Re the Racing Times--

Our own Alan is an alumnus, and the guy doing our programming had a little to do with the paper. Steve Crist was editor and spearheaded the purchase of DRF, his assistant editor at the RT was Neil Cook, who went on to be editor of DRF for a while. Katherine Wilkens was head of marketing at RT, went on to do the same job at DRF as one of the sharpest people in the industry, then married Joe De Francis and doesn't have to work anymore. Scott Finley was last sighted with Atttheraces in England.

The importance of the Racing Times can't be overstated. Up until that time the DRF had a monopoly, and no interest in adding to the publicly available body of knowledge or information, since they felt it would hurt their business (and ultimately that turned out to be true). George White and Steve Crist changed all that, and George put together the deal that had Equibase sharing the RT database-- that is why that database exists today, and did not disappear when the RT went out of business. For thoses of us who had been unable to get the DRF to allow us to buy data on-line, this turned out to be pretty damn important.

The RT ended what amounted to a long dark age of handicapping-- that's why guys like Donaldson (see my post "History Lesson") are not well known, and why many others of us were viewed as counterculture or fringe operators for a long time. And Beyer came out pretty good.



TGJB