The Day I Met Tonto*
*Jay Silverheels, born Harold Jay Smith in 1912, Canadian Mohawk
My Dad was into horse racing, really into the ‘ponies’. When I was a boy, he had us regularly visit the race tracks in California. Bay Meadows in Albany was our ‘home’ track. During county fair season, we hit several because many of the fairs included horse racing.
I remember many days walking into Bay Meadows. Race day was special for guys like my Dad. There was excitement in the air. Was this the day the long shot came in? Walking in we would pass several guys selling ‘Tip Sheets’ which promised to help gamblers find winning horses. There were maybe a half dozen different tip sheet brands, each printed in a different color, but all had the same format and type font…hmm. My Dad instructed me that many gamblers had favorite tip sheets they were loyal to, but my Dad preferred to go look at the race horses. He believed he had a skilled eye… But he also did his homework. He researched the track record of each horse, reviewing their race results history and paying particular attention to their recent trends. My Dad would research how each horse had performed in their last few races. He was especially interested in finding horses who had a mediocre lifetime race history but were recently performing better then their own average.
We would enter the stadium and walk down to the track level where the horses and their jockeys could be seen up close. Getting close to the thoroughbred race horses and their jockeys was magical for me. The horses were beautiful and majestic. Each horse and rider sported uniforms in combinations of two bright colors, unique to their owner/sponsor. It reminded me of the flags of ships and the cloth of the uniforms was shiny. I imagined it was silk.
After inspecting the horses that would race that day, our next stop was the betting windows where my Dad would pick his bets and place his money for the next race. He coached me through the process of making gambling bets. I learned something about the ‘odds’ of a bet and what the payoff would be from a bet based on the its’ odds.
When I think back to that education, I find it interesting that the career I ended up having was in investment management. My Dad was a ‘trader’ Vs an investor. Apparently he considered buying a race horse before I was born but he never had that kind of money. Had he been born in my generation he could have been a hedge fund manager. Horse racing is a ‘market’ based on risk and reward, supply and demand, research and opinion, and plenty of uncertainty, similar to the stock market. But he and I were different in this respect. I was not a trader in the investment markets and I don’t gamble as a rule… on horses or anything else.
My Mother’s family was based in San Diego and we would visit my maternal grandparents a couple times a year. When we were visiting, my Dad would be sure to spend an afternoon at the Del Mar race track north of San Diego. The special treat when we were in San Diego was when we drove into Mexico for the day, to Tijuana, and spend time at the Caliente race track. In the early 1960’s Tijuana was a wilder town than any I had experienced in the States. I was excited by the adventure of it.
On one of these San Diego trips, when I was seven or eight years old, my Dad drove us across the border to Caliente. He drank a lot of coffee and when we went to a track, our routine was to start the day in the track café. The café at Caliente looked like a no-frills diner in the US with vinyl upholstered chairs and linoleum tiled floors. I remember two differences about the Caliente café that made it clear that we were ‘no longer in Kansas’; there were posters advertising bull fights on the walls and on each of the Formica tables was a stone bowl full of stuffed jalapeño peppers.
As a typical American boy of my generation, I was a big fan of the TV series The Lone Ranger. There is something about a masked hero. I had no idea why he wore a mask, but it made him mysterious. The show used a classic formula which included the loyal, stoic ‘Indian’, Tonto, as the Lone Ranger’s support staff. I admit that the Lone Ranger was the big attraction for me but I respected Tonto. He was solid, dependable and strong.
That morning in the Caliente café, I remember my Dad being unusually excited. He was the strong, silent type. I’ve thought of him like Gary Cooper in the classic westerns. We didn’t talk too much so I was excited when he said to me that he had arranged a surprise, that there was someone he wanted me to meet. I remember feeling a little nervous. I was a shy, introverted boy and a surprise meeting of a stranger seemed scary.
Turns out he gave me no time to stew on the surprise. No sooner had he mentioned it, he stood up and greeted two men who had a moment earlier walked into the café, one leading the other. My Dad greeted the first man and introduced him to me. It was apparent that my Dad knew the first man. They seemed to be friends. I had been trained to greet adults in a proper fashion with my back straight, looking them in the eye and shaking their hand. As I greeting this first man, I noticed that he was grinning more than adults normally did. I wondered if he thought something was funny. Maybe me?
This first man was blocking my view of the second man. The first man told me that he had treat for me as he stepped aside to let the second man forward. As he stepped aside, the first man said ‘Timmy, I would like you to meet Tonto!’
The second man, ‘Tonto’, stepped forward smiling warmly and offered his hand to shake. In a deep voice he said it was nice to meet me. My memory of these moments feels somehow fragmented. I think I must have been in shock. This man looked like Tonto and he sounded like Tonto. But he wasn’t dressed like Tonto. No buckskin shirt and pants. No headband. This man wore a white shirt and grey slacks and black, polished shoes. I had no idea that the character I had watched so often was not a real person. The real person on TV was an actor who went by the stage name Jay Silverheels. I remember feeling confused. Why would Tonto be dressed like this, like all the other men at the race track that day? I must have looked pretty funny, probably with my mouth open, staring at Tonto. All three men were grinning.
After a little while the men agreed that the races were about to begin and that we should head to our seats. Outside of the café we joined the flow of the crowd headed towards the grandstand seats. As we climbed the stairs of the grandstand I made sure to keep an eye on Tonto. I was fascinated by him. In the crowd, he looked like every other brown, dark haired man in Tijuana and no one seemed to take any special notice of him.
My Dad and I had seats in the lower rows of the grandstand, just in from a main stairway. I watched Tonto and the other man keep climbing up. Their seats were 15 or 20 rows above ours. As we waited for the first race to begin, I stole a few looks up at Tonto.
When my Dad bet on racehorses, he liked to play the odds to shoot for a larger payoff. I don’t remember him ever merely betting on the heavy favorite to win. He would typically bet on horses that the odds suggested would finish in the middle of the pack. Occasionally my Dad would bet on a long shot hoping for a big payday. On the day I met Tonto, my Dad went for it. He made a large bet on an out of favor horse. My Dad made a classic long shot bet but more aggressive than usual for him by putting more money down. Perhaps he felt this already special day was ‘the day’.
After the buzzer went off, starting the race, my Dad’s horse was running in the middle of the pack. Gradually, his horse moved towards the front of the pack. The crowd was cheering on their favorite horses. My Dad started yelling his horses name and “Come on! Come on! Go! Go!” About half way through the race, his horse nosed ahead of the pack towards the front runner, who was running on his own. My Dad was so excited. His horse continued to catch up to the leader around the final turn. As the horses headed down the home stretch, my Dad’s horse caught the leader. The audience was on its feet and my Dad was yelling at the top of his lungs. I had never seen him so excited. It was contagious and I got very excited. As the two horses headed to the finish line, my Dad’s horse seemed to find an extra burst of energy and he push ahead as they crossed the finish! There was a huge cheer from the crowd. My Dad was now whooping for joy. His long shot horse had won!
I was bursting with excitement. I felt I needed to do something about this great thing. I needed to tell someone that my Dad had picked the long shot and that it had won. Suddenly I knew that I had to tell Tonto…
The roaring of the crowd was dying down but everyone was still standing. I pushed my way down our row to the middle stairway of the grandstand. I knew where Tonto was sitting, several rows above us. I started running up the stairs. But I was bursting, I needed to shout out my news as I ran. I spotted Tonto in his seat, several rows higher and I yelled as I ran “Tonto, Tonto, my Dad’s horse won!!”
Tonto heard me and he saw me running towards him. Lots of other people in the audience also heard me and I noticed several turning their heads to look towards where I was looking, towards where I was running. I was focused on Tonto and I saw his eyes go wide. He glanced around, no doubt seeing a number of people looking at him. Suddenly, Tonto stood up and forced his way to the middle staircase that I was running up. I thought he was going to greet me. Instead, when Tonto got to the stairway, he glanced at me getting closer and then he turned and flat out ran up the stairs of the grandstand. He was remarkably fast. Just like I imagined Tonto… I realized that I was never going to catch him so I stopped running and watched Tonto climb to the top of the grandstand. There must have been an exit down the back of the grandstand and he disappeared from sight.
My first thought was ‘What happened? Why did Tonto run away like that?’ I walked down the staircase to the row where our seats where. My Dad had been watching me come down and he was laughing hard. I don’t know that I had ever seen him laugh like that. He wiped tears from his eyes. When I asked him why Tonto had run away, my Dad said “I guess he didn’t like the attention”. I was so confused. Tonto seemed so brave when he was fighting bad guys with the Lone Ranger…Maybe he was shy like me.