This is a story I have referenced before. However, I am now able to tell the story fully. To begin, I am very fond of telling young people with children that parenting is the hardest thing they will ever do in life. Work is easy. Wherever it is, it does operate by a set of rules that are given to you. Once you understand the rules the rest becomes easy. Parenting, on the other hand, is something else. There are no rules and no guidelines. It is trial and error. You just try to do the best you can and get it right. Often you fail. Hopefully, not too often. The late Elliot Leyton said to me one time that to be a parent is to fail at least 100 times.

I was roaming around the NTV archives a couple of years ago and came across some video that made me smile. It was tape shot out at the now closed Lakeview Downs racetrack in Goulds. That was the old name of the trotting park. A cameraman doing a story on the track’s operation shot the tape on a Sunday afternoon and I remember I had to speak to him about it before it went to air. I had to speak to him because I wasn’t at the track working that day when our paths crossed. I was there as a spectator, standing on the rail urging on the horses. There were my three sons and me. At that time one my boys was 13 years old so the other two would have been 11. I spoke to the cameraman because I couldn’t have my good wife home watching the news and see her husband and sons showing up at the horse races.

All of that came about because I decided to share the “horse experience” with my boys. The racetrack is a wonderful place and a throwback to a different time. There are sunshine and the smell of the horses and the wonderful sounds of the hooves on the dirt. I used to tell my wife we were going out to look at some horses – which we were but as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “The cruellest lies are often told in silence.”

In those days the Lakeview Downs track was a pretty “free flowing” place. It was under a different regime later on and eventually it closed and passed into history. Back then they had a marvellous little lounge called The Hideaway that was home to many of the characters of the track. Me and my boys met the late “Moon Man “of radio fame at The Hideaway. There was a pari-mutuel betting window right in the bar, which was adjacent to the main betting hall. My sons and I would have a ball. We would have fries and gravy, and we would sit out in the summer sun in my old camper van and dutifully read over the racing form published before racing day. Now all the secrets of the world of horse racing are in the racing form. You just have to find the secrets and keep your eyes and ears open. We always had a cooler of drinks on ice, and we bought food at the track. It was luxurious. We bet a little money. Never more than $25 for the afternoon. It is I think a higher order of gambling than VLTs or pull tickets. It is the sport of kings. It takes a full two minutes or more for a race to be run and a half hour between races. Our goal was always to cover expenses with winnings, and I treated my boys as equals in horse selection. After a while they knew the horses pretty well and we would debate our selection. Majority rules. I never sent my oldest up to the window to place a bet, but he did go up a few times to collect money. How cute is that! A 12-year-old boy with a winning race ticket in his hand.

Once we got a great tip from one of the racing “families” at the track on a horse called Harvey Road. Harvey was running down in class “C” because he had finished last in his last two outings. My racing friend, who is a cook by trade and a horse owner, told me. Harvey Road had finished last because he had broke stride in his last outings. This time he was running with blinders to keep distractions away and my tipster said he was going to outdistance this whole class “C” field. We bet Harvey Road to win and then covered Harvey and three other separate horses in “exactor “bets. Exactors are when you pick the winner and the second-place horse in the proper order. Well, Harvey won in a walk and one of our three second place choices finished second. We won $48.50 on a $6 investment. I reminded my sons that they couldn’t go home and shout, “Mom we won the Exactor at the Trotting Park.”

None of this got me the Father of the Year Award but we had a load fun and wonderful memories at “the sport of kings” and strangely I don’t feel any guilt. My young boys, now grown to men, all talk about it and our day with Harvey Road when the sun was shining and our horse came out of the far turn way ahead of the field.

You can contact Jim Furlong at [email protected]