Kitchen Table Tales - Mary Bird and the race tickets

When we were growing up in Pecos, the summers were hot. Like 120 degrees hot.

Daddy had air conditioners installed at the house - not those window units, but real refrigerated air registers like you'd find in a meat locker. He liked it cold.

Anyway, several weekends during the summer we would take a trip to Ruidoso, New Mexico, which was 285 miles from Pecos in the mountains. It was cooler there and also had the attraction of horse racing at Ruidoso Downs.

Daddy shared a Jockey Club membership with some other man, and we would sit up high in the bleachers with chairs and little built-in desks, have Shirley Temples and bet.

Children, of course, weren't allowed to bet, but Daddy would finance $20 per child for the day. Since there were 12 races, you would have to have at least one winner to have enough to bet on all 12 races at $2 a race. You could keep your winnings, which didn't amount to much, and you didn't have to pay back the $20 if you lost it all.

Bobby and I (the big kids) would study our race programs, buy a tip sheet and maybe end up with $5 or $6 at the end of the day. Mary Bird, who might have been about 6, would choose a horse because of the color of his jockey's outfit or because she liked his name, and she would clean up!

To keep us out of the way during the races, Daddy would have all of us go around and pick up all the tickets that people had dropped, and later in the motel room, we would carefully go through to see if anyone had inadvertently discarded a winning ticket. You'd be surprised that we found at least a couple of winners every day, which we turned in for the cash value.

Mary Bird, however, was the champ. Once she got the hang of it, she would bet not only the Daily Double (you pick the winner in two different races), she would bet on the Quinela (first and second in the right order, I think). I remember that she once won a big Quinela while Daddy had had no luck, and he decreed that she had to pay for the hotel rooms and dinner for all of us out of her winnings. She still kept about $25, if I recall.

Many years later, we had a reunion at Ruidoso and Jonathan was still a baby, so Mary Bird and Bob stayed back with him as the rest of us went to the races. Mary Bird randomly picked out horses and we made the bets for her. She still did better than all the rest of us combined.