Joseph Sullivan, the CEO of Hinsdale Greyhound Park, agreed to be interviewed by a Keene High School student in his corporate office on October 26, 2004. The American Studies assignment required the students to interview various owners of dissimilar businesses located throughout Cheshire County. Their objective was to gain an understanding of the impact these various businesses have on their respective communities from an economic, social, and historical perspective. Upon completion of the class project, the student interviews would be published in the Keene Sentinel which did not happen.
This 5,500 word unedited dialogue describes in detail the business of Greyhound dog racing. The interview is educational, insightful, and at times naively funny because the student asking the questions had no prior knowledge of the horse and dog gambling profession. By relating all of the answers to the questions, iBrattleboro readers will understand the reasons why the Hinsdale Greyhound Park closed six years after this interview was conducted.
RLElkins
Student Question: What attracted a family from Lowell, Massachusetts to invest in Hinsdale, New Hampshire in the 1950’s?
Answer: They didn’t invest here in the 1950’s. My grandfather was a printer in Lowell, Massachusetts who published race track programs. He took stock in lieu of payment for the racing programs he printed during the early years of this racetrack. His involvement in Hinsdale came through his company. That’s how the original holding happened. My Grandfather had stock in other race tracks too. The answer to your question on the original investment was through our family racetrack program printing business.
Question: After twenty-five years operating as a harness horse track, what made horse racing uneconomical in Southern New Hampshire.
Answer: Lack of horses. In 1973 the Meadowlands opened in New Jersey as a big, big harness track that drew horses from the New York tracks over to New Jersey and from Yonkers and Roosevelt in New York. Those horses went to New Jersey to race. The horses from Rockingham and Foxboro in the eastern part of New England went to New York to race and the horses racing from Green Mountain, Hinsdale, and Scarborough, Maine, went to Rockingham and Foxboro to race. There was nothing coming up to fill the bottom. So it was a combination of lack of product and other competitive forces that diminished harness racing in Hinsdale.
The other competitive forces were the lotteries that started in the early 1970’s when megabucks became big in Massachusetts and dog racing that had its heyday from the early 70’s to the late 1980’s. The transition from harness to dogs that took place in the 80’s was a result of happened in the 70’s.
Question: When was the first time you remember coming to this track?
Answer: My father and two of my uncles became involved here in 1968 after a race fixing scandal where the state had come in and basically frozen out the previous management. They had some stock in the place at the time when they arrived in 68’ during the management transition. That’s when my family became involved in the actual management.
Question: What physical changes were made to the facilities when the track was converted from horses to greyhounds?
Answer: There is an interim period in which both ran. Harness ran from 1958 to 1986. The dogs opened in 1973. From 73’ to 86’ you had a dual use of the facility which was a summertime harness meeting and a fall, winter, and spring dog race.
Question: Wouldn’t it be hard for the horses to race in the same area as the dogs?
Answer: They don’t. Its two entirely different areas they race on. The harness track is a half a mile stone dust track. The dog track is a quarter mile sand track. It was literally in the center of the harness track. They didn’t race at the same time. The horses would run from mid June to early July through Labor Day. The dogs would run the rest of the year. We would take out the turns of the dog track and the stretch of the harness track would run through it.
Question: Which one was more of an attraction when you had both?
Answer: By that point the harness was going downhill so the dogs were more of an attraction from a gambling point of view than the harness. From a social point of view the harness business is more of a sport and the dog business is more of a hard boiled gambling game. That’s not to say there is not a business element to the harness business but harness is a sport.
Question: Why would there be a difference in the surfaces on the tracks for the horses and the dogs?
Answer: Horses have hoofs and dogs have feet. [Laughter]. The horses would dig too deeply into the sand and fall down and the dogs would break their feet running on the stone dust. It’s three different types of tracks – dog tracks, harness tracks, and thoroughbred tracks. Thoroughbred tracks are like a plowed field. Harness tracks are like a dirt road, very, very hard, and dog tracks are like beach sand. You know when you go to the beach and the tide comes in and you get that wet hard packed sand that is easier to walk on than the deep sand. That wet hard packed sand is the ideal surface for race dogs.
Question: The check for Elvis, the one million dollar check, is that real?
Answer: Yes, that was absolutely real.
Question: There was enough money back then to have him sing?
Answer: We had it insured. Elvis had been dead for about six years and the likelihood of Elvis showing up was about zero. [Laughter]. That was one of our better promotions. Elvis died. He was dead for about ten years when all of a sudden people started to see Elvis around the United States of America. There were Elvis sightings everywhere at about this particular time. As a Labor Day promotion we offered Elvis Presley a million dollars to show up here and sing one song. We had the contract all drawn up. [Laughter]. In order for him to get the million dollars, he had to give us the rights, the publishing rights, to the one song he sang which would have been worth much more than the one million dollars. We had a couple of people come in and try to convince us they were Elvis. [Laughter]. We had one guy show up here half stewed. It was a three day weekend, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. We had Elvis impersonators and Elvis bands.
Question: How did you know they really weren’t Elvis?
Answer: This guy showed up and he didn’t look like Elvis anymore than you do. He appeared in a white suit, cocked, just drunk as a skunk. We kept him around all weekend and bought him booze and food and he entertained people. It was quite amusing.
Question: When you think back over the past twenty years, what are the most memorable events here at the track?
Answer: The Elvis thing is certainly the number one on my list. We had Vinnie “The Bomb” Kosky here who climbed inside of a box and then blew himself out. [Laughter]. That’s actually a picture of him on the wall underneath the explosion. We ran that as a promotion. Vinnie was a character.
We are currently transitioning through dog racing now into simulcast wagering. We take bets from tracks all over the country over a combination of phone lines, computers, and television satellite signals that has become more than sixty percent of our business. Our big events are the Kentucky Derby Day and the Breeder’s Cup Day which is this Saturday. Memorable events here are driven more by things happening elsewhere that we participate in. There was a horse Smarty Jones this year that went for the Triple Crown in thoroughbred racing that drew a lot of interest and is memorable. Last year there was a horse named Funny Side who also went for the Triple Crown. Those days become national racing days are more memorable in our promotions where as before we had to manufacture promotions like the Elvis thing or the Vinny “the bomb” thing. We still do promotions. We had a psychic night here a couple of weeks ago. We had palm readers, fortune tellers.
Question: Is there anything within the races you can remember such as a dog freaking out, or doing something crazy, or biting another dog, or something going absolutely wrong during a race?
Answer: We have dogs catch the rabbit from time to time.
Question: Really? Is the rabbit scented?
Answer: No.
Question: Why do they chase it?
Answer: Greyhounds don’t chase by scent, they chase by sight, and in reality they chase by sound. The breed has developed to a point there are sight hounds that chase by sight, but the racing dog has evolved over time to chase the noise of the rabbit. It’s a combination of chasing the rabbit and the sound of the rabbit.
Question: Is it very uncommon when a dog catches the rabbit?
Answer: It’s a mechanical error. A mechanical mistake the rabbit makes.
Question: So what happens to the bettors?
Answer: You refund the money on the race.
Question: The dog must feel happy when he caught it?
Answer: I don’t know. It depends.
Question: When they are trained, do the trainers ever let them purposely catch the rabbit to give them satisfaction? Or, do they just run around never catching it? It would be kind of discouraging to me if I was a dog to never catch it.
Answer: When Greyhounds are trained they don’t train them on rabbits. They haven’t trained them on rabbits since the mid 1970’s. They train them on artificial lures which are pelts that they drag by a motorized device in front of them. And yes, they do occasional let them catch them to keep their interest.
Question: Can you describe the financial impact of this park on the surrounding towns like Brattleboro, Hinsdale, and the State of New Hampshire?
Answer: Sure. How much detail do you want?
Question: As much as you can give me?
Answer: I will email you. I don’t have it handy because I wasn’t expecting that question. By and large we pay one-hundred and ten people right now. We go up to about one-hundred fifty people in the July and August period which is our busiest time of the year. We have a payroll that runs between thirty-five and forty thousand a week. We pay purses of over ten thousand a week. The common multiple is five on how we impact the area. It’s a substantial payroll in the area. When you add the purses in it becomes very substantial. We are not the biggest company in the area. We are not the biggest financial impact but we would certainly be in the top part of the middle. We pay roughly $200,000 a year in real estate taxes and license fees to the town of Hinsdale and another million dollars a year to the State of New Hampshire in taxes. No other business in the state pays for the right to take bets. We have a relatively large impact. I have a sheet around here somewhere that I will email to you. We will take it off the computer that will just lay it all out to you and will be very easy to understand.
Question: What is the most amount of money someone has ever won just betting on one dog?
Answer: Dog or horse?
Question: Both?
Answer: I saw two people hit for one-hundred thousand dollars one night on a dog race about ten years ago. They split a $200,000 twin trifecta pool. I had a guy hit the Belmont stakes here two years ago for $110,000. I had a customer hit a pick six here on the thoroughbred race in one of the big pick sixes for $75,000 last June. The largest payout I’ve seen to a single person is in the area of $100,000.
Question: When you made the switch into Off Track Betting and Simulcast you have all those satellite dishes………..
Answer: Those satellite dishes are sixty-five to seventy five percent of our business.
Question: It must have been a phenomenal investment in technology to pull that together?
Answer: Not really. It’s not what you think, probably fifty thousand dollars. And the other thing is, it grew. It grew from something relatively small to relatively large over a ten year period. We have invested more than fifty thousand into it but the initial investment was less than fifty. The last time I stopped counting about four years ago I had just under $300,000 into simulcasting.
Question: When I was here a week ago seeing all those people watching all those different races on television…….
Answer: They are watching races from all over the United States and Canada.
Question: So I assume people can watch Hinsdale from all over the United States?
Answer: No. We are so small we stream out the signal on the Internet. We take bets here over the phone on what is on the Internet. That is something we have just started. As far as putting our races out to the nation, simulcast dog racing is very, very competitive and the bigger tracks own the market. We never dove into it. We just got into streaming the signal and it is working. Those people are sitting watching those televisions in real time. They can walk up to any of our betting windows and make a bet on the track they are watching. That bet actually goes into that track pool through a combination of computers and frame relay phone systems. For example, if we go out right now, Santa Anita is just starting up in Los Angeles. You like the four horse at Santa Anita. You walk up to our betting window and say “give me two dollars to win on the four at Santa Anita”. That bet is at Santa Anita roughly twenty seconds later and will show up on their tout board at Santa Anita.
Question: Someone calls them from here?
Answer: It goes from a phone here to a hub in Maine where a bunch of tracks combine. Out of the hub in Maine it goes onto a phone system called Frame Relay and right to LA in a matter of seconds. It’s a matter of three or four seconds for the batch to go to Maine, four or five seconds for the batch to be combined in Maine with the other tracks, and another nanosecond to go into the computers in California. If the bet hits, the reverse happens. Your ticket becomes validated. You walk up to our window and cash it.
Question: Does the accounting go as fast as the ………..
Answer: No. The actual accounting is almost as instantaneous because you can print that right off the computer screen. The physical movement of the money happens every week or thirty days depending upon what your deal is with the track.
Question: When you bet on the dogs do you bet on the order that they will come in?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Why can’t a person just bet every single dog in every single order possible? They won’t lose no matter the results. They can do that?
Answer: You can do that. I take anywhere from 19% to 27% out of every bet made as my commission. It pays the employees, pays the heat, pays the gas, pays the lights, and pays the person. When you walk up and make a bet, I’m taking twenty-seven percent maximum off the top. The seventy-three cents that’s left on everybody’s bets is divided by the number of winners. So if you did what you are talking about doing, over the long haul you are going to lose the 27%.
Question: Well, you will come out with something?
Answer: But you will lose the 27% of your bankroll. It’s a good question.
Question: I think you have already answered this question, but what changes or innovations have evolved in Greyhound racing over the last twenty years?
Answer: The biggest innovation in Greyhound racing in the last twenty years, and it’s a two edged sword, is that we have come under tremendous animal rights pressure.
Question: Really?
Answer: Unbelievable animal rights pressure. Like the fur business in a way. The people who are pushing an animal rights agenda have centered on Greyhound racing as a very easy target for them to use to make all sorts of accusations on abuse that really aren’t there. If you think about it, it’s the largest concentration of animals under regulation in one place, so there is a lot of data for them to mine.
Question: How many dogs in one night typically race?
Answer: One hundred.
Question: You have cages where all the dogs stay in?
Answer: Yes. We have right now 650 dogs living in four buildings on the property. They race basically twice a week. They are owned by people all over the country.
Question: And they donate their dog?
Answer: No. They lease their dogs to a kennel operator who then brings those dogs to us. We do not own any dogs. The way the business works, if you want to buy a greyhound, you go out and buy a greyhound. You can’t walk into a racetrack and say race my Greyhound. You would lease your dog to a kennel. That kennel owner would come to the racetrack with fifty to one-hundred dogs that they have deals with owners on and they would manage the kennel at the racetrack. We provide housing for the dogs, heat, electricity, this, that, and other things and we pay what they call purses to the kennel operators that’s a percentage. You receive more if you win than lose.
Question: But the owner of the dog, if they win do they get money?
Answer: Yes. They get somewhere around 20% to 30% of what the dog wins.
Question: Once their dog is dropped off to the kennel is that it? Do they say goodbye and I’ll see you in about a year? Or can they visit their dog and take them home at night?
Answer: They stay here, or go back to the owner, or they are adopted out and that is the biggest innovation in the business.
Question: So all 600 dogs don’t go home at night? They stay here?
Answer: They all stay here. The life of a Greyhound right now for the owners is they are investments. They are not pets. They are investments. The owners generally buy them sight unseen based on parentage, breeding, and guesswork. They turn them over to the kennel. By and large they never see them again.
Question: That is really sad. If your dog is a really big success you’ll never get to have him home?
Answer: The dogs that are really big successes go back to breeding.
Question: What if you don’t want your dog to race anymore? You want him home again?
Answer: In the cycle of a Greyhound’s life, a Greyhound does not become a pet.
Question: Oh, never?
Answer: No. What a minute. Listen to me. It doesn’t become a pet until its done being an investment. No one goes out and says, boy, I’d like to own a Greyhound as a pet in spite of the fact they are very good pets. People who want to own Greyhounds want to own them to make money. People who breed Greyhounds don’t breed them to sell them for pets. They breed them to race. A Greyhound comes here and he races. He learns to race or he doesn’t learn to race. The ones that don’t learn to race become pets early in their life. The ones that do learn to race become pets later in their life. And that is the biggest innovation in the last thirty years in Greyhound racing. Thirty years ago they were not considered pets at all. They were euthanized when they were done racing.
Question: What does that mean?
Answer: Killed.
Question: Why?
Answer: Do you eat meat?
Response: Yes.
Answer: A cow died so you could have your cheeseburger.
Question: But…..
Answer: It’s livestock.
Question: So they only race once?
Answer: No, No, No, No, No.
Question: How many years do they race?
Answer: Six years. It depends on how well they learn to race.
Question: My God?
Answer: What do you mean My God?
Question: What do they do? Buy a gun and shoot them on the spot?
Answer: No, no, no. A veterinarian gives them a shot. You asked what the biggest innovation is and it’s the adoption of Greyhound dogs.
Question: Do the dogs have a schedule? There are so many dogs here.
Answer: Yes. There is unofficial schooling and official schooling. There is a schedule of racing. All of that is put together by our racing secretary. I don’t want to mislead you on this. I’m trying to answer your question on what is the biggest innovation in Greyhound racing. When greyhounds end their careers they become pets and they become remarkable pets that thirty years ago nobody even considered.
Question: So they are trained every day, worked out on the track?
Answer: Not necessarily every day but on a regular basis.
Question: What do they do when they are not on the track? What would be a sample schedule for a dog during the day?
Answer: Every trainer handles things slightly differently. A dog that is racing today would have gotten up about six-thirty this morning. He would have been turned out with other dogs to conduct his or her business and other things. A dog that is racing this afternoon would have eaten a very light breakfast. At about eleven they would leave the kennel and go to a holding kennel that is down the end of the building. They would be weighed and checked-in. A veterinary would look them over and put them into a crate until they were ready to race in whatever race they were in. They go out, get into the box, run around the track, are taken off the box, and two of them held up to take a urine sample.
Question: Random?
Answer: Random. It’s done by the judges on the roof. They pick two dogs to be sampled every race.
Question: Typically, would it be the winner?
Answer: It’s the winner and one other dog but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the winner. It’s a judgment call. The three judges on the roof look at the race and decide what two they want. Nine times out of ten it’s the winner and one other. Once they have done that it usually takes five or ten minutes to pick up the sample. They go back in the truck back to the kennel. They eat a meal. They get turned out. They walk around with the other dogs. At some point, eight or nine o’clock, they go to bed. If they are not racing they get turned out three times a day. Other than that they spend their time hanging out and sleeping. They are more cat-like than dog. They live the life your dog lives. They hang out with other dogs.
Question: Why would their weight matter?
Answer: It’s not a lot different than a fighter or wrestler. It’s a way of determining if they are in shape. Their weight can vary a pound and a half either way. By and large the obvious medical issue is a dog that is not eating right will lose weight that indicates something is wrong with him. A dog that eats too much will be logy, so they keep them on the weight as the first measurement, but not the only measurement, that something might be wrong with them,
Question: So female and male dogs run together?
Answer: It’s one of the rare places where females compete equally with males.
Question: Of all the dogs here are there more females or more males?
Answer: It’s fifty-fifty.
Question: Do you find that males typically run faster than females?
Answer: No, they don’t. In the Greyhound business, and I can’t answer the why of this, females compete equally with males. In the horse racing business they separate them. In the dog racing business there is no class for females. They run equally with the males. They tend to be slightly smaller than the males in the breed but they run equally as fast.
Question: What would happen if the winner of a dog race has something wrong with his urine? What would happen to that dog in his race?
Answer: The race results would stay exactly as it was. They would redistribute the purse and the trainer would be fined.
Question: What are they looking for in the drug test?
Answer: It’s a little bit different than the horse racing business. There are a lot of steroids being used and a lot of blood doping going on in the horse racing business. It doesn’t exist in the dog business. They are looking for amphetamines. Basically, anything that will speed them up or slow them down. There is a state lab in Concord, New Hampshire and they run the samples through a mass spectrometer that identifies certain general elements. If they find the general element they will get more specific. It’s rare, very rare that you have a bad test in Greyhound racing.
Question: What changes do you think will happen in the next twenty years in the future?
Answer: I have to be careful how I answer this question. Do you want the truth?
Question: Well, personally, what do you see happening in the future?
Answer: I have been here since 1971. I’ve owned the place since 1986. Before that it was a publicly held company that my family had a controlling stake in. The entertainment market changes, the gaming market changes, and consequently this business must change. This business is not married to anything. At one time Hinsdale was strictly a harness track and became a combination harness and dog track. It then became a fifty-two week dog track. In the 1990’s we became a dog track and an OTB (Off Track Betting) parlor. And now, the transition is going from fewer dogs to more simulcast. We are a state regulated business. In order for us to simulcast we have to run a certain number of live dog days.
We have transitioned over a period of time from being a manufacturing company where we would produce our own races with dogs or horses that were on the grounds. We would put them together, turn around, and sell our own races. Now we are becoming a Walmart. We manufacture nothing. We buy product from other tracks and then merchandise their product to the general public in Hinsdale.
Because of the evolution in technology right now, we have transitioned from being a manufacturing company that retailed own product that, because of technology, we now purchase a better product and sell that product to the public that at one time we are able to manufacture ourselves. We sell races from Churchill Downs in Kentucky, Santa Anita in California, Yonkers in New York, or Derby Lane, and the dog track in Florida as the entertainment instead of manufacturing the entertainment ourselves.
To me it’s a little sad because I like the manufacturing side of the business, but, its part of the transition. It was sad when we had to go out of the harness business. It’s a bit sad when the dog racing here has to compete with the simulcasting and the simulcasting is better.
The nature of any business, but particularly this business, is the closer you are to the population centers the bigger and the better you are. So the tracks in New York, LA, and Miami are bigger and better than we can ever be. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to be the best we can all the time. We do. We now have the ability to sell that product which is better than anything we can make.
Also, there are all types of new gambling opportunities competing against us. You have two casinos in Connecticut with slot machines which is something we are after politically. Hopefully at some point in time we can get them. That will open up a whole new area. In the meantime with our own live dogs we are experimenting with a number of things such as the streaming video, the phone waging on them, and some lower priced bets available through our web site.
Question: What aspects of owning the Hinsdale Park makes it personally rewarding for you?
Answer: The whole circus to be honest with you. It’s a very rare and complex business that encompasses a lot of things. And the most rewarding thing to me, other than the money issues, is that I do marketing. I do politics. I do a certain amount of construction and a certain amount of psychology. Rewarding would not be a word I use, but the most rewarding thing about this business is its diversity.
The first job I had at this racetrack I was 15 years old. I’m 53 now. The thing that keeps me coming back is change. I am never pigeon holed. I deal with politicians, newspaper people, and employees. I deal with customers. I deal with maintenance issues. On any given day here you can literally go from how to fix a broken septic system in January to five minutes later being on the phone with the Governor. It doesn’t happen every day. I have a customer base, these people I see every day, that runs the gamut from gangsters to federal judges. It is probably the only place in the world where you can have two people standing in the same location, one a criminal and one a judge, looking at a television screen sharing information about the same thing – if the four horse is going to win at Aqueduct. I just as soon you do not use that analogy because it’s actually true and I don’t want to embarrass the federal judge or the gangster. You can make up something else to hide that.
The most rewarding thing is the people. It’s the employees, it’s the customers, and it’s the action. We handle thirty million dollars worth of bets a year. There is money flying all over the place. There are winners, there are losers, — its life.
Question: I have one final question. When thinking back about the history of the track and your family involvement, what would you like to say about the Hinsdale Greyhound Park to the Keene Sentinel Readers?
Answer: You have some good questions. Vote for the politicians who are for the expansion of gambling in New Hampshire. We are, at the end of the day, a business in transition competing against the entertainment and gambling business. Right now, we are lacking a big piece of what we need which is slot machines. Vote for the people that are for the expansion of gambling.
End of interview.
[When the Hinsdale Park was constructed in 1958 the new harness racing venue had a major economic and social impact on “just across the bridge” Brattleboro. Those recollections from fifty years ago by a former town resident will be detailed in an interview that will appear on iBrattleboro next weekend.]
RLElkins
