At the Track

The autobiography of the compulsive gamler is gripping; he worked in New York, in the 1950s, a block away from where I worked in the Chrysler Building in the 1970s; tells the joke of the horseplayer who said he felt lucky to break even, because he needed the money. And I had to laugh when he wrote about betting on horses that "owed him," i.e., horses on whom he had bet and lost in the past, on which he would bet again.