The great Shirley Povich on 1958 snow storm at Bowie..

[Kasept]

This Morning…With Shirley Povich

FULL COLUMN: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ie-snow-storm/

At 1:30 in the morning the last Bowie horse player was hauled aboard the Pennsylvania Railroad’s mercy train which mushed in from Baltimore and reached trackside, its blinking lights promising passage to the outside world again for the beleaguered bettors of Bowie.

After the train was arriving, the hoards of sleepy, angry horse fans bolted from the harsh barracks Bowie had provided in the clubhouse, and sloughed the 100 yards to the rescue coaches. The snow that got in the way of their stampede was simply kicked away.

These were the last left over — 2000 Bowie fans of whom a day at the races had stretched into dusk, darkness, cold, hunger, food, warmth, beer, fun and then less fun. Stabbing at them all the while was a growing suspicion that they shouldn’t have been there in the first place to let the biggest snow in 22 years close the trap on them. There had been warnings against the weather.

You had to be a diehard horseplayer to venture to Bowie in mid-winter. Three years later, there would be this:

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/199...train-derailed

I was on that train a couple of weeks before that, probably opening day in January that year. I still remember catching a nice-price horse ridden by Ollie Cutshaw.