horsies: MMFC and St Phalle

The Monzante Memorial Fundraising Challenge: a number of teams (headed by various handicappers and other racing fans) are raising $$ in memory of Monzante, a horse who died at a Louisiana track last week. Some teams are offering rewards such as free picks or cookies.

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Thanks to the current clutch of work, I've been paying scant attention to the ponies, but I've had this passage from Niki de St Phalle's Harry and Me on my "to share" stack for some time. This takes place around 1950:

When I rejoined Harry at Harvard, he and my brother John (who was also studying there) would go out very early in the morning to the racetrack where they were working as hot walkers. That is to say, they would walk the horses through a routine to cool them down after their morning runs. Harry enjoyed this very much. he was earning a bit of extra money while learning all about the racetrack from my brother, which fascinated him. John had quickly become quite an expert on the topic. His enthusiasm for horse racing was so great that it was difficult to walk into his room, which was brimming over with countless stacks of the Morning Telegraph, John's favorite paper for tracking the odds on the horses.

At some point John felt it necessary to take on yet another job ... with an airline, which I believe was to earn the extra money he needed to finance his obsession with the track. Despite the excessive amount of time John spent on "the horses," John did manage to do very well on his studies. Nonetheless, Harvard's administrators eventually cottoned on to the fact that he was only showing up for his classes to take the exams. They chose to suspend John from Harvard for a year -- in spite of his outstanding academic performance.

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/57776.html.