The New Guy

Hopefully, you all saw the feature story in Wednesday’s paper about our new staff reporter, Dno Wilburn. I touched on it in the story, but Don and I actually go way back, all the way back to the fabled time of the 1990s when he and I were both working at Southland. It’s Southland Casino Hotel now, but back then it was known as Southland Greyhound Park.

Back then, Southland was struggling. Splash Casino had opened down in Tunica, Mississippi just a few years earlier and with the burgeoning casino boom came a steep decline in business at the dog track. If you weren’t around or paying attention back then, I can not adequately describe how huge the business at Southland was pre-Splash and how dramatically it fell off a cliff in just a few short years — like from doing a million dollars a night to doing a million dollars a week. And the decline did not stop there.

I don’t think it’s even the slightest stretch of the imagination to say that if not for the turnaround that came in 2006 with the arrival of “casino-style gaming” as they called it, Southland would have closed its doors a long time ago.

But anyway, back in the late ‘90s, Don and I both worked in the Racing Department at Southland. It was a very interesting job to say the least. We both learned valuable job skills that have absolutely no value outside the very niche industry of greyhound racing. It actually paid pretty well, and you got to meet some very interesting characters there, including colorful gamblers, far-flung greyhound

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owners and trainers, and of course, fellow greyhound racing industry workers who, by virtue of also possessing that unique industry-specific set of skills, traveled the country finding job opportunities. At one time, my office (I was the Director of Racing, which is not nearly as exciting as it sounds… and it doesn’t sound very exciting) we had folks from Boston, South Dakota, Texas, Kansas and, of course, Arkansas working and creating a mish-mash of accents.

Don and I both started as Lead-outs, which as you might have figured out on your own, meant our job was to lead the greyhounds out of the paddock (sort of a staging area before the races, in case you’re unfamiliar with the term) and parade them down the track to the starting gate.

We would then, once all the wagers were in for that particular race, place the dogs in the starting box (and I assure you, some of them did NOT want to go in). Then they would run, we would then collect them and escort them back to their trainers.

And then we would do that again a dozen or so times a night.

Well, as you can imagine, it’s not really all that hard, so if you showed you could do it and show up for work regularly, you’d start getting moved up the ladder, and so we did.

Between the two of us, I’ll bet Don and I performed every job in the department, even if it was only as an occasional fill-in. I won’t bore you with the job description for each one, but we did everything from Patrol Judge, Paddock Judge, Kennel Master, Scale Clerk, Chart Writer, Lure Operator, Brake Man, Starting Operator, Assistast Starter, Presiding Judge, Flux Capacitor… OK, I made that last one up, but it actually isn’t the dumbest sounding title in the list, is it?

Well, anyway, like any job, it had its perks and it had its downsides. The pay was good, even as Southland struggled to compete with the new casinos, and it was fun. But the hours were terrible. When you’re in the entertainment industry, you work when everyone else is off. So, it was a lot of nights, weekends and holidays at the dog track. Eventually, my kids got older and started doing stuff like school plays and ballgames and such, so I left showbiz behind and not long after that, so did Don. We kept up with one another somewhat, although there were big gaps along the way.

Anyway, it all worked out that he was gearing up to come back to the area right about the time that I was looking for a reporter, so we’re once again working for the same company. And honestly, just like Southland was struggling after decades of being the only game in town, the Times is struggling, as are most newspapers, to compete with all the internet-based news sources.

Hopefully, Don and I will be albe to work together for years to come here at the Times. As always, if you have any story ideas or cool photos to share with us, send them on. You can Text the Times or email us at news@theeveningtimes.com.