Book Description

Poetry. Photography. Melissa Shook came to Boston from New York in 1974 to teach photography at MIT. She soon discovered Suffolk Downs. Though she did not bet, she felt comfortable at the track, enjoying the sounds, the crowd and the people who worked with the horses. Over the next thirty years she documented her Suffolk Downs in photographs and poems concentrating on the trainers, hot walkers, exercise riders, horse shoers, dentists, those who delivered hay, feed, and ice, and the jockeys and their agents. Suffolk Downs, located in East Boston, opened in 1935 and flourished into the 1980s. The Beatles played there, and in 1969-1970 Bill Veeck, who is in baseball's Hall of Fame as an owner, managed the track. He wrote about his experiences in his book Thirty Tons a Day. In 1989 Suffolk Downs closed for two years. When it reopened the track came slowly back to life. Laura Hillenbrad's book Seabiscuit: An American Legend published in 2001 and the movie made from it, are credited with reviving interest in Suffolk Downs. "Melissa Shook's gift combines a documentary-photographer's eye and an ear perfectly pitched for vernacular speech. Her subject is the backside workers of the Suffolk Downs racetrack: the all too often broken down, troubled, bleak yet enduring lives of the hot-walkers, stall-muckers, horse-shoers, grooms and trainers. Out of intense concern for these mostly immigrant works she gives us her East Boston version of Dubliners, in speech that springs to life as vibrantly real as the satin pelt of a thoroughbred. Her book is a thrilling integration of common idiom, stoic clarity, and generous energy."--George Kalogeris