Page 21 - November 2005 The Game

Your Thoroughbred Racing Community Newspaper The Game, November 2005 21
Beverly Wick:The Woman of A Million Wagers
By Peter Gross
In the late 70s and early 80s, well before satellite wagering, phone accounts, self-serve windows and the internet, I was earning good attendance marks at Woodbine and Greenwood and for a certain period of time I was making most of my transactions at one window.
I didn't even know her name, but Beverly Wick became
the custodian of my bets
simply because I found
her pretty and friendly and on those days when everything I bet finished off the board, her sincere smile was a pretty good consolation prize.
I think I know when
we finally exchanged
names. In June of 1981, I
won a $7000 tri and
strutted to her window to
impress her with my
good fortune. So I guess that's when she started calling me Peter and I started calling her Bev and here we are 25 years later and I'm still betting and Bev's still working in the mutuels.
"I started in July 1974 and you had to work ten days to get on the 'B' list," she remembers. "If you were on the 'B' list you had to go every day and line up and depending on how many people were there, you'd be called. In those days you got $3 a race and if you were only selling exactor races, you'd make $9 for the whole day"
In six weeks, Wick was promoted to cashier and earning $28 a day.
After a full year on the job, Wick became a union member and that meant her pay skyrocketed to about $32 a day.
Since 1974, horse racing in Ontario has seen dramatic changes both in the way wagers are placed and in the place that people wager. Wick recalls an era in which The Jockey Club kept their heating bills down.
"When I first started at Woodbine, I pre- ferred to be in the Clubhouse because years ago there was no heat in the grand- stand and the higher levels,"
These days, Wick is proud of the remarkable facelift that Woodbine has undergone,
"What they did to Woodbine is make it a beautiful track. My nieces came here a few years ago and they couldn't believe it was the same place. I notice that since the renovations and the slots, on the weekends there's younger people and new faces, people that have never been there before. "
In her early years, Wick did the pari-mutuel circuit, driving when neces- sary to sell and cash tickets at Fort Erie, Greenwood and Woodbine. Now she's a Woodbine full-timer, which has allowed her to move into a home in Rexdale, an easy 15-minute hop to the track. "I get the longer shifts - 71/2 hours, about 37 hours a week, which is the max," she says. "The reason for that is to allow people lower on the list to get
hours."
A mutuel clerk of Wick's tenure gets
$21 an hour these days. That may sound pretty good, but the job does have its perils.
"You get some people who can be very rude and belligerent and swear at you," she says with just a hint of exasperation, "But things have improved greatly. Now we have Mutuel Co-ordinators and Security who deal immediately with the odd unruly customer."
And then there's the problem with shortages. A clerk might make over 1000 transactions in an afternoon. If that person's till has extra money at the end of the day, the overage is taken and recycled into the daily double pool. But if a shortage occurs, the mutual clerk has to replace it and Wick was burned badly a few months ago.
"I went short almost $200," she says, "All we could figure out is that I must have issued a $200 voucher instead of $20."
In cases like that, the recipient of the beneficial payment is unlikely to turn around and return the extra cash, probably figuring - wrongly - he's finally beaten the track.
It's a far different world of wagering today than it was when Wick started.
CONT. PG30 - SEE BEVERLY WICK
Mutuel Clerk, Beverly Wick
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