Odds On Racing - Harness Racing

Odds On Racing's

Personality of the Month
for January 2007

Dominic Polito

If you venture to the Windy City racetracks these days of Maywood and Balmoral Parks, you might take a tug on your ears to see if you are hearing correctly. No, that’s not Gil Levine calling the races---even though the voice sounds distinctly "Gil-like"—it’s Dominic Polito—a man living a dream.

Dominic, who grew up in Chicago and now resides in suburban Tinley Park, regularly attended the races with his father, garnering a love for the sport and for the announcers’ voices who seemed so distant and so intriguing to a young boy.

"My first trip to a racetrack came at the age of nine," Dominic, 48, recalled. "I would tag along with my father on his weekly excursions to the local racing ovals. The two of us would make are journeys out to Washington and Balmoral Parks because I was raised on the south side of Chicago. We were also at Sportsmans Park and Hawthorne in those glory days of the 1970’s."

Ever curious, Dominic didn’t waste anytime inquiring about harness racing—he first approached Sportsman’s Park starter Gene Montgomery as a teenager.

"I was very young and began talking to the Sportsman’s Park starter, Gene Montgomery, in between the races," Dominic said.

As it turned out--about ten years later Gene and Dominic would be working together at the Logan County Fair.

"Besides the people like Gene who worked for the racetrack, I grew up with the drivers as my heroes," Dominic recalled. "My favorites were Bob Farrington , Jim Curran and Don Busse and Daryl Busse. Jim Dennis was also one of my favorites, and Joe O’Brien too."

But though he admired and looked up to the drivers, Dominic says he was drawn more to the call of the races than any other aspect of the sport.

"I would imitate the calls on the way home in the car," he says. "I can remember staring up at the announcer’s booth as a young boy and wondering what it was like up there. Once in awhile you would catch a glimpse of the announcer staring through his binoculars following the action."

As a teen in the mid to late 70’s, Dominic began writing letters to local Chicago announcing legends Phil Georgeff and Gil Levine.

"They both replied and to this day I have those letters," Dominic says. "Gil Levine instructed me to make a tape of the qualifiers from the grandstand at Sportsman’s and send it to him. I did, and he invited me up to the booth one night and I announced a post parade at Sportsmans."

Dominic would show up at the Sportsman’s Park qualifiers once a week, where former paddock judge Eugene Pryzbyla—known to everyone as "Ish"—let him call one qualifier. Then one morning presiding judge Jim McArdle spotted Dominic along the fence and called him into his office.

"He introduced himself and told me he was looking for a announcer to call Demo Derbys," Dominic said. "I worked a couple of summers for his business which was called Grandstand Attractions. He began introducing me to people in the harness industry. I began attended the annual awards banquet in Springfield in 1980 and continued to do so for many years, getting to know the Illinois county fair board members.

Because of his friendly and outgoing nature, Dominic was quickly hired to announce at several county fairs—his first being the 1980 Logan County Fair. From there he was hired to announce at Farmer City, Christian County, Taylorville, Lincoln, Effingham and Altamont, Oregon and Pectatonica. He announced and all the while didn’t quit his day job working for the RJR Nabisco Company where he was employed for 25 years.

During those summers announcing at the fairs, Dominic would bring along family members such as his two sons and his nieces and nephews. Eventually, however, as the children grew older, Dominic was traveling to the fairs alone. He never, however, stopped sending tapes of his calls to the Chicago tracks.

"I sent tapes and resumes out for years with no response," Dominic said. "Really, I knew there was no opening in Chicago. But those fair years were a great experience and it was great to have had my family along to share in those times."

After a quarter century working for Nabisco, Dominic decided to call it quits.

"It was time for a career change, and so I decided to go back to school and learn a new trade—which happened to be computer networking," Dominic said. "Unfortunately, after I was enrolled only two months, the school I was attending went bankrupt. This was a very weird time for me because it was the first time in my life I was unemployed, and all of a sudden someone dropped a newspaper article in my lap."

The article in a local Chicago paper reported that Peter Galassi was resigning from race calling at Balmoral, and that Maywood’s Tony Salvaro was very ill.

"I didn’t know what to think," Dominic remembered. "I really didn’t have a reaction at all—I figured the tracks had already filled the positions, and besides that, I hadn’t called a race in four years."

Unbeknownst to Dominic, his wife had sent an e-mail to Balmoral Park’s John Johnston telling him that her husband had been a race caller on the Illinois county fair circuit for years. A few days later Dominic picked up his home phone and to his surprise Johnston, steward Ben Wessels and Chicago’s Director of Racing and USTA president Phil Langley were all on the other line.

"I almost fell over," Dominic said. "I couldn’t believe it. They wanted to know where I had worked and what fairs I had called. That led to a morning of qualifiers that I called, and to being hired to work two days a week—Monday at Maywood and Tuesdays at Balmoral. I was thrilled to have the opportunity."

Determined and dependable, Dominic doggedly pursued his pair of weekly race calling nights in the Windy City, until one night, Indiana Downs called him, offering him a full time announcing job. Dominic worked at the southern Indiana facility until the fall of 2005, when Chicago announcer Scott Ehrlich left the Windy City to ply his wares at Cal-Expo. Dominic took his position—announcing at both Maywood and Balmoral—and has been there ever since.

"This is a dream come true for me—to work as an announcer at my home town tracks," Dominic noted. "There are times after the races have ended, when the turn out the track lights and it’s very quiet. I look down at the track apron near the rail and I go back to a time when I would look up from there and wonder. I just feel extremely lucky to be living my dream."