The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [44]
I went downstairs and said goodby to Mrs. Braune and to Charlie Goldman, who by that time was clipping a newspaper account of the death of a preliminary boy in a Brooklyn prize ring. The boy had died of heart failure. Goldman collects newspaper stories he thinks will be instructive to his wards. “He was a nice kid,” Goldman said to me, “but he never trained right. He relied on his ticker to get him by. He had plenty of moxie, but it is just like I am always saying to my kids. If the flesh is weak, the spirit don't mean a thing.”
• Turf and Gridiron •
ne of the pleasantest clubs in town, prior to 1940, was the Turf and Gridiron, which occupied the third and fourth floors of a narrow building at 20 West Fortysixth Street. It cost thirtythree dollars a year to belong to the Turf and Gridiron, and it was not to be confused with the Turf and Field, which has headquarters at Belmont Park and annual dues of a hundred dollars. The Turf and Gridiron was the social club of the New York bookmakers. It was exclusive in only one sense. In the hall on the ground floor—the club being the only tenant of the upper floors—there was an iron gate, such as used to protect speakeasies in the twenties. A colored elevator boy looked at visitors through the bars before admitting them. This precaution was taken because certain persons believed that the clubmen carried large sums of money. Most of the members were held up once or twice, and some of them so often that they became connoisseurs of criminal technique. It was all the result of a misconception. The bookmakers sent their funds direct from the race track to a bank every night in an armored car, and drew their working cash from another car at the track the next day.
The club came into being in 1934, when the state legislature rescinded criminal penalties for accepting bets at race tracks. Like the repeal of prohibition, a few months earlier, this action of the legislature restored an older order of things. Prior to 1909, when, at the urging of Charles Evans Hughes, then governor, the legislators made the practice of the bookmaking trade a misdemeanor, the bookies of New York formed an honorable and highly respected guild. Moreover, between 1909 and 1934, most of the present Turf and Gridiron clubmen took bets anyway. Their position, like that of bootleggers during the last years of prohibition, was delicate, although not exactly dangerous. The Restoration period was brief, for in 1940 the legislature legalized parimutuel machines and by that act outlawed the bookmakers again.
Turf and Gridiron members were for the most part substantial, conservativelooking gentlemen of at least middle age. Younger men, it seems, lacked the equanimity the profession requires. The wallpaper in the club lounge on the third floor was a fawnandbrown plaid, like an oldtime bookmaker's vest. There was a big American flag by the fireplace, and over the entrance to the bar a framed picture of a celebrated horse named Master Charlie, which was owned a dozen years ago by Tom Shaw, a prominent member. On a first visit, a casual observer might have thought the Turf and Gridiron a reform organization, for the club bulletin board was perpetually covered with newspaper clippings denouncing racetrack betting. It was always the parimutuel form of betting that was attacked in these clippings, however, under headlines like “MACHINES TAKE WPA WORKERS' PAY” or “MUTUELS GUTTING TEXAS, SAYS GOVERNOR.”
The guiding spirit of the club was its founder, Timothy James Mara, a large man with babypink cheeks and a square, massive jaw. Mara is a half inch over six feet tall, weighs two hundred and five pounds, and was fiftyfour years old last August at Saratoga, when he gave himself his usual gargantuan, impromptu birthday party by inviting everybody