding trouble in school.

After getting expelled from the local high school, he transferred to one in Alta, Iowa, from which he graduated. From there he roamed around county fairs in Iowa and Minnesota trying his hand at various endeavors, including driving in chuck wagon races. When he was 21, a farmer offered Kenny a chance to ride one of his horses in a county fair race. With borrowed tack, wearing a football helmet, and despite losing an iron, the young tyro grabbed a handful of mane and won the race. Out of a purse of $1,000, the winning rider earned all of $10 and a $2 “stake.”

Driving a 1949 Studebaker that barely ran (and in which he often slept), Kenny worked for a trainer with a serious drinking problem at Raceway Park in Toledo, Ohio. After doing all the work as a trainer, groom and exercise rider, Kenny was rewarded by getting fired. Undeterred, the itinerant rider-to-be galloped horses at Waterford Park (now Mountaineer Park) and defunct Wheeling Downs in West Virginia before ending up in South Florida where the “weather suited his clothes” as the song goes. There, he witnessed first-hand the ugly segregation of the deep South with separate restaurants and public facilities for “whites only” and “colored,” an experience he said he never forgot.

After almost being selected by the famous cosmetics queen Elizabeth Arden to ride her stable's horses at Hialeah Park as her first-call apprentice jockey, Kenny headed to Rockingham Park in Salem, N.H., a fortuitous move. There, at the prettiest racetrack in all of New England, Kenny finally rode in his first recognized race — and found himself in the starting gate next to a horse with Bill Shoemaker in the saddle. The “Shoe” was in town to ride several mounts throughout the track's “Futurity Day.” (Kenny finished a respectable fourth in the race.)

In 1963, when the new Green Mountain Park racetrack opened in Pownal, Vt., (the writer's grandfather, Leo O'Donnell, was one of the stewards), the ambitious Mr. Pruden was ready and pounced. Over the course of that picturesque racetrack's short 14-year lifespan (it closed in 1976), Kenny led the riders' standings for nearly all of that oval's spring, summer and fall meetings. His agent during those years was his older brother, Jerry, who later became an assistant trainer for some prominent outfits, and who hustled rides from local trainers like Leo H. Veitch, brother of Hall of Fame trainer Sylvester Veitch and uncle of Hall of Fame trainer John Veitch. Team Pruden competed with much success all over New England and at Penn National, Finger Lakes and other racetracks. They spent the winter months at Florida Downs, later renamed Tampa Bay Downs.

Pruden with Green Mountain general manager Vincent Bartimo

According to Equibase and Daily Racing Form's American Racing Manual, in a career that lasted over 34 years, Kenny won 1,416 races from 11,004 mounts for total purse money earned of $2,168,876. Those stats don't include many winners he rode at the fairs in Massachusetts — Berkshire Downs, Northhampton, and Brockton Fair among others.

Later in his career, Kenny rode first call for Kentucky trainer Jerry Romans, father of Eclipse Award-winning trainer Dale Romans. Kenny still gets excited talking about the mount he rode in the Debutante Stakes on the 1978 Kentucky Derby Day card at Churchill Downs in front of 131,004 fans. (The Derby was won that year by the Triple Crown winner Affirmed.) Dale Romans, although quite young at the time, remembers Kenny very well saying that he and Kenny's brother Jerry, an assistant trainer for Dale's father, “were good racetrack people who practically raised me. Kenny rode long enough that he eventually rode for me when I got my trainer's license.”

Green Mountain publicity photo shows fellow jockeys trying to cool off the red-hot Pruden

Kenny's most cherished memory of his New England riding career is the day he met Dolores Ianelli, the sister of jockey — and good friend — Frank Ianelli. Despite being stood up by Dolores on their first date, the determined suitor (that would be Kenny) persevered and true love eventually triumphed as it usually does. After winning three races at Green Mountain on June 20, 1964, the track's betrothed leading rider hopped in his car and sped to Cranston, R.I., where he and Dolores were married. In a 1/1A entry that has lasted 57 years, the Prudens have a son, Ken, and a daughter, Deborah, and two grandchildren, all of whom live nearby in southern Vermont. 

Counting himself extremely lucky that in some 30 spills during his riding career, he never broke a bone, Kenny lives out his retirement helping his beloved Dolores through  some health issues and occasionally traveling to his Minnesota hometown to see his siblings. As his legion of family, friends, and racing fans would agree, it's been a remarkable, well-lived life for Kenneth Gene Pruden, the undisputed king of the little racetrack they built in the foothills of the Vermont Green Mountains. 

Bob Heleringer is a Louisville, Ky., attorney, former racing official and former Kentucky state Representative who, from 1970-1974, worked at Rockingham Park.

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Lamberty died Dec. 16, 2020, in Pompano Beach, Florida. But it was not until Feb. 2 that news of his death began circulating among friends via an online tribute archive hosted by a cremation company that provided services for Lamberty.

No cause of death was listed on the tribute page. In the final years of his life, Lamberty fought to overcome an opioid addiction, according to friends who had extended help to him.

“P-Lam,” as he was fondly known, grew up as a multi-sport student athlete in the seacoast city of Revere, just a few furlongs from Suffolk Downs. He first became enthralled by horse racing when he and some neighborhood buddies would sneak into the track to watch the late-afternoon  races when high school classes were done for the day.

In 1997, while earning a degree in business management studies from Boston University, Lamberty won an internship to work in the press box at Suffolk Downs. He spent several summers at Monmouth Park in a similar capacity.

Lamberty's aspiring knowledge of Thoroughbred pedigrees combined with a gregarious personality made him a natural fit for earning his way onto the Suffolk Downs “Paddock Preview” broadcast team in 1999. His confident willingness to take on additional on-air talent roles led to co-hosting a nightly TV replay show, a weekly radio program, and eventually serving as a backup race caller. He later parlayed this work into a TV handicapping gig for the New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation.

In 2003, Lamberty took great pride in forming a small Suffolk-based racing stable with those same hometown buddies with whom he used to sneak into the track. Their very first acquisition ended up exceeding expectations to race at Saratoga.

Lamberty later rose through the ranks at Centennial Farms, where he was the point-person for the syndicate's clients into the early 2010s. He especially relished his roles in helping to select young horses at sales and giving insights on the progression of racing prospects.

Friends who recalled a storm-soaked P-Lam celebrating with unbridled enthusiasm at Monmouth after Corinthian splashed home first in the 2007 GI Breeders' Cup Dirt Mile for Centennial will probably never encounter a happier rain-drenched racetracker.

Lamberty later moved to New Orleans and then Florida to try his hand at various bloodstock ventures and racing partnerships, and he also represented several jockeys as an agent. He was divorced with no children.

Those who knew of his deep compassion for making sure horses were always well-treated are asking that donations honoring Lamberty's memory be made to benefit a Thoroughbred welfare program of the donor's choosing.

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The phrase “larger than life” doesn’t do justice to describing Jim Hannon, the Runyonesque race caller known for his booming bass voice, charismatic showmanship, and roaring, motorboat-like laugh that resonated through the press boxes of New England racetracks since 1953. He died on Aug. 28 from natural causes at a hospice facility in Danvers, Massachusetts, after having recently suffered a fall. At age 92, he was believed to have been the nation’s oldest retired Thoroughbred announcer.

An entire generation of fans has evolved since “Big Jim” (as he preferred to be called) last regularly “hollered horses” (his preferred job description) at Suffolk Downs and Rockingham Park. Even though the region’s racing is now gone–Hannon outlived the Thoroughbred era on his home circuit by one year–legions of New Englanders will forever associate a day at the races with his gravel-throated, growling calls punctuated by enthusiastic catch phrases like “Here they come for the money!” and the emphatic “Put a ring around” so-and-so, which meant Big Jim deemed a horse to be so home free in deep stretch that you might as well circle its number in your program as the winner.

Hannon grew up on the North Shore of Massachusetts, not far from Suffolk Downs. After serving two stints in the Army and earning a business administration degree from Boston University, he got a part-time job as a concessions hawker at the track. When he got fired for reading the Racing Form instead of selling pastrami sandwiches, Hannon gambled on making a career out of manning the microphone. In 1953, when race calling jobs were largely passed down via apprenticeship, young Jim landed the coveted assistant’s job to well-respected Suffolk announcer Babe Rubenstein. He proved to be a quick and highly personable study.

In 1954 Hannon got his first full-time announcing job at Scarborough Downs. Over the next few years, as he built a reputation as one of the most identifiable East Coast callers, other gigs followed: Delaware Park, Charles Town, Beulah Park and Timonium, to name a few, plus stints at nearly every stop on the old New England circuit.

The mid-1960s were a grand time to be a horse hollerer in the New England. In addition to Boston’s Suffolk Downs, the Rock in New Hampshire, and Scarborough in Maine, the region’s racing then included Lincoln Downs and Narragansett Park in Rhode Island, Green Mountain Park in Vermont, and a bevy of country fairs in Massachusetts. At one time or another, Big Jim manned the mic at nearly every one of those venues. “God gave me the voice and I’ve always loved sports,” he was often quoted in the numerous press clippings that chronicled his rise.

Hannon was adept at using the technologies of his time to earn a little extra income and promote the sport with a passion. Unfortunately, recordings of his years of feature race radio broadcasts are long gone, as are the hundreds (thousands?) of 45 RPM records of his calls that Big Jim produced and sold to winning owners. Yet thanks to the internet, you can still hear Hannon’s ad-libbed recreations of famous races that were used in newsreel-style recaps (view one here).

Legend has it that Hannon turned down a job offer from Churchill Downs because even the honor of calling the Kentucky Derby wasn’t enough to get him to uproot his family from the Boston area he so loved. In 1969, Rubenstein retired at age 73 and passed the Suffolk Downs microphone to Hannon, then 41. As racing in New England ballooned to a year-round endeavor, Suffolk became Big Jim’s primary gig, and he settled in for a two-decade run.

His first two seasons as the full-time voice of Suffolk coincided with the zany but brief Bill Veeck tenure of running the track. The maverick pro baseball team owner was known for conjuring up wacky promotions, and in his memoir, Thirty Tons A Day, Veeck credited Hannon with being the pitchman whose off-the-cuff schtick really got fans into the revelry. Big Jim gleefully narrated Halloween scavenger hunts for toy black cats hidden around the track and “called” a mock Ben Hur chariot race in the infield. When he surprised fans a handful of times a meet by suddenly announcing it was time to play “LLLLLUCKY CHAIRS!” the grandstand resounded with the clattering of thousands of wooden seats popping up all at once as customers frantically searched underneath for prizes stashed before the gates had opened.

If Hannon’s calling card was his sonorous cadence that reverberated so strongly it echoed a mile away from Suffolk Downs at Revere Beach, it was a rare departure from that style that defined his most memorable call. That would be the 1987 Massachusetts Handicap, in which locally based Waquoit engaged in a “ding-dong battle to the wire” to eke out a narrow win over powerhouse invader Broad Brush. Big Jim’s voice shot up to a never-before-heard register as the two head-bobbed to the finish-he would later openly admit he had been rooting for the hometown hopeful–and it cracked with emotion as the horses hit the wire in a photo finish that was too close to call (relive it here).

After 21 seasons at Suffolk Downs, Hannon’s calls went silent in 1989 when the track was mismanaged out of business. Big Jim resurfaced two years later when Rockingham Park’s announcer was arrested for growing marijuana, and fans welcomed Hannon back warmly. But when a new ownership reopened Suffolk Downs in 1992, it wanted nothing to do with the old regime, and the rebranding included a new voice. Larry Collmus, then 25, was brought in from California to call the races. Although Hannon, 64, made it a point to be gracious and establish a friendship with his successor, he still harbored some hurt over not being asked back to his old job.

Big Jim presumably could have hollered horses at Rock for as long as he wanted, but a candid slip of the tongue was his demise: One afternoon in 1993 after a cheap claiming race, Hannon commented to the chart caller in the booth next door about the sorry quality of racing. The quip would have gone unnoticed had Hannon not forgotten to first turn off his microphone before uttering, “They’re all rats. How can anybody even bet on these things?” The gaffe was piped loud and clear to thousands, many of whom might have shared the same opinion. But his bosses heard the wisecrack too, and regardless of the truth in his statement, Hannon was told not to return after the end of the racing season.

Hannon hung up his binoculars and accepted a job as a Suffolk Downs mutuel clerk. Although toiling in the grandstand five stories and many memories removed from the prestigious position he once occupied was probably not the way he had envisioned winding down a racetrack career, Hannon proudly maintained his dignity and good nature, and you could catch a glint in his eye whenever customers recognized him (or more often, his voice) behind the mutuel line and shouted out a greeting.

Well into the 21st Century, Big Jim continued to stop by the Suffolk Downs press box before his betting window shifts, often reverting to what I imagined he was like at the prime of his personality–laughing, crooning snippets of jazz standards; mixing, mingling, and just having fun swapping jokes and racetrack rumors. Hannon was especially supportive of the younger press box staffers just breaking into the sport, and he sometimes told them in a reflective tone to never forget that whatever you do in life, “You meet the same people on your way back down the ladder of success that you once passed on the way up.”

By 2008, there was quite a bit of sentiment that Hannon had never been given a proper sendoff considering how much he had contributed to New England racing. As Big Jim neared his 80th birthday, another new ownership group took over Suffolk Downs. The new management team wanted to host a day in his honor, and when they broached the idea to Big Jim, they asked if he felt up to calling a couple of races. Not only did Hannon enthusiastically and immediately say yes, but he proposed an unexpected treat: He wanted to belt out the National Anthem from the winner’s circle on his special day. And belt it out Big Jim did, in a crisp, resounding baritone honed by years of singing in local variety shows as a hobby.

By this point, Collmus had moved on to bigger and better race calling gigs, and I had been granted the privilege of announcing the Suffolk Downs races. Hannon had hosted a meet-and-greet with fans that went on longer than expected after his singing of the Anthem, and he had been rushed to the rooftop a bit winded amid the hubbub. I stood by to assist with the newfangled headset but just tried to let Big Jim find his rhythm as he warmed up by repeating horse names and matching them to silks and cap colors. He hadn’t called a race in 15 years, but I was more jittery than he was.

Just before the horses loaded, Hannon lowered his binoculars and gazed out at the vast green expanse of the Suffolk infield and the salt marshes and Atlantic Ocean beyond, one of the most magnificent views in all of Boston. “You know, I came to the track for 40 years to do my job,” he said to me with a wry smile. “And I never once considered it work.”

Then Big Jim flipped open the microphone and gave the crowd what it had come to hear–his signature pre-start “Now they’re all in!” barked in classic basso profundo Hannon style. Cheers rose skyward from the grandstand apron as the gates crashed open and the race went off.

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