1st Series Chronicles of a broke horse trainer "It's a Small World"

gas, motel, meals, etc. while you were there. After a little creative thinking I devised a plan that actually worked well. In the world of horse racing there is a rule, at least at the smaller tracks, that states if your horse has ever run below the bottom claiming price for that track (at Fairmont it was $3000) then the horse must run in the top 4 finishers in one of its next 4 races at $3000 or higher claiming price. Many of the horses that came into Fairmount came in from tracks in Nebraska, Oklahoma or Louisiana where there were claiming prices as low as $2500. If your horse fell into this category, it meant that you had to run top 4 in one of your first 4 races to be able to keep the horse at Fairmount. The racing was presumed to be fairly easy at Sedalia due to the low purses and in fact many of the races would only have 5 or 6 entries. This resulted in me being able to charge a reasonable fee to haul horses in jeopardy to Sedalia for other trainers at Fairmount and have all of my expenses covered. I could only haul 3 horses in my old trailer but that meant 2 for pay and 1 for me so it was a perfect setup for a broke horse trainer. My whole staff at Fairmount consisted of my wife and I, a couple of grooms and an old boy named Gordon who had moved up into the Collinsville a few years before from Florida. He lived in an old trailer house a few miles from the track and had a tendency to drink a little more than his share of beer but he was just one of those super likeable race trackers that you run across once in a while. He didn't know enough about horses to really be called a "groom" but was very handy as a runner and general shed row cleanup hand. I had to leave the grooms at Fairmount for the Sedalia trips since there were still horses to be cared for there. I also would need decent help at Sedalia since I would have 3 horses there by myself and would occasionally have back to-back races. Gordon was adamant about wanting to go with me, but the truth was that I really needed a pretty good hand at Sedalia and I decided I would be better off finding a groom looking for work at the Sedalia track.