The Ghost Horse

by Joe Layden

  It took him nearly a week to cross the country, the first of a couple hundred such trips he would make in his lifetime, almost all by car or thumb. Times were different then, of course. This was 1970, which was really just an extension of the sixties, with its reassuring if somewhat naive notion of peace, love, and understanding, when you couldn’t drive more than a few miles without coming across a hitchhiker, seemingly with his entire life strapped to his back. There is a tendency to romanticize the past; even in the sixties, not everyone found the open road to be a hospitable place, and not every driver felt secure enough to open his doors to each smiling, ponytailed, paisley-shirted hitchhiker he came across. But the truth is, it was a more innocent time, and the scraggly little teen who walked out onto a dusty road had no problem catching a ride. And not once in the ensuing days did anyone try to hurt him, steal from him (not that he had much worth taking), or otherwise take advantage of him.

  Maybe there was some Dickensian thing about the kid that made people want to help him. Or, perhaps, once aboard they got to know him a little, caught that whiff of survival that followed him, and thought better of trying to mess him up. Something about the kid made it clear that he wouldn’t go down without a fight. Regardless, Tim Snyder recalls the trip nostalgically.

  “Didn’t have a problem,” he said. “Slept in cars, trucks. Didn’t meet a bad person.”

  Depends on how you identify the term, of course. There was the truck driver hauling a crane, taking back roads and side roads and roads that were barely roads at all in an attempt to beat the scales and save some money. The guy gave Tim some food, told great stories, and advised him that if they ever got pulled over, the kid should jump out of the truck and run as fast as he could. So Timmy kept his suitcase by his side, and when the inevitable happened, somewhere in the upper Midwest, he bailed before the truck even came to a complete stop.

  Timmy hid in the woods for a little while, waited for the flashing lights to recede in the distance, then stuck out his thumb and quickly landed another ride. The last one was a trucker who carried the kid more than five hundred miles, all the way to Boston. Dropped him off on the side of the road in Chelsea, only a few miles from Suffolk Downs. Timmy had seventy-five dollars in his wallet, about half of that earned along the way, while loading and unloading gear for two guys who drove a truck for Allied Van Lines.

  He walked from Chelsea to Revere, his destination a local pub that he vaguely recalled from his childhood. Tim had gotten to know the place through his father, who would sometimes take the boy with him when he visited the local watering holes where jockeys and backstretch workers congregated.

  “But it wasn’t just a bar,” Tim noted. “It was an underground gambling kind of place, with a back room where you could play the slots, cards, shoot pool. All kinds of stuff.”

  The kid wasn’t even sure the bar was still there, or that ownership hadn’t changed hands. He simply remembered that his father was a regular and figured the old man was probably still a drinker and that it would be a good place to start.

  He was right.

  The kid walked into the dim, smoky bar, leaving daylight behind, and told everyone who he was: Timmy Snyder … Warren Snyder’s boy.

  “Anybody seen my old man?”

  Of course they had. Everyone knew Warren Snyder. Hell, everyone knows everyone at the racetrack. Within a matter of minutes the kid knew exactly where and when to find his father. He was at Suffolk Downs, working as a hotwalker and groom for a trainer named J. J. Kelly. Warren had stopped riding competitively by this time, his career cut short by injuries and laziness and a pathologically self-destructive nature.

  “He wasn’t a jockey by that point,” Tim said matter-of-factly. “He was pretty much just a drinker.”

  Fifteen-year-old kids weren’t allowed on the grounds of Suffolk Downs, or most any other racetrack in those days—at least not if they weren’t accompanied by an adult. Tim Snyder was hardly dissuaded, though; what are a few track cops and a locked gate after you’ve run away from an abusive stepdad and hitchhiked three thousand miles on your own? Nothing more than a minor annoyance. The kid found a quiet spot on the backstretch, largely ignored by racetrack security, scaled a six-foot chain-link fence, and dropped to the other side. Then he let instinct take over. Timmy hadn’t been to Suffolk Downs in at least five years, hadn’t seen his father in more than three years. But he knew right where to look.

  “I went to the backstretch kitchen area and asked around, what barn he was in, what room … that sort of thing. He was staying on the backside, in these little bungalows they have for track workers who can’t afford anything better. Kinda shitty. I figured that’s where he’d be. Everybody knew him because he was a pool player and a drinker. This was midafternoon, when the races were just about over. Maybe like the eighth or ninth race. I asked someone on the backstretch where he was, and they pointed out his room to me. Back at that time they had trailers, all lined up at the top of the stretch. Everyone I’d talked to that day warned me that he wasn’t doing well, that he was basically drunk all the time. I didn’t care. I wanted to see him.”

  Prepared for the worst, Timmy knocked on the door. A voice barked back at him.

  “Who is it?”

  The boy opened the door without answering, and walked into the room. There, not ten feet away, was Warren Snyder. Timmy smiled at him.

  “Hey, Dad. How are you?”

  The man stood up slowly, shambled over to greet his son. They embraced wordlessly for a few moments. Then they just stared at each other. Later, Tim would explain that his father seemed happy, or maybe just shocked.

  “I know he was drunk,” Tim said. “I could smell it on him. But it felt like he shook it off and sobered up real fast. We stayed in the trailer for only a little while, and then he wanted to take me out, introduce me to everyone. I guess he was trying to show me off.”

  Most of the day would pass before the father asked the son how the hell he had found him, and where he had come from. A fifteen-year-old boy hitchhiking all the way across the country? To reunite with his father?

  Damn!

  How could Warren Snyder not be impressed? Even through an alcoholic haze, his heart swelled.

  But there were limits to what the guy could handle. He’d had virtually no contact with his wife or kids since the day he’d headed north and left the family behind in Florida. When Timmy tried to tell his father about the man who had taken his place, and how they’d come to blows that night in Washington, and that the kid had basically run away from home to avoid getting his ass kicked (or worse), and that his sister was in Southern California, raising two children on her own, and that the whole family had basically been blown to bits … well, that was almost more than Warren could bear. As Tim told the story, the man’s eyes welled with tears; he shook his head.

  “Please,” he said. “Stop.”

  * * *

  The kid got a tack room at Suffolk Downs and hung out with the old man for the remainder of the summer meet, and into the fall meet. The months passed quickly, the two of them reconnecting with surprising ease. Warren showed his son around the track, introduced him to a broad range of potential employers who sometimes gave the boy work and tossed him a few dollars off the books. Tim had come to Boston out of desperation more than anything else, with few expectations beyond finding a safe place to sleep at night; he was pleasantly surprised to discover that his father, while clearly having fallen to the lower region of the racetrack world, was apparently not beyond redemption. Warren liked having his son around the track, seemed proud of the boy for having made his way across the country. Probably, although it was left unspoken, he admired the kid for cracking his stepfather across the skull.

  That’s my boy!

  Most important, Warren Snyder was sufficiently motivated by the prospect of renewed fatherhood that he set the bottle aside and tried to lead a generally sober life.

  In the fall, father and son drove together to Aiken, South Carolina,
home of the venerable Aiken Training Center.

  “He was going to teach me how to gallop horses,” Tim remembered. “That was the plan—my father and his buddies were going to make a rider out of me.”

  At Aiken, Tim would learn the basics of the backstretch (although much of it he already knew from firsthand experience). He would walk hots, muck out stalls, even hold horses for the blacksmiths while they shod the frequently agitated animals. Bottom-of-the-barrel jobs, just like every other neophyte. It was a sound strategy, one that showed respect for racetrack tradition and conventions. But Tim’s entry into this world did not go smoothly.

  “By this point my dad had started drinking pretty heavily again,” Tim said. “So the first place he hit when we got to Aiken was a bar downtown where all the jump riders hung out. These guys were nut jobs—plates in their heads, a hundred broken bones, hooked on painkillers, totally whacked out. Hell, all steeplechase riders are crazy, but back then it was really a different world. Today the steeplechasers are mostly young English kids from good backgrounds, and it’s a lot safer than it used to be. These guys were mostly jocks who’d gotten too big, and so they became jumpers. Weight restrictions are a lot more relaxed. But, shit … you gotta be a little off to be a steeplechaser, because you know you’re going down eventually.”

  Timmy didn’t care at the time, and in fact was somewhat in awe of the twisted, swaggering jumpers, with their prodigious appetites for partying and their capacity for pain. Anyway, his father was a rider and so Tim wanted to learn to ride, as well. Didn’t matter what kind of horse or what type of race. Eventually he would become a jock, but his body would rebel against the notion. He was simply too big, and no amount of running or puking or cocaine was going to make him small enough to be a viable jockey. The kid’s instincts were essentially correct, though: if he learned how to gallop horses, and to do just about any job on the backstretch, maybe he could support himself.

  “It wasn’t like I had a ton of options,” Tim said. “I was fifteen years old, with no education and no money. Hey, I’m educated as far as horses. The knowledge I have you couldn’t find in a book. I know kids today who go to school, pay eighteen thousand dollars to learn about horses, and they come out with nothing. I worked for a lot of people—good trainers, bad trainers, good riders, bad riders—and I got something from all of them. It’s the experience you need, not just reading about it. People kept telling me I was a natural with horses; I just figured there had to be a way to make some money at it.”

  Once in South Carolina, it didn’t take Warren long to fall completely off the wagon. He’d been hanging on by his fingertips for a while, anyway, and that first day in the bar, tossing back shots and sharing war stories with the steeplechasers and other old-time racetrack buddies, loosened his grip for good. They had come to Aiken in search of Bill Hicks, a prominent horseman and a fixture at the training center. When Hicks walked into the bar, Warren drunkenly introduced him to Timmy, slurring his words so badly that the boy was embarrassed to be in his presence. It was clear that Hicks knew Warren and likely had seen this performance before. He seemed unfazed.

  “Bill sort of ran the whole town back then,” Tim observed. “He gave my father a place to stay right there on the grounds of the training center, and he went right to work breezing horses. I ended up with a bunch of different jobs, and when I wasn’t working the jump riders would teach me how to gallop horses. I had some money in my pocket and I was learning the ropes. It was okay. The thing is, every weekend my dad would end up in the bars with everyone else, drinking and carrying on until they had to carry him out of the place.”

  Timmy was amazed by his father’s ability to bounce back, to get up with the sun and hop on the back of a thoroughbred, and guide the animal safely around the track despite suffering from a blinding hangover. How he didn’t kill himself or wreck one of the horses was a mystery if not a miracle.

  The drinking and subsequent disagreements grew tiresome, and after about a month Timmy chose to hit the road again—this time on his own. He wasn’t old enough to drive legally, didn’t have a license or insurance … but he had a functioning car, courtesy of an uncle, and soon found himself behind the wheel, heading south.

  * * *

  Tim wound up at another training center in Delray Beach, Florida, where he mined old racetrack connections, looking up some people who had gotten to know his father through the years. In fairly short order the kid had an apartment and the means to pay for it. He was not yet sixteen years old.

  “It was a good spot for me,” Tim said. “I had my own bungalow, and I broke yearlings and swam horses. I started out working older horses that already knew how to gallop, then started breaking yearlings, kind of mixed it all up. Spent a couple years there, got my galloping license, then went to work at Tropical Park in Florida, working for a Cuban guy from Chicago, galloping horses, making maybe a hundred twenty-five dollars a week. This was the early 1970s, so it wasn’t bad money for the time, especially for a seventeen-year-old kid.”

  Life was an adventure, and Tim learned early in the process to avoid getting too attached to anyone he might come across. You can’t be ready to drop everything and move if you have friends and family, or if you care about anyone too deeply. Better to travel light.

  People came and went.

  There was, for example, the businessman from Hallandale Beach who hired Tim to gallop his horses in the morning, and to work at his restaurant in the evening. Tim would restock the bar and vending machines, vacuum floors, mop up, then meet the owner at the track the next morning. They got to know each other, and if they weren’t quite friends, neither were they merely employer and employee. Tim felt like the man cared about him, wanted to help the kid who had no family to speak of. Then, one morning after a workout, Tim jumped off the horse, handed the reins to the owner, and the two began to talk.

  “All of a sudden his eyes rolled into his head,” Tim remembered. “He just fell backward and died, right there on the spot.”

  Tim stopped as he told this story, then gathered his thoughts before continuing.

  “I was totally on my own by this point. I had no contact with my family at all. My dad was up in South Carolina, my mom was out West somewhere. I didn’t keep in touch with my brothers or sisters. But I made friends, or at least I got to know people. I learned to take everything one day at a time. It’s like training horses—you can’t plan much of anything. I mean, you can try, but the plan always gets wrecked and you have to make changes and adjust. And life is about the same way. One day you’re up, the next day you’re down. And sometimes you stay down for a while.”

  In Florida Tim reunited with a childhood friend named Dale Thirtyacre. A couple years older than Tim, and of Cherokee heritage, Dale had gotten to know Tim when they were boys, and their fathers had been jockeys together on the Southern circuit. Dale had even lived with Tim’s family one summer when the Florida tracks closed for the season and the racing action shifted north.

  “I lost track of Timmy for a while,” Dale said. “He was going through some tough times with his stepdad, and then the family moved away, and we didn’t see each other for a few years. But he had a lot of determination, and I wasn’t surprised to hear that he’d run off on his own, or that he’d been hitchhiking around the country. He was an amazing kid.”

  As they had been as boys, Dale and Tim became virtually inseparable, first while working in South Florida, and later on a series of cross-country adventures, including one that occurred in the fall of 1972, shortly after Tropical Park went out of business. The two young men were offered an opportunity to accompany a horse van transporting roughly a dozen head of stock from Florida to Arlington Park racetrack in Chicago, where, upon arrival, jobs would be waiting. They would each wear multiple hats: exercise rider, groom, stable hand. In return, each young man would receive a salary of three hundred fifty dollars.

  “More money than I’d ever seen,” observed Dale Thirtyacre. “A good, steady job.”
r />   Along the way, though, the two encountered tragedy on a Grand Guignol scale.

  “Transporting horses is crazy work,” Tim noted many years later. “The driver had already made several long trips before he picked us up, so he was probably exhausted, popping bennies or whatever they did back then to stay awake for thirty hours straight. It was totally common and pretty much unregulated. That’s the way you moved horses.”

  You also moved horses by making sure they had human accompaniment in the back of the van. This was Tim Snyder’s job: to sit in a lounge chair and generally just keep an eye on things; to feed and water the animals, make sure they remained calm, did not overheat, or otherwise experience any duress that was worth reporting. The van was basically a stable on wheels, with individual stand-up stalls for each animal. The horses were grouped in rows of three, in alternating positions: the first three with heads facing in one direction, the next three with heads facing in the opposite direction. Each animal was secured in place by chains that stretched from the edge of the stall to the horse’s bridle. As the van prepared to pull away, Tim checked the animals one more time, then took his seat in the back of the van, opened up a newspaper, and tried to relax. Driving a car behind the van was Dale Thirtyacre.

  As such trips usually are, this one was uneventful for the first several hundred miles, until the van crossed the Tennessee-Kentucky border, while traveling on the Kentucky turnpike, and came upon an accident that had snarled traffic for some distance.

  “I don’t know if he didn’t see it, or if he was slow to react, or what happened,” recalled Dale Thirtyacre, “but the driver of the van plowed right into the back of a semi, and the horse van buckled sideways. At first, it didn’t look that bad. Not as bad as it was, anyway.”