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Episode 155: T.D. Thornton—Horses, Cons, Boxers, Oh, My!
129 Plays6 years ago
"You can persevere and you can grind, but you have to get lucky at times," says T.D. Thornton, @thorntontd.
T.D. Thornton, author of Not By a Long Shot and My Adventures with Your Money came by the show.
Thanks to Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction for sponsoring the show.
Twitter: @CNFPod.
Instagram: @cnfpod
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Transcript
MFA Programs in Nonfiction
00:00:02
Speaker
cnf the creative nonfiction podcast is sponsored by goucher colleges master of fine arts and nonfiction the goucher mfa is a two-year low res program online classes let you learn from anywhere while on-campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplishmenters
00:00:18
Speaker
who have Pulitzer Prizes and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni, which is published 140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit Goucher.edu slash non-fiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for non-fiction.
00:00:49
Speaker
CNF is also sponsored by Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Discover your story. Bay Path is the first and only university to offer a no-residency, fully accredited MFA focusing exclusively on Creative Nonfiction, attend full or part-time from anywhere in the world.
00:01:09
Speaker
In the Bay Path MFA, you'll find small online classes in a dynamic, supportive community. You'll master the techniques of good writing from acclaimed authors and editors, learn about publishing and teaching through professional internships, and complete a master's thesis that will form the foundation for your memoir or collection of essays. Special elective courses include contemporary women's studies, stories,
00:01:31
Speaker
Travel and food writing, family histories, spiritual writing, and an optional week-long summer residency in Ireland, with guest writers including Andre DeBees III and Hood, Mia Gallagher, and others. Start dates in late August and January. Find out more at baypath.edu slash MFA.
Introduction to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:01:55
Speaker
All right, so here we are, CNFers. Welcome to CNF. This is my podcast that created a nonfiction podcast, a show where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, and audio producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. It's part prologue, part process, and part product.
00:02:13
Speaker
Today's guest is T.D. Thornton, a turf writer, meaning he covers horse racing and he's also the author of two books, Not by a Long Shot, which is a horse racing book. In My Adventures with Your Money, it is not T.D.'s adventure with your money. He's not a con artist.
00:02:33
Speaker
it's about this other guy may be the best con artist of the 20th century so it's to be clear TD is no con artist please subscribe to the show and head over to BrendanOmero.com for a show notes
00:02:52
Speaker
There you may also subscribe to the podcast newsletter where I share reading recommendations and podcast news on the first of the month. Once a month, no spam. As far as I can tell, can't beat it.
00:03:07
Speaker
Keep the conversation going on Twitter by tagging the show at CNF pod. I'm picking up a little bit of steam on Instagram to do that little show your work thing that Austin Kleon type thing. He was on the show showing some behind the scenes of putting together episodes.
Finding a Writing Voice
00:03:23
Speaker
So follow that on Instagram at CNF pod. What else? Oh yes.
00:03:31
Speaker
Now, forgive me, this might get a little long-winded, but bear with me. So, you know, I've been largely frustrated with my work as a whole. There's nothing new. I'm not getting that much work of late, and I still feel like I'm not fully formed as a writer. Now, we typically are never fully formed or always becoming, so to speak, a phrase I fucking hate. Pardon my language.
00:03:58
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But as I was writing a feature for Mountain Home Magazine, it finally struck me like a thunderbolt.
00:04:04
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I've been trying to avoid it for years, but there it was. I sort of found my voice in a way I hadn't ever found it before, and this is how I found it. I remembered why I started and why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. My big influences back in the day were Hemingway and mainly Vonnegut. I remember a time wanting to merge the terseliness of Hemingway with the wit and heart of Vonnegut.
00:04:31
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And I got away from that, and it came out of my past and really just slapped me across the face. I think throughout my 20s and even my 30s, I've tried to sound too much like other people or what other people might want me to sound like.
00:04:51
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This was especially true when I was in grad school. I was trying to be lyrical. A style that does not be fitting of who I am and I don't like it. I find it too flowery. I don't necessarily like to read it either.
00:05:02
Speaker
So, and I was trying to be too literary, too artful, because I felt like, you know, it had to elevate, you know, if you're going to write as an artist, you had to elevate it to these lyrical, flowery standards, and damn, that's just, that shit ain't me, man. I finally found a way to describe it, what it is at my core, what feels right, take it or leave it. I call it palm muted sentences, if you will, and I'm not a guitar player, but
00:05:29
Speaker
my favorite guitar players and my favorite bands, namely Metallica, as you well know. They, you know, they use these palm muted power chords that make the chord sound meatier and chunkier and deeper and uglier and shit if that ain't me. Chunky, meaty, ugly. So,
00:05:52
Speaker
I wrote this feature with super tight sentences, very short, like really shortening the distance between that first capital letter and the full stop. There's barely any commas in it because I wrote such short sentences and it might read a little choppy to some, but it felt good on my end. I had I think a 10,000 word transcript of all the recordings and reporting and I was writing a 3,000 word feature.
00:06:18
Speaker
So I had a lot to draw from, of course. So of course, through the bulk of that reporting, I was able to then write very short sentences and let the story through the heavy lifting. You don't need me to show you how wonderful and artful I am.
00:06:33
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So I wrote this feature with those tight sentences like I was saying and it might read choppy to some but it felt really good on my end. And then when I drop in maybe a slightly longer sentence it kind of pops. I mean this could change but for now it's the truest version of myself as a writer. You know that I've come across in 23 years of doing this freaking thing.
Advice for Writers
00:06:55
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So my advice anyway is remember why you got into this racket and maybe then you'll find the truest version of who you are at least right now.
00:07:03
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And it might feel better. And you'll attack your work with a little more rigor, at least a little more fun, because this should be fun on some level. So anyway, listen, this podcast is for you, CNFers. It's meant to serve this little community and to make you a better teller of true tales. If you have questions, give a shout, ping me on Twitter, email me, whatever.
Introducing TD Thornton
00:07:28
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Share this episode across your platforms this only grows if it deserves to grow and part of that is if you think it matters I hope you think it does so TD Thornton at Thornton TD on Twitter is here I thought it was a befitting time to publish this up so we recorded a few weeks back
00:07:48
Speaker
Before the Kentucky Derby, I think. And the Belmont Stakes, depending on when you listen to that. Listen to this, it's going to be tomorrow on Saturday. And it's the third leg of the Triple Crown. TD and I don't talk about horse racing much in this episode at all. So, whatever.
00:08:08
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So I figured this is a good time to bring TD on. Anyway, seemed your main. You could say this, podcast is the test of the champion, which is the nickname for the mile and a half race at Belmont Park, Saturday. So, is that it? I believe that's it. Alright, this is it. This is me talking to TD, Thornton and Julie CNFers.
Thornton's Inspiration from Horse Racing
00:08:42
Speaker
So I think my journey into writing is kind of intertwined with my immersion into horse racing, which led to my first book, Not By A Long Shot. And I can kind of trace it back to when I was five years old, I grew up in a racetrack town in Salem, New Hampshire, the track that was Rockingham Park. And as you mentioned, my dad was a school teacher. He had a couple of racehorses. It was a hobby for him.
00:09:11
Speaker
Not a vocation. And from some of my earliest memories, I tagged along with my dad to the racetrack. And I could go everywhere with him into the bedding area, into the stables where we took care of the horses. And the one place I could not go into that I was not allowed to was the paddock, which is where they saddled the horses right before the race begins. And I had to stay on the other side of the fence.
00:09:36
Speaker
and watch my dad, and that's when I saw my dad get his serious face on, he was all business then, he was giving instructions to the jockey, he would give the jockey a leg up to boost him onto the horse, and the track bugler would play the call to post, and there would be, you know, this amazing flash of color as the horses went out to warm up for the races, and then of course the anticipation of the race itself, and the race would be off, and the big
00:10:05
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throaty surge from the crowd and everybody's screaming. And that's where, you know, the culmination of the race, the finish line, I would see what happened. And then I would get to reunite with my dad again after the race. But in my mind at a young age, it stuck with me that I wanted to be on the other side of that fence. That was where all the action was. And, and that's where everything seemed to happen. And I didn't quite have it all articulated that way when I was five or six years old.
00:10:32
Speaker
But I kind of knew I wanted to get on the quote unquote other side of the fence. And that's what led me into a racetrack life. And as I got older and trying to figure out how I could make that happen, it so emerged that one of my talents was writing. When I was a kid in high school, I played a lot of sports, but I wasn't the greatest athlete. I played guitar and was in a couple of bands.
00:10:58
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I was not the best guitar player in Salem High School and I did well in classes and I was in some of the honors classes, but I didn't seem to fill with those kids as well. But the one thing that I could do was I could write stories and I really liked to write stories and I could make the other kids laugh and I could come up with something kind of witty or clever. And it was kind of easy for me back then at that age. And it was something that I really took a shine to.
00:11:25
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Once I kind of got my push out of high school and was heading off to college, I went to the University of New Hampshire. That's where I kind of figured out that, boy, I would like to meld this racetrack life and this writing about race horses and the racetrack life. And if I could ever con somebody into giving me a job to write about horse racing and be at the racetrack, I would be in heaven. And I shut off to try and make that happen. And eventually it did, but it didn't happen right away.
00:11:55
Speaker
When you were in high school and even into college, who were you reading at the time that also kind of gave you a sense of what you could do if you applied all your rigor into that trade? So that's an interesting point because a lot of what's written about horse racing is about the pinnacle of the profession. We read about the Kentucky Derby and championship horses and people who
00:12:24
Speaker
have biographies written about them because they're at the top of the game and they're the winners. You hear the old cliche that the winners get the right to history and it's true to a large extent. What really intrigued me was nobody was, although those were excellent reads and fine pieces of literature, it didn't really resonate with what I knew to be the racetrack experience on a day-to-day basis at a smaller track like Rockingham Park in Salem.
00:12:52
Speaker
and Suffolk Downs in Boston, which is the track that I eventually faced my book not by a long shot off of. And I said, well, why isn't anybody writing about this? You know, why isn't anybody getting down onto the back stretch, which is the term that we use for the stapling area of the horses, and what it's like to race through the winter in Boston when you have to get up at two hours before dawn to chop the ice out of the buckets of the water buckets of the horses so the horses can drink.
00:13:20
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You have to get out there and exercise the horses before it gets light. And all these people who are barely scraping by and they're not making much money, but you can tell that they do it and they stay involved for the raw visceral love of the horse. And I wondered why that was not happening. And I would read a couple of snippets of it. I can tell you a couple of pieces that stand out. I was an avid reader of Sports Illustrated back in its magazine form when it was in a payday and when I was in college in the mid 1980s and Bill Nack
00:13:49
Speaker
wrote a great story about a jockey named Robbie Davis. And Robbie Davis in 1988 was involved in a race where his horse, there was a racing accident ahead of him. A jockey had fallen off his horse named Mike Venetia. And Robbie's horse kicked Mike Venetia in the head and killed him instantly. And Robbie was never the same thereafter. And Bill Nack wrote a story probably about
00:14:17
Speaker
six or eight months after the accident happened, trying to find out what, you know, here's a jockey who has died, and obviously the racing community and his family is impacted by that. But how about the guy who inadvertently just happened to be involved in the accident? And Robbie Davis' life was changed, too. And nobody seemed to want to sympathize or write about that. And Bill Nack did. I can remember another story at the time in Sports Illustrated.
00:14:46
Speaker
I think the writer was Gary Smith, and it was about a jockey named Willie Clark, who wrote at Charlestown in West Virginia. And Charlestown was a backwater, leaky roof type of track. Very down on the rungs of success, on the ladder of success of horse racing, Charlestown at the time was about as low as you could get. And Willie Clark was 68 years old, and he wanted to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for being the oldest active jockey to win a race.
00:15:16
Speaker
The problem was Willie was blind. He was losing his eyesight. And Gary Smith went and wrote about that. And those were the types of stories that really sparked me. And I wondered why there wasn't more of that. And that's what I set out to do when I eventually gained employment at Suffolk Downs as the track's announcer and working in the press box.
00:15:37
Speaker
And that's when I started to keep my journal that eventually began, not by a long shot. It's a really great subculture when you get into the mud of it. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, there's nothing like the promise of possibility around the racetrack. One thing about racetrackers is, perhaps you got a sense of this as well, is that there are a lot of eccentrics. There are so many characters from all walks of life
00:16:06
Speaker
Money plays a role in it, but it is not the predominant role because like you said, a good horse can come from anywhere. A horse can win the Kentucky Derby based on modest breeding. He's not an expensive horse, but racetrackers are so even keeled in that you know, because we walked this fine line of danger and tragedy and you never know what's going to happen out on the racetrack safety wise and you know, in a dark way, that's part of the allure of the sport too. But you know,
00:16:35
Speaker
When race trackers do get a good horse or Fortune does tilt in their direction and they make a big score somehow, they don't get too high on the high points of the game, but they also don't get too low. They're very, they have such a sense of equanimity in that they're able to balance things out and that too is part of the allure. You never know what the next day is going to bring, so you want to embrace what you have on that particular day.
00:17:05
Speaker
And it's something that I've tried to write about, and I don't know if I've come across it, but it is one of those things that grabbed you, and it's not something that's evident to people who don't experience a racetrack life.
00:17:17
Speaker
And when you write about it, and not by a long shot to an extent, but it's been a long time since I read it, but you did hook up with Stephen Christ in the racing times. And so what was that experience like as you were able to marry the two passions of your life and with kind of a titan of turf riders and handicappers? Yeah, that's an interesting story for me personally. So when I, to kind of pick up a thread that we talked about,
00:17:47
Speaker
a couple of minutes ago, I went to college at the University of New Hampshire.
Thornton's Journalism Career
00:17:53
Speaker
At first, I thought I wanted to be an attorney, so I was going to go to law school. And when I was an undergrad, I was told, well, you don't need to really major in pre-law. You could do some other sort of liberal arts background and just kind of see what interests you. And then if you'd like to continue on to law school. And the writing thing really bit me, and I never recovered from it in a good way.
00:18:17
Speaker
My sophomore year, a fellow student approached me and she was the editor of the New Hampshire, which is the name of the University of New Hampshire student newspaper. She said, why don't you come out and write for New Hampshire? And news writing was a whole different paradigm for me. The conventions seemed a little bit different. I was not trained at that point in journalism, so I didn't have a great grasp of it, but I was willing and I gave it a go.
00:18:45
Speaker
And I kind of learned that as you do, like anybody out there listening who's ever written on a college student newspaper, you know, the drill and you pick it up as you go along. And I took some journalism classes and eventually that led to a couple of internships at real newspapers where you really learn by doing complete immersion. And I got one of the internships was at the New Hampshire Bureau of the Boston Globe. And I got out of college. I graduated in 1990.
00:19:14
Speaker
And I freelanced for the globe a little bit that summer. The globe, at that time, was a very strict union paper. So I thought, jeez, I'm just going to get right out of college and parlay this internship at the globe into a job at the globe, which didn't happen because they go out and get some, quote, unquote, real experience at a smaller paper and then come back and see if this equips. And the paper that I landed at was the Haveral Gazette, which is
00:19:44
Speaker
a newspaper in northern Massachusetts, right on the New Hampshire, Massachusetts border, and you wore a lot of hats in that job. I had a seven-town beat that I had to do. I was a general assignment reporter, and the paper was an afternoon paper, so that meant going to a lot of school board meetings, selectments meetings, and things at night, and then being back into the newsroom at 5 a.m. just to write them up so you could hit the 10 o'clock deadline for the afternoon paper,
00:20:14
Speaker
I had a lot of afternoons free because of that, which was great for my budding racetrack degeneracy. I was able to go to the races at Rockingham Park and fit that in and along with my work life. And I really kind of saw that I think as a lot of kids at age, I was 22, 23 at the time, you know, your reality doesn't match up with what your aspirations are. I don't think anybody does at that age. And I really wasn't digging going to the school board meetings and writing about
00:20:44
Speaker
fake sales and ham and bean suckers, things that are really the staples of small town journalism, but I didn't view them as important in my world back then. And I wanted to escape and I said, how can I get over to the racetrack? How can I break into racetrack reporting? And there are very few jobs that come available and they are and were coveted jobs.
00:21:09
Speaker
I wrote to some of my literary heroes, including Steve Christ, who at the time was the writer for the New York Times. He covered horse racing. And Andrew Byer from the Washington Post, who's published a number of books on horse racing. And Andy wrote me back a very nice handwritten letter. I didn't hear from Steve. He didn't write back, but Steve actually gave me my first job. So what happened was when I was toiling for the Gabriel Gazette and trying to find an escape route,
00:21:39
Speaker
I had an uncle who was sick in the hospital and my uncle liked horse racing. So I bought, I stopped on the way to go visit him. I bought a couple of magazines, horse racing magazines. And before I brought them up to my uncle, I of course skimmed them myself and flipped through them. And I saw one little note that said Steve Christ of the New York times is going to be leaving his prestigious job to go for a new startup venture. It's going to be called the racing time.
00:22:06
Speaker
And it's bankrolled by a newspaper magnet from Britain. And it's going to be a challenge for your listeners out there who aren't familiar with the racing press. There is daily racing form, which is the so-called Bible of horse racing, which at that point in 1991 had been around for almost 100 years and had effectively swatted away or killed all of its challengers in the daily newspaper business. But the racing form was very much a house organ.
00:22:36
Speaker
It didn't publish anything objective. It wasn't very creative. It was just the way it always was. And it was resistant to challenges. And Steve was full of energy and had some money by being bankrolled by Robert Maxwell. And he was going to, you know, invent the newspaper of the, there was going to be the 21st century newspaper in 1991.
00:23:02
Speaker
And he was hiring, and I wrote him a letter and, you know, practically begged that I would relocate to any race track, racing jurisdiction in the country in order to fulfill my dream of being a turf writer, somebody who covers horse racing. And he wrote back this time and said, you know, we're interested in considering you, and you wouldn't even have to move because we're looking for somebody in New England.
00:23:29
Speaker
We went through an interview process and they hired me and that was my big break in that I hooked up with Steve Christ and the racing times and that got my foot in the door.
00:23:40
Speaker
And when you were starting out as a reporter too, whether for the racing times or even in Havril, what were some growing pains that you experienced, just as any young reporter did, that you worked your way through to eventually reach a level of proficiency that built up your toolbox, so to speak? Well, one of the challenges was that
00:24:08
Speaker
being kind of running my own little outpost, meaning I had the whole New England beat, which meant I covered Rockingham Park, the track in New Hampshire, Suffolk Downs, the track in Boston, and there were a number of other county fairs that had, of course, racing meets throughout New England. So I was kind of just stuck up there on my own with all the telephone guidance from the racing times and by editors, and they were really, you know, they were happy to
00:24:37
Speaker
I think they were happy to see that there was a 23-year-old kid who was really dung ho and willing to get out there and get on the back stretch and write those types of behind-the-scenes stories. But I didn't have, you know, anybody directly with me in an office that I sat with to try and hash things out and, you know, what would happen, you know, when you came up against a conflict. And some of the conflicts I came up, you know, this is,
00:25:04
Speaker
Part of the part and parcel of the system of horse racing. Horse racing is, you know, the brand thing about horse racing is the tradition. It's also a big stumbling block for the sport because there are certain entities in horse racing that want the game reported the way the racing form reported it back in 1940 and that doesn't fly in this day and age or nor did it fly in 1991 when I was at the racing time so
00:25:28
Speaker
Right away, I was digging deeper than they were used to, than some of the subjects were used to at the track management level. They found that uncomfortable. And I didn't, you know, I wondered, you know, how is this, you know, am I doing the right thing? And I kept on getting verbal encouragement, you know, keep on doing what you're doing. And in early December of 1991, the racing times had been publishing for six months.
00:25:55
Speaker
I had a pretty big blow up, and the blow up centered around at Rockingham Park, they were going to be closing for a while while Suffolk Downs took over the racing circuit for the first number of months, and Rockingham Park was going to be running just
00:26:16
Speaker
one race a day, kind of a joke race, but to be able to satisfy its requirement that they could show televised races. It was a statutory requirement. They had to run one race a day. Um, so they were going to run one race in the mornings just to, so they could turn on the TV and let people bet races from elsewhere in the country, which is fairly lucrative. Uh, but they were going to cut corners on safety. So they didn't want to have an ambulance there for the jockeys, which is a Cardinal thin in horse racing. You, you had, you know, the jockeys.
00:26:44
Speaker
in thoroughbred horse racing, it's one of the few professions where an ambulance follows you around while you're doing your job. And they were going to save the 150 bucks or whatever it was and not have an ambulance. So I wrote about that. And at the same day, it happened to be a slow news day, but the track president's son, uh, who was a bit of a cut up, uh, got popped by the New Hampshire state police for, for
00:27:10
Speaker
trafficking narcotics as part of his job as the valet parking director. This is one of those racetrack stories you can't make up. He's the guy who's the director of valet parking and people would drive up and it would kind of be like McDonald's drive-through window except he'd hand you a gram of cocaine and you'd hand him a hundred bucks. And so that guy got popped. I wrote about that, but the ambulance story came out on the same day and
00:27:35
Speaker
Right away, as soon as I got it to the track that day for work, I was told by the track's publicity director that the general manager wanted to see me. I went in to see the general manager, and he kind of threw a temper tantrum. In fact, he threw that day's copy of the Racing Time Japanese. You know, I'm 23 years old. I really don't know how to handle this. So I just tried to be a stoic and as polite as I could while holding my ground.
00:28:00
Speaker
And then I kind of left his office and I was a little shaken and I had to go up and call my boss, Mr. Chris and tell him what just happened. And I really didn't know how this was all going to shake out. And, you know, one of the hallmarks of our competing paper, the daily racing form was, you know, if you
00:28:18
Speaker
Got in this type of trouble and you were a racing form employee, they fired you or they transferred you to, to the boondocks and you never got back to a better track again. And I called, I called Steve Chris and told him what had happened. And his response just floored me. It was one of the tremendous support. He said, we're already on the case. We're going to get the word out that, you know, they were going to turn this into a news event that, that one of their reporters at the upstart new newspaper for horse racing.
00:28:47
Speaker
Just got thrown out of the racetrack. I was told I could, one of the things the general manager told me was I no longer had press box privileges, but I could continue to work as a paying customer out of the clubhouse. So Steve Chris told me, you know, get your stuff, move down, buy yourself the nicest table in the clubhouse, expense lunch every day. And we are going to make this a big story that they're stepping on the freedom of the press and that they won't be able to do this. So.
00:29:14
Speaker
I kind of embraced my role as the 23-year-old martyr for the newspaper. And within an hour, I had, you know, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Post calling me up. And it was quite a whirlwind going on, something I didn't expect on a typical Monday in December of work. And that was really my, you know, my big break, so to speak, in that it was a boost for the paper to show that we were
00:29:41
Speaker
head and shoulders above the competition in terms of going out aggressively, in terms of reporting on things generalistically, that we were going to do things that the older publications weren't going to do. And it helped me out because it helped me, you know, to kind of button hold this to kind of wrap up the story is the racing times only lasted two more months after that. Mr. Max, Mr. Robert Maxwell, the British newspaper magnet, at that time,
00:30:10
Speaker
either fell or some people speculate, jumped over the side of his yacht because he was in a lot of trouble. The pension funds of his companies had been raided. There was a lot of talk about malfeasance and his embezzlement of the funds and other newspapers that he had holdings of were going dry. And Mr. Maxwell either fell or took a jump off the side of his yacht.
00:30:34
Speaker
He was no more. And so two months after that Rockingham Park incident that happened with me, the racing times was shut down. And ironically enough, as these things happen, who bought up the assets, but daily racing form bought up the assets just to shut the paper down. So I was a little bit of a, I had a little bit of name recognition because of that incident and
00:30:59
Speaker
I got hired by Suffolk Downs, the rival racetrack, probably because they wanted to put people on the payroll who were anti-Rockingham, their competition. But it opened another, you know, as one door closed, another one opened for me, and it got me into a whole difference. Not so much a writing aspect of my career, because this was a time when I stepped away from writing. I became a member of track management. I worked in the press box at Suffolk Downs. I learned how to be the announcer of forced racing.
00:31:25
Speaker
doing the play-by-play force races, and I did some TV and some radio work, so it gave me some other opportunities out of what was a pretty nasty situation, the paper folding.
00:31:37
Speaker
So what was that experience like going from being the reporter on the ground to then being sort of on that other side where you're no longer sort of reporting on it? You know, you have to be sort of, not the cheerleader, but you're on the other side of that. So what was that like for you, just having cut your teeth as a journalist and then to go into PR? It was, I want to phrase it the right way because,
00:32:07
Speaker
My experiences at Suffolk Downs rising through the ranks at a mid-sized track in management really mean the world to me that some of the people that I met and got to work with and who are lifelong friends to this day. But it chafed against me and I was, you know, I was a journalism student. I was taught, you know, the basic principles of objectivity and here's how you should go about bringing them out in your writing.
00:32:34
Speaker
And now I was a publicist and that was kind of difficult for me. You had to watch what you said. You had to stick to the company line. Um, and there were some writers in the press box who, you know, very silently I coveted their jobs. I wanted to be, uh, the guy from the Boston globe. You know, I wanted to be sitting out in the press box, being the guy writing the stories. Um, and not the guy who is typing up the notes and the quotes from a guy who was writing up the stories and does have that privilege.
00:33:00
Speaker
So it was a little bit different and it is something that I wrote about it, not by a long shot. What eventually happened was I worked for Suffolk Downs and at a mid-sized track, you get to do a lot of different jobs, publicity-wise. I did practically, like a lot of people that I worked with there, if they said, sweep up the floor on your way out, you picked up the group and you did that in addition to your other duties.
00:33:28
Speaker
It was a long, you know, it wasn't until the late 1990s when I decided, you know, let's come back to that thread that we discussed earlier, where I wondered why nobody was writing about what really goes on at the quote unquote minor leagues of force
Thornton's First Book
00:33:41
Speaker
racing. So I started keeping a journal and this, I started keeping it in earnest at about 1990. And I, you know, it was, you know, I'm not big on New Year's resolutions and things like that, but
00:33:55
Speaker
We all remember when Y2K was coming, the year 2000. And I said, you know, this is the year I am going to make a point. And it was, as anybody who knows out there who's listening, who's a writer, who tries to keep a journal and make some vow that they're really going to stick to at this time, I made the vow. I said, you know what, I'm going to do it for the entire year 2000 racing season at Suffolk Downs, which was essentially our season then was June, excuse me, January through June.
00:34:22
Speaker
So six months, I'm going to take notes every day. I'm going to come home and take them up at night, no matter how tired I am or no matter how much I want to go do something else. And I'm going to really stick to it and see what comes out of it. And I'm kind of getting back to a long-winded answer to your question. That's when I started working through some of those feelings of, you know, I'm not really a publicist. I'm almost an apologist for the sport. And I wasn't very comfortable with certain aspects there. So I worked through the journal and, you know,
00:34:51
Speaker
I have to credit fate a lot here in that you can write a damn good journal and you can keep at it and you can come home and do it after your day job until you're blue in the face. But if the storylines aren't there, if certain things don't happen to give you a good narrative, you're just basically going to be left with a journal that you put a lot of effort into. And I got really in a fortuitous turn of events without giving away some of the key plot points, if not by a long shot.
00:35:22
Speaker
several fairly bizarre coincidences happened with one of them with a low level horse who turned out to be related to a champion type of racehorse and it was under my nose the entire time and didn't know about it and neither did anybody else and just several other things really falling into place to make it a nice story arc and
00:35:48
Speaker
You know, that's one of those things where you just have to, you can persevere and you can grind away at it, but you have to get lucky at times. And that's what happened to me. What did these journals look like for you? How long were these entries? Um, were they, was it kind of prosy or was it just a bullet points? So you were getting everything down. Like what did that look like for you? So let me just wind back and go back one step and say that one of the,
00:36:17
Speaker
One of the reasons that I think not a lot of people wrote about the glorious underbelly of thoroughbred horse racing is that access is a problem. But at the time, when I was keeping these journals, I was the director of media relations at Suffolk Downs. So I essentially gave myself the access. I know that if another writer had come along and asked for this type of access, my superiors probably wouldn't have allowed me to give that access to them. So I was a guy who,
00:36:45
Speaker
by the nature of my job anyway, as a media relations director, was frequently in the jockey walker room on multiple times on a daily basis with a notebook and pen or a tape recorder speaking to people. So I wasn't out of place doing this. I was on the back stretch in the stable area talking to people. I was in the paddock. Finally, I got to be on the other side of the fence where I always wanted to do it with my dad. I was on that other side of the fence and I was taking notes.
00:37:12
Speaker
I also had my daily program that I was always scribbling – whether I was keeping a journal or not, I always had a program, the lineup of that day's racism. I was scribbling notes there, which, as an aside, once the book finally did get published seven years later and the attorneys at the publisher of public affairs said, how can you substantiate your information that you took because some of the things that you say are – might be challenged in a court of law.
00:37:41
Speaker
And I said, well, I basically outlined to them what I just told you. I said, I took notes and I have these programs. And when they heard I had programs that are date specific with handwritten notes in them, they said, you're all set. This is one of the strongest things that holds up in a court of law is handwritten notes with some sort of temporal timestamp. So I would take those notes throughout the day and I would come home and type them up
00:38:11
Speaker
you know, in basically a Microsoft Word document. And it was basically a big rambling outline. And it was bullet points. It was everything you just said. It was bullet points. It was fragments. I'm also a big quarter of news clips. So I would clip things out and highlight them and circle things on them and keep them in a folder. And eventually, as I'm working along, it becomes
00:38:41
Speaker
you know, the narrative emerges. It either does or it doesn't. And in my case, you know, once I finished that year 2000 racing season in my notes, I said, wow, I've got a story arc here. This is gonna fly if I can talk somebody into it. But the talking somebody into it part was more difficult than the note taking and the writing because I didn't have a literary agent
00:39:07
Speaker
I didn't know the first thing about how to go out and shop around a book. So I had to learn, just get on the internet and learn. How do you shop a book? How do you approach editors? How do you make pitch letters? I didn't even know you had to have something called a book proposal. And, you know, it took me, you know, that was the year 2000 when I took all those notes. The book didn't get published until 2007. And it took me about, I eventually had about 700 pages of a loose narrative
00:39:36
Speaker
And I had to reign that into about half its size. The finished book is about 350 something pages. And then I had to spend a couple of years just shopping it around without an agent. And, you know, I got plenty of rejection and, you know, some of the rejection, I can take rejection with constructive criticism. That's very helpful. Initially I had pitched the book as a diary-like entry of journals with dates on them. And through some of the construct, you know, some editors wrote back and said,
00:40:06
Speaker
lose the journal entry type of thing, make it more of a narrative. And some editors didn't write back at all, which is kind of lousy because, you know, I learned that you don't want to shotgun, you know, I learned the term shotgunning a manuscript, which is you don't want to send it out to as many people all at once as you can, because editors like to think they're getting something exclusive, they should have the right to look at something exclusively. But on the back end of that, you're in this constant limbo of
00:40:35
Speaker
You know, some editors just don't give you the courtesy of a reply. So you're waiting for a reply. What's a good time to wait? Is it a week? I didn't know. Is it a week, three weeks, two months? I really had no idea. So that's what took me quite a ways. But the editors that did give me some good feedback, I tried to incorporate into the revisions. And I had a big fat file of formal rejections. At the same time, I was also trying to pitch, knock by a long shot, the manuscript to agents. And I had no luck in landing an agent.
00:41:05
Speaker
In May of 2006, I had it out to Public Affairs, a really neat little mid-sized publisher out of New York. And I live on the north, what's called the North Shore of Massachusetts, about 30 miles north of Boston. And we had, in May of 2006, we had what's called the now historic Mother's Day floods. And I lived close to a river, or I did live close to a river at the time. And overnight,
00:41:35
Speaker
Um, our basement, you know, our, our lower level of house, which was not a basement. It was living areas where our bedrooms and my office is what my office was. Uh, it was, we always wanted an in-ground swimming pool and we got one. It was in the house though. And, uh, our house flooded. It was a total wreck. And I was trying to, some, I was trying to get water out of the house. I was literally standing up to my cross and floodwater and the phone rang.
00:42:04
Speaker
And I said, who the hell is this? It's not a good time for a phone call. And it was Lisa Crossman, an editor at Public Affairs, who said, I want to buy you a book. And that's how it turned for me. You get a lot – the frustration of being a writer, as anyone who's a writer knows, is you get so much rejection and so many people saying no to you.
00:42:26
Speaker
But it only takes one person to say yes, but turn your life around. And that's what that phone call did for me. What were the dark moments of the soul for this story? Were there any point where you wanted to just pull up anchor and give up on it? For not by a long shot, no. I mean, that was my baby, so to speak. I was going to – I had even gone so far as to –
00:42:51
Speaker
instruct my wife that if I died, you know, this, this thing is in a, this, this written form is in a manuscript box up in my closet. And, you know, one of your tasks is to get it to see the light of day if something, if I should perish, which I, which I now realize is a terrible burden to inflict upon somebody. But I wanted that to, I wanted it to see the light of day because I thought it was a story that needed to be told. So yes, I did have, um,
00:43:18
Speaker
some dark moments, but not pull the plug type of moments. I kept on chipping away at it. But I'm going to bookend that comment by telling you a little bit about my second book. And so I don't want the takeaway message for writers out there to be this cliche, never give up on your dream type of thing. Because I actually do think it's appropriate that there are some times when you should pull the plug. And my example of that is not by a long shot got published in 2007,
00:43:47
Speaker
And I had already had an idea for a second book. And my second, and at this time I had, not by long shot, got some good press. It sold well enough that I was able to attract an agent. My agent is David Patterson at the Stuart Kuchesky Literary Agency out of New York. And David had just gone over from editing to being, for being an editor.
00:44:15
Speaker
to being a literary agent and he was just hanging out his shingle and he was looking for new blood. I was looking for an agent because I didn't, I just realized I didn't have the knack or the know-how to do the pitching process properly. And my idea for a book, second book was, I like the, you know, the gritty, glorious underbelly of sports. And another sport that is often lumped into the same category in that respect as horse racing is boxing.
00:44:46
Speaker
Another sport whose heyday was maybe decades ago and is in a constant state of flux and change right now. And also is completely rife with characters that you will never see in any other sets of walks of life or even other sports. So I did some research and I was fascinated by the history of boxing and I found out that in all the recorded history of boxing belts, there are five boxers who
00:45:14
Speaker
you know, a lot of a lot of boxers have died in a fight. But there are only five boxers who killed a man with a punch. And then they themselves were killed by a punch in a boxing belt. And these five boxers, they spanned from the late 1700s, up until, you know, the later part of the 20th century, and they were equally spread apart almost. And each of them, I thought told a different
00:45:41
Speaker
story of an era of boxing. And that was going to be my next book. And I was really, I had put probably about 18 months of work into this by the time I hooked up with my agent David and pitched him that idea. And he considered it. And he read through my proposal and he got back to me and he said, he put this, you know, I realized at the time, and now with the passage of time, I realized it even more. He put it as kindly and gently as he could, but he supported it with facts.
00:46:11
Speaker
and said, you know what, I think you have an interesting idea. I don't think it will sell the publishers. And he said, here's why. And he read me some of the metrics about previous boxing books, how even some of the best ones, they don't even come out in paperback after a modest hardcover run. And he said, it's not selling. People like to make movies about boxing. That seems to fly. But boxing books don't do very well. And he said, I want to be with you. I want to shop your next book around.
00:46:41
Speaker
But I don't think this is the right one. And I want, I want, I want you to consider maybe giving that up and moving on to something else. And, you know, I'm going to admit I was a little offended at that at first. And I took that a little hard. Um, but I, but I saw the logic of what he said and I was able, you know, I still haven't totally abandoned it. It's, it's, it's far, it's far back on the back burner now of probably about sitting with about, you know, eight or 10 other projects that I,
00:47:10
Speaker
invested similar time in that I still think are fun ideas and great, you know, underneath the radar type of book ideas. But he freed me and my acceptance of his advice, because that's what you're paying an agent for, is their advice, in part. You know, once I accepted that and moved on, I kind of floundered for a little bit. I didn't have a ready next book idea in the pipeline.
00:47:39
Speaker
But that's when I came up with the idea for my second book, which is my title, My Adventures with Your Money, George Graham Rice and the Golden Age of the Con Artist.
Writing 'My Adventures with Your Money'
00:47:48
Speaker
And it's a book about con artistry. And it's a biography of a guy that nobody's ever heard of. And he's probably the greatest con artist of all time. He operated in the early 20th century with the flair of the circus showman, P.T. Barnum, and he did it on a scale of
00:48:04
Speaker
a modern day birdie made off, who built billions of dollars out of people. And, you know, my agents saying, let it go and move on to something else is what enabled me to move on to that other project. So, you know, again, it's not trying to be all a hallmark moment thing cliche here, but there is, you know, there is something to the when one door closes another opens and that's, that kind of wraps up that it's a long winded answer to your question about, do you cling to a project
00:48:33
Speaker
because you fiercely believe in it. Yes, sometimes you do. And do you sometimes let it go? Well, yes, sometimes you do. And nobody can, it's going to be in your head as a writer.
00:48:42
Speaker
as to where you draw the line and which ones you claim to and which ones you let go. And how did you come to Rice? How did you find him as your character? And then what was that moment like where you were like, oh, this can be what salvages the year and a half I spent on the other book that I had to give up? Yeah, that's a great question because there is a nice answer to that. So I've always been
00:49:11
Speaker
interested in the shadow world of confidence, artistry and confidence and hustling and grifting. And I can recall, I was in a used bookstore in Vermont in 2007. And I picked up a book called The Big Con. Anybody who's even thinks they might be interested in this subject. This is the book to get to start. It's called The Big Con.
00:49:37
Speaker
And it's written by a guy named David Maurer, M-A-U-R-E-R. And he wrote it in 1940. He was a linguistics professor at the University of Louisville. And he wrote about these subcultures. He was essentially writing about the lingo of different subcultures. And he got access to aged, older, retired, so to speak, if you will, con artists who
00:50:04
Speaker
uh you know con artists you know are like magicians the tricks of the trade nobody they're not going to tell you the tricks of the trade they're passed from one con artist to another basically the same way a magician will reveal his tricks incrementally to people he thinks can keep the secret and show talent for them and David Maurer was unique because he did get these guys to open up over time certainly not right away and his 1940 book The Big Con
00:50:32
Speaker
basically is like a roadmap of how you would swindle people in the golden age of the con artists, which is roughly from 1890 to 1940. So I read that book and I kind of kept that in the back of my head. And in the summer of 2011, when I was searching for that next book subject, but I was also searching for, you know, I'm one of these writers, my books aren't going to pay the bills. My books are more of a hobby for me. It's something that I do as a labor of love.
00:51:02
Speaker
But I am not one of those writers, at least not yet, who can live solely on writing books. So I have different day jobs and other gigs. I mean, very involved in the gig economy. And I was trying to come up with what I thought was an idea for a freelance piece to write for the Boston Globe, who's one of my freelance outlets. And I was researching something about con artistry in Massachusetts. And I came across an article in Time magazine that was written in 1934.
00:51:32
Speaker
that I saw profiled a past-his-time grifter named George Graham Rice, who actually became the subject of my adventures with your money. And it portrayed him as the iconic swindler of his era. It regaled some of his biggest coups financially. And despite all my fascination with the shadow world of confidence hustling, I had never heard of this guy. I had never heard of George Graham Rice. And a quick skim of the internet revealed that
00:52:00
Speaker
In 2011, hardly anybody else had heard of him either. It's very unique. Almost everybody seems to have a Wikipedia page about them, even if they're a minor footnote in history. There was none for George Graham Rice. And I kept thinking, if he was such an infamous iconic figure of his time, why had his legacy evaporated? And those are the type of subjects which really grabbed me and intrigued me. And over the next couple of years, I wanted to find out. And the deeper that I dug for George Graham Rice, the more intriguing
00:52:30
Speaker
and compelling his tale became. He was a guy who was, I learned from newspaper archives, who was front page news in the New York Times and other contemporary publications while he was on the run from his misdeeds or while he was on trial. And it was just one of those things that, you know, the more I got into him, the more I wanted to keep pursuing it.
00:52:57
Speaker
As, you know, if you read my Adventures with Your Money, George Graham Rice, on the face of it, is not a likeable person. He's a very morally corrupt human being, but he went about flingling people with such debonair flair that you couldn't help but liking him. And as I was writing the entire manuscript, I kind of, you know, he spent a lifetime suckering people into believing things that any right-minded person should have the logic not to believe. And I kept on wondering, too, like, the guy's been dead.
00:53:26
Speaker
for 80 years, because he suckered me too from the grave. That's almost a witness test for a true con artist. He's got the power to shape his image beyond his lifetime. That was my launching off point. That was my oh yeah moment for when I knew I had something for my adventures with your money.
00:53:45
Speaker
and you you alluded to how how your your books are more or less right now kind of hobbyish and they you're not not like you know david granner or the susan orleans these people that can actually sort of make a living
00:54:00
Speaker
writing books, so you have to balance it with day jobs and other things. So how do you strike that balance? Because you're a representative of 95 out of 100 writers out there that have to supplement and subsidize their habit with something a bit more stable. Yeah, I try to do it by, you know, in one sense, writing is writing.
00:54:27
Speaker
You know, it's, you know, there should be some crossover and there is, but I do really try and delineate between my book, you know, right now I'm pursuing book number three. I'm not actively involved in writing a manuscript, but I'm at that idea stage. There's some little flickers of flame, but I haven't yet had the spark that's going to take me off. And I'm okay with that because I put out a book like once every seven years. So I'm not one of these guys who can churn out a book.
00:54:55
Speaker
every 18 months or every two years or so that I don't think I have that in me. But I really try and do delineate between my gigs and my potential book writing. One of my main gig is I'm a journalist. I write a report on thoroughbred racing news and I'm a columnist for a daily international publication called thoroughbred daily news and
00:55:23
Speaker
You know, in an era where we hear that journalism is such a top grind and it's, you know, loyalty and be able to have fun with your work and also get compensated fairly and have a good rapport back and forth with your editors, that's tough to come by. And I really lucked onto a good thing with Sarah Brett Daily News. I have an editor there who's also the publisher of the publication Sue Finley.
00:55:50
Speaker
She gives me license to chase down creatively whatever I would like. We have good back and forth. You know, some of the daily journalism, you know, is a grind. We're an industry facing newspaper. Certainly, horse racing fans can read thoroughbred daily news, but a lot of what we do is specific to the industry. So I'm writing a lot about lawsuits and regulatory issues and policies. And, you know, some of that can become a grind, but there's,
00:56:19
Speaker
You know, it's still for me, it's horse racing. So there's, it's what I've always wanted to do. So there's the thrill of the chase and the, there are enough great projects to sustain me. And that's what also is my big nut financially is, you know, that's what carries me. So I can pursue book projects, which are more passion projects for me. So I try and delineate between those two things. I still work as the announcer at Suffolk Downs, although the track will be closing this year for good.
00:56:48
Speaker
Like a lot of urban race tracks, uh, around the country we've seen with Hollywood park in Los Angeles is one prime example that is closed because you get to a place like in Boston where we're suffering downs is the 200 acres of real estate is just more valuable to the people who own it than horses running around in circles. I don't agree aesthetically, but that's the way it is. But I, I still announced the horse race is there. This is going to be our last hurrah this summer. So.
00:57:16
Speaker
Between thoroughbred daily news and my announcing gig at Suffolk Downs, those are the things that kind of pay the bills. And then I'm allowed to, you know, I give myself permission to go off and chase these, these fanciful book ideas, which may or may not turn into books. I, as I mentioned, I've, I've had, I've gone down those, I think it's okay to go down the path to don't end up in a book or a book manuscript or a solid book proposal. You can always revisit them.
00:57:43
Speaker
And, you know, somebody, I think we've all as writers been told this at some point in our lives that, you know, not everything you write is going to be your A list, top of the line, five star writing. It's, you have to turn out some bad writing to get some good writing to get excellent writing. And I think it's the same in the business world. You see people who, you know, who are the most successful people in business, the people who have had quite a number of failures attached to what they've done. They're not afraid to fail. And I think that's important.
00:58:13
Speaker
It's the balance of what allows you to have gainful employment and what allows you to chase the dream as well. I think it's trying to keep those two things in sync.
00:58:22
Speaker
And with respect to this sort of speculative third book project that's kind of, you know, it's sitting in that spot of, you know, you're not quite sure what it might be. So what are you, what's informing what potentially could be this third book? Like what are you reading or rereading to help sort of coach that along?
00:58:46
Speaker
I am I'm taking a deep dive back into history, you know, I'm one of these people I don't know as far as
00:58:55
Speaker
technological things. I don't consume news or I don't read anything on a phone. I'm one of those odd people who uses a smartphone primarily to make phone calls. But I do have my workstation set up and I'm a serial Googler and going back into histories and newspaper archives. And one of the fun things about the researching process for me is
00:59:23
Speaker
I give myself license to go back in and, you know, when I'm looking for a certain article in a 1923 newspaper, it's okay for me to get lost and read that entire edition of that newspaper from June, you know, whatever the date might be, June 22nd, 1923 to find something out. I think as a writer, you invest a lot of that time. Some of it could be frivolous, but it's, you know, you also do, that's how you get these little nuggets, these contemporary nuggets that flesh out the larger part of the story.
00:59:53
Speaker
I go way back in time. I like to do deep dives into history. I like to haunt bookstores for out-of-print materials that aren't even on Google Books, things that haven't seen the light of day. And the thrill of the chase for me involves, when I was writing my adventures with your money, you would have thought I was a kid sitting under a Christmas tree with a big gift
01:00:20
Speaker
when I was sitting in the National Archives, deep within the National Archives, and they rolled this card out, and it's got three manuscript boxes of materials that I know, because the paper says who was the last person who signed out those materials, that I know nobody's looked at since they were compiled 80 years ago. That to me is like opening a gift and taking a dive in there and seeing what you can come up with. And sometimes you get the meat of your story that way, but sometimes you get things like,
01:00:49
Speaker
an envelope with a return address in the corner that gives you a clue to something that you didn't know, that puts somebody in a time or a place that you didn't expect they would be in, or launches you off onto a next sphere of research that you can do. So taking a deep dive, giving yourself license to do that, even though it's fun for me. So I don't consider it work. Is it the best use of my time always? You might argue.
01:01:19
Speaker
You know, you might argue, no, it's not, but it's what I enjoy, it's what I do, and it's what keeps me going on those historical projects. As for the subject matter of this book, you know, this nebulous subject matter, because I'm not quite sure, but, you know, here's the steely dance on Deacon Blues where there's a line there that says, we've got a name for the winners in this world. I want a name when I lose. And it kind of comes back to the winners rewrite, the winners write our history.
01:01:48
Speaker
But the losing narratives are sometimes the more fascinating ones, so I want to come back to some of those losing narratives of so-called, quote-unquote, losers, who I don't think are losers, but they're hidden stories, they're hidden narratives, and I try and twirl away and chip away and unearth them. And I think those, to me, are where I find the nuggets that could be a next book.
01:02:10
Speaker
Wendy, would you say that the research and the discovery, this research you're talking about, this is where you feel most alive and most engaged over the course of an entire project?
Passion for Historical Research
01:02:22
Speaker
It is. I have trouble leaving the research off and starting the writing sometimes. I have been accused of over researching and over preparing. I think that's a valid accusation for me. Sometimes I get so bogged down in it that
01:02:41
Speaker
It might cost me in other ways or, you know, I might not pursue other things, but I don't feel complete until I've exhausted things as best as I could. So yes, there is that spark of, you know, I'm on to something. I've seen something that nobody knows about. You know, finding a guy like George Grand Weiss who is worthy of an entire book in and of himself and to learn that nobody prior to
01:03:08
Speaker
2015, when I wrote the book, had written about him extensively for 80 years. I do get a, you know, a feeling of pride about that. I do get a thrill out of that type of thing. It does drive me, but then once I do fully commit over to the writing process, the part where I feel most alive and fully engaged in my work, that's when you're, you know, I'm, I'm kind of a, I'm a night owl by, by
01:03:37
Speaker
By definition, that's the way I've always been. I'm actually trying to switch that up now. I'm really trying to switch my circadian rhythm over so that I have a little bit more to do in the earlier part of the day, and it's very difficult for me to do. But for me, when I was writing, for example, not by a long shot, and my adventures with your money, my primary day job was as the racetrack announcer at Suffolk Downs. I didn't have a main journalistic gig at that time.
01:04:07
Speaker
And that was great because I could go do my thing at the racetrack, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and then come and during the day keep writing notes about things that I would do that night. And then I would have a fresh set of eyes to stand in front of the computer screen for six to eight hours and hash out the book. And, you know, I felt most alive and most into the process when it would be like,
01:04:31
Speaker
All right, I'm really into this. I'm done from the night. What time is it? And I haven't looked at a clock, and I think maybe it's going to be like 11.45, but it's really 3 in the morning. And it's like when you lose track of that time, it's like that's the feeling of, you know, when you're so into the work that you've lost track of the time. That's one of those, it can be a great liberating feeling. It can be a great feeling of exhilaration. That is when I feel most involved in post-system work.
01:04:58
Speaker
And now that you've actually pretty much researched three books, maybe more, written to working on what you hope to be this third one, what would you say over the course of the breadth of that since 2000 that you're better at today than you were maybe five years ago or even 10 years ago? How have you evolved as a researcher and a writer?
01:05:29
Speaker
I think part of it is just the practicality of knowing where to find things, knowing what's available and what's out there and what's not. For example, I can't believe there really wasn't a peep about this in the literary world, but when I was working on My Adventures with Your Money, Google had a really extensive Google newspaper archives, and it was free, it was fairly
01:05:56
Speaker
fairly detailed and accurate. I was surprised at some of the things that weren't behind a paywall that you could get access for. And roughly in some spot between, you know, I'm going to say like 2014, 2015, they took that project totally offline. And I did some research on that because I was going back and fact checking some things for the book. And I'm like, I had this bookmark. Why isn't it showing up?
01:06:21
Speaker
took their newspaper archives and they put them offline for a while. And initially the party line coming out of Google was, we're mothballing this for a little bit. It's like they come back in another form. Well, apparently they didn't figure out a good way to monetize their archives. And they've been mothballed for good since then. And I can't believe there wasn't a whimper out of this from people who do research. I mean, if you took, you know, if suddenly in 2014, you took all the cat videos off of YouTube, you would have had a world crisis from some people. But here there's great,
01:06:51
Speaker
free resource had just disappeared. It's like somebody's taken the body and buried it and nobody knows and nobody's talking about it. So knowing where, I know that doesn't exist anymore. I do know some other places, there are some paid archives, source newspaper archives that you can get at. I don't think they're as good or as complete. But knowing where to find things is one thing that I'm better at. And I think also is,
01:07:20
Speaker
having an agent and knowing that I don't have to do this, this huge hoopla over shopping the book and shopping the proposal and knowing that I'm going to give that off to my agent, David Patterson, and he's going to do a great job at it. The book is, is either going to find a great home or it's not. And I fully trust David to do it. Um, my relationship with my agent isn't one where David's got to make money and I'm not exactly grinding out a lot of money from these, these two middlest books there.
01:07:48
Speaker
that I have on my resume. So I don't have daily interaction with my agent, but, you know, we can, we can still bounce ideas off of each other occasionally. And I know that when I do come up with something, he's going to embrace it and he's going to help me shape, you know, he'll give it a good final shaping before it goes out and gets burst into the world as a proposal. And so just, I think those two things, knowing, knowing where to find things and not having to kind of flail around in the dark for older research materials, because I do like the,
01:08:19
Speaker
you know, the historical aspect I think might be involved in my next book. And knowing how to delegate that big responsibility of getting it out there in the world to somebody who really knows what they're doing and having an agent and allowing him to do what he does best and so I can do what I do best. Do you, in the course of your book writing, do you prefer to work with dead people or living people?
01:08:48
Speaker
that people are interesting to me and appealing because they're, they're not going to try and color or shape the story in a way that, um, that I might not want to figure out, you know, it's one of the things I think all writers are dealing with now, if you're writing about living people, everybody is so image conscious and, uh, yeah. Yeah. And they want to be able to,
01:09:14
Speaker
to shape themselves. It's interesting when I wrote, not by a long shot, my horse racing book, that was entirely about wooing people. And I didn't seek the permission to write the book. And, you know, to me the way that that passes muster legally and ethically is like I'm writing, you know, essentially it's a memoir of my experiences. And you're allowed to write about your experiences if other people are involved.
01:09:43
Speaker
And when you write a book, especially in a closed type of sociological loop like the racetrack, which is kind of insular and, you know, it's a departure from a normal slice of society, to say the least, at the racetrack, I ran into two types of people. And I didn't know this before the book came to be published, but once it was published, there were two types of people.
01:10:09
Speaker
It's based on the people I wrote about Suffolk Downs and they were A, people who said, I better be in that book. I hope I'm in the book. What page am I on in the book? And the other people, I better not be in that damn book. You better not have written about myself. When you're writing about living people, that is one thing that you have to be cautious of. To close off that thought, though, I'll tell you a quick story about when I was a newspaper intern at my very first
01:10:38
Speaker
newspaper internship, the Newbury Port Daily News in the summer of 1989 here on the Massachusetts Seacoast. As we touched on earlier, when you're 22, 23, you're full of grand aspirations. You want to go and do big things with capital B-I-G. And, you know, as you should be at that age, you know, your dreams should not be tempered by reality until you get a little bit older, I think. But I wanted to go out and do all these
01:11:07
Speaker
fanciful writing projects. And one night, I was at the newspaper, you know, you're the intern, so sometimes you're the only one in the newsroom at night, and I was working on a project. And there was an older gentleman who had long since retired. His name was Bill Plant. He actually just died last year. He was close to 100 years old. And Mr. Plant whipped him in, and he had been a newspaper, he'd been an editor and a newspaper executive for many, many decades. And he was kind of a curmudgeon-y old gentleman.
01:11:36
Speaker
And they, my editors had said, Bill Plant's going to be in the newsroom when you're working. Just give him his space. Don't bother him. But if he speaks to you, you know, interact with him, he can probably teach you a few things. And at one point, Mr. Plant called me over and he said, what would you like to do? And I kind of kicked off all these ideas that I had where I want to go places and do things and travel and write about these subjects that, you know, the New York Times and at a high level of journalism. And he kind of took it all in and said, you know,
01:12:06
Speaker
I would also like you to consider that what we do here in a smaller paper, like the daily news, is that you might not consider it important right now, but to the people who live their lives in the community, it is important. So when you go to these hand and bean suppers, when you go to these, cover these church socials or things at nursing homes or school board meetings, or you're writing about the property tax increase, it's really important to these people. And these are the type of, you know, you might write for the New York Times someday,
01:12:34
Speaker
And you might not, you might be writing a column and you might not even know personally the people that you're writing about or taking or criticizing. And so here in a small type of paper, and this is, I'm kind of wrapping this into the, into the small insular community of the racetrack too, which is how I learned this years later, you're going to write about these people and you're going to stand in line behind them at the grocery store and you're going to see them on the street and you're going to have to answer for what you wrote. And that's kind of what I, you know, when I wrote it not by a long shot,
01:13:04
Speaker
I tried to keep that in mind because I did have to face those people and answer what I wrote. And some, you know, some of the things I was writing about, for example, some scandalous things. There's one part and not by a long shot where, in my opinion, even though I can't prove it, I'm dead certain that the jockeys conspired to fix a race. And I wrote about that. And, you know, you have to answer to these people. You have to, when they call you out on it, you have to say, look, this is why I wrote this and this is why I think I'm being fair.
01:13:32
Speaker
I had a lot of people come up to me after Not by a Long Shot was written at Suffolk Downs, and I didn't have a single person say, you wrote that and it wasn't true. I did have a lot of people say, you wrote that and it was true, and I wish you hadn't written it, but I didn't have a single person come up and write something and say that what I wrote wasn't true. So I did take a point of pride in that.
01:13:56
Speaker
And I've read you an interview you did that a few years ago where you said that the horse racing, and we can extrapolate this to journalism too, they are so similar in a sense that people like to say that horse racing is dying and journalism is dying. But what you said is like, no, horse racing is changing.
01:14:19
Speaker
And so it's in a sort of watershed moment, as is journalism. So like that said, given that you're tethered to both industries, where would you say your optimism lies? Yeah, that's a big question. I'll start off by answering by telling you kind of a funny anecdote in that when I graduated from college in 1990 and I had a journalism degree
01:14:48
Speaker
And then I started working for, and I started covering the horse racing industry. My grandfather, now deceased, he was so proud of me in that he said, you know, he came out of the depression and just having a job that was good and had good prospects meant a lot. It was your lifeline. And he was so pleased that.
01:15:10
Speaker
I was getting a job at a newspaper because newspapers are never going to go out of business. Right. And then when I went over to the racetrack, he knew because he came out of that era when, when tracks were in their heyday and the 30s and football, the racetracks are never going to go out of business. And now we see, you know, in my lifetime, at least, um, it's been nearly 30 years since I graduated from college. And both of those institutions have changed radically. Racetracks are sliding off the grid, um, horse racing.
01:15:37
Speaker
as it should be, is going to have to start to answer to some of its criticisms and the way that we treat these beautiful but fragile animals that give us so much joy. And if you're in the racing community, so much enrichment for our lives. And horse racing has come, you know, right now the argument in the mainstream press is
01:16:02
Speaker
Like a lot of things in our society, it's very polarized. There's people who say horse racing should end. It's cool to animals. And there are people on the other end of it who defend it and say, we all love our animals. We're not doing anything wrong. And in most things, the truth is somewhere in between there. Horse racing has done more in the past 10 years for animal welfare and cleaning up its act and regulating the drugs that are applied to some of these horses in some instances.
01:16:31
Speaker
They made more progress in the past 10 years than in the previous 50 years. But that's not evident to people who are outside the world who only see a news headline that says 23 horses have died at Santa Anita racetrack in California since December. And horse racing should end, and it's cruel. And there is a middle ground. There are two, you know, like Italian journalism school, there are two sides. There are multiple sides to every story. So I think, you know,
Adapting to Changes in Horse Racing and Journalism
01:17:00
Speaker
That's what's going on in the horse racing industry in the journalism side of it, how things are changing. You know, it's, again, I don't, I don't think newspapers are dying. I don't think horse racing is dying. They are both changing. And the change in journalism has been a little tougher for me to weather, going away from, you know, I'm still one of these people who still gets two dead tree newspapers dropped at the end of my driveway every day. And from what I can see going up and down the street, there aren't too many other people who get that. I'm still into the print product.
01:17:32
Speaker
as well with books. You know, I don't read books electronically. I'm glad some people do because I think otherwise they might not have access to give themselves access to books. But, you know, it's definitely changing. Is it changing for the better? You know, I think that people consuming their news via social media and Facebook is a problem.
01:17:57
Speaker
Is it my problem personally? No, but as a consumer, I don't consume my news that way, but I think it's detrimental to society, to people who only skim the headlines, and only the most popular headlines percolate up to the top of the news cycle. Yeah, and the most negative headlines are algorithmically induced into people's news feeds, too. Yeah, and it's a matter of what's the better clickbait.
01:18:28
Speaker
I am dismayed when I, when, you know, I also understand this the way it is, but, you know, I, I've, I've freelance, you know, I have my regular writing gig for Starboard Daily News. I freelance occasionally for the Boston Globe. I have freelance in the past for the New York Times and some other online news publications like, like Slate and the Daily Beast. And, you know, when I'm told.
01:18:52
Speaker
You can write a long article, and by quote-unquote long article, they mean 900 words. That's a little dismayed that people don't want to – that people don't want to read beyond the jumps to the next page, or they don't want to read beyond the first couple of paragraphs. I don't know that I have a good answer to how that might turn around or if it will turn around, but I don't see it as a great trend.
01:19:16
Speaker
Well TD, this was a great conversation to hear your story through horse racing and journalism and how you approach your book writing and your current project and how you're circumventing that and working on that. So I'm deeply excited to have you back on the show when the third book comes out.
01:19:40
Speaker
In the meantime, where can people get more familiar with your work if they're not already familiar with it? You can check out my website, which is tvthornson.net. It's got links to some sample chapters of Not by a Long Shot and My Adventure with Your Money are also on there. I have a very small social media footprint.
01:20:07
Speaker
I'm kind of proud to say that all these people are trying to disengage themselves from their smartphones and social media. I've never opened a Facebook account, so not worried about that. But I do have a small footprint on Twitter, and it is at ThorntonTD, which is spelled T-H-O-R-N-T-O-N, and then the initials TD without any period, like Timothy Daniel.
01:20:27
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, TD, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast and we'll have to, like I said, we'll have to do this again down the road and unpack a few other things when the next book comes out. Brendan, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Awesome.
01:20:45
Speaker
Awesome stuff, right? Thank you to TD and thanks to Goucher's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction for making it happen. Keep the conversation going on Twitter at cnfpod and on Instagram at cnfpod. Visit BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for the monthly newsletter, reading recommendations, podcast recommendations. It's fun stuff. I hope you dig it. Once a month, no spam.
01:21:16
Speaker
If you leave a review of the show on Apple Podcast, I will gladly coach up a piece of your work for up to 2,000 words. It takes me in the neighborhood of three hours to do it. So it's a pretty good bargain if you ask me. Just head over to Apple Podcast, post your review, and when it posts, take a screenshot, email it to me at creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail.com, and we'll get it done.
01:21:42
Speaker
Also, email questions or concerns you might be having with your work, and maybe I can answer them for you. That might be a fun thing to do. Okay, is that it? Yeah, that's gonna do it. That's it, CNFers. Remember, if you can't do interview, see ya!