ARCHDEACON: FAN NOW PART OF THE TRACKS HE LOVED
Friend spreads horse racing enthusiast’s ashes around top facilities.
In death, he has accomplished something he had trouble doing in life.
Tommy McIntosh made it to the finish line at Churchill Downs.
He’s done the same at Turf
Park, Keeneland, Belterra Park, Fort Erie in Canada and the area harness tracks, Hollywood-Dayton Raceway and Miami Valley.
When he used to wager on the horses — which he did for over four decades — his picks rarely reached the finish line
the way he’d bet them.
“We’d say, ‘Tommy, who you bettin’ on?’” Mike Kessler said with a throaty laugh. “Whoever he said, we wouldn’t bet it. He was a terrible handicapper. He over-analyzed.”
But if you knew Tommy, you
knew it was just a case of over-immersing himself in the sport he truly loved.
“He loved horse racing, and he loved horses,” Kessler said. “He thought they were beautiful animals.”
The seeds of that romance were planted when he was growing up in East Dayton, Kessler said:
“His dad, his name was Raymond, he liked horses and used to go to the track with his buddy Denver. And Tommy said when he was a small child, they’d take him along with them.”
Tommy’s niece, Amanda McIntosh, who’s a waitress at Abner’s restaurant on Third Street, recalled her uncle’s passion, especially for the thoroughbreds:
“I remember being a little girl and my Uncle Tom always bringing me one of the (souvenir) glasses from the Kentucky Derby. I was born in 1982, and I got a glass from every Derby after that.
“He had a room in my grandma’s house on Babson Street where he had all his racing memorabilia on display.”
Although Kessler said Tommy was an avid newspaper reader, he said what he perused most were racing programs and the Daily Racing Form:
“You could give Tommy a program that was 2 weeks old, and he’d sit there and read it like it was a book.”
Darrell McHargue agreed: “We used to go to the tracks together all the time: Turfway, River Downs, Beulah Park and the Kentucky Derby with Mike. There was nothing Tommy loved more.”
Kessler said Tommy took him to his first Derby in 1974: “I had a Gremlin, and he and I drove down the night before and slept in the car. We went into the infield the next day ... and I loved it.”
He has gone to the Derby every year since, and almost all of those times, he brought Tommy along. Often they were joined by their friend Patti Hill, who had been a classmate of Tommy’s at Wilbur Wright High School in the early 1970s.
A couple of decades ago, they all met Hank Stinson, who lives a block from Churchill Downs on Burton Avenue.
“If you sit in my front yard, you can see the Twin Spires,” Stinson said.
Kessler remembers the first time the trio parked across the street from Stinson’s house:
“He told us, ‘If you guys got any beer cans, throw them over my fence. I collect them,’” said Kessler, who admits they added extensively to his collection.
That led to a quick friendship, and soon the group was parking next to Stinson’s house. Tommy and Hank especially became friends, and in later years — when Kessler would stay with his daughter Grace, who now lives in Louisville after graduating from the University of Kentucky — Tommy would sleep on a futon in Hank’s living room.
“Hank has the horse racing channel, and from the moment Tommy got there on Thursday until we left on Sunday — when he wasn’t over at the track — he was in front of the TV with his Racing Form watching every horse race he could, even if he hadn’t bet on it,” Kessler said.
As for Tommy’s over-analysis, Stinson laughed: “He kept looking and trying, and every once in a while he’d hit a good one.”
Speaking by phone from South Carolina, Hill said Tommy was “the runner” for their group.
As they’d join the throng surging into the infield when it opened early in morning on Derby day, he’d run ahead with some blankets and try to claim a select plot along the fence near the fourth turn.
In later years, after Stinson lost his legs to diabetes and was confined to a wheelchair, Tommy also ran his bets for him.
A little more than a year ago, Tommy — who often worked odd jobs with Mike — had a bit of a falling out with his old pal, and the two lost touch.
But when the Derby rolled around last May, Kessler forgot about all that and went looking for Tommy to see if he wanted to go down to Louisville as they always did.
He knew he’d been living for a while with McHargue in Riverside, but when he stopped there, he got terrible news. Tommy was dead.
He had died pretty much by himself at Miami Valley Hospital way back on Sept. 29 of last year. The cause, Kessler was told, was liver cancer.
There had been no funeral. When no one had come forward, Kessler said, the hospital turned Tommy’s body over to Glickman Funeral Home on Salem Avenue. He was cremated, and when no one claimed the remains, his ashes were sent to Woodland Cemetery for storage.
“I found Amanda on Facebook and asked her if I could get his ashes,” Kessler said. “She agreed, and for $150 I got the box that contained them.
“I knew Tommy’s wishes. We’d talked about it. He always wanted to be cremated and have his ashes spread at the tracks he used to go to.
“And there’s one other thing, too. There’s a song by John Prine called ‘Paradise,’ and Tommy talked about that, too,” said Kessler, whose voice usually sounds like a slow drive down a gravel road but now was soft ... and soon breaking.
“In the song it says, ‘When I die let my ashes flow down the Green River. Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester Dam,’” said Kessler, eyes glistening. “It goes, ‘I’ll be halfway to heaven with Paradise waitin’. Just five miles away from wherever I am.’”
Kessler quieted as he wrestled with his emotions and his words:
“So that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m takin’ him to the Green River ... Yep ... Yep ... It’s down in Kentucky, so I’m gonna let his ashes flow there, too. And I’ll be taking him out to Del Mar in a couple of weeks when I go to the Breeders Cup there. And down to New Orleans, too, because he liked the Fair Grounds (Race Course).
“Tommy was my friend. ... a lifelong friend. Forty years is a long time. We had some differences, but in the long run Tommy was a faithful friend who would do anything for me. I just didn’t want to see him in cold storage at Woodland.
“He belonged at the track.”
Tough-luck life
Patti Hill — back when she was known by her differently spelled maiden name, Patty Bell — remembers the slightly built Tommy from high school:
“He was a quiet, calm guy, maybe because he was so small. He was real friendly, just a good guy, and he stayed that way later.”
After high school, Tommy went to Sinclair Community College, Kessler said: “I think he studied childhood education or something. Later he was a chef at Charley’s Crab in the Arcade. He had a couple other jobs, too, and for a long time he was a blackjack and craps dealer at the Argosy Casino on the (Ohio) river.”
But for a guy who sometimes dealt good hands to other folks, he never got many himself.
“Tommy had a tough life,” Kessler said. “He didn’t have a whole lot of good luck.”
He recounted how Tommy’s sister had been killed in an auto accident many years ago. “That really affected him,” Kessler said. “His parents divorced. His mother got Alzheimer’s, and his brother eventually died of brain cancer. Tommy took care of both of them for a good while.
“And that’s how he lost his job at the casino. That was back when the (Argosy) boat would go out on the river, so you had to be there at an exact time. And he was trying to care for his family.”
Kessler said although Tommy had been promised the family home on Babson, his dad had gotten a new girlfriend, the will ended up rewritten and she got the house.
Until he retired a couple of years ago, Kessler worked over four decades in quality control at the Dayton Daily News. He also did odd jobs around town, and Tommy — although he weighed around 100 pounds, had emphysema and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes he filled with pipe tobacco because it was cheaper — often helped him.
Kessler said he and his wife, Mary, looked out for Tommy as best they could. He loaned him money when he was short and said Tommy always paid him back.
“We’d buy him winter clothes every year — a coat, hat, gloves — because he walked a lot,” Kessler said. “And each November when his birthday came up, we got presents for him, and Mary made a birthday cake and his favorite home-cooked meal.”
Kessler took Tommy to the Blue Grass Stakes every year at Keeneland, the old Jim Beam Stakes (now the Spiral Stakes) at Turfway and even the Breeders Cup at Santa Anita, California, three years ago:
“I told Tommy I was going, and he said, ‘Boy, I’d sure like to see that.’ I said, ‘OK, let’s go. The tickets aren’t that bad.’
“We flew out there, and he had the time of his life. He loved it.”
The falling out came when Kessler thought Tommy was spending all of the little money he had at the racinos. In truth, it may have been something else.
Amanda said her uncle had struggled when he lost his casino job. He didn’t have health benefits and couldn’t afford to see the doctor.
Although he had kept his liver cancer private, she said he was in pain. She said he’d once been prescribed OxyContin, and when he couldn’t afford it, he took heroin.
“He did it for maybe three years, but he got treatment and got clean,” she said.
That didn’t stop the cancer from spreading, though, she said:
“I hadn’t really talked to him in a couple of months, but when I heard he was sick, I thought it was just a flu kind of ill.”
McHargue said Tommy was feeling “bad,” and he finally told him he had to go see a doctor.
“I guess he went, and they called an ambulance and took him straight to Miami Valley,” he said.
McHargue had been at work when Tommy left, and for a few days he didn’t know where he was. Finally, he located him at the hospital, but when he went over, Tommy was unconscious “with tubes down his throat and all over.”
The next morning, 62-year-old Tommy McIntosh was dead.
‘He loved racing’
This past May was about the first Kentucky Derby that Kessler had gone to in 43 years without Tommy at his side.
“I thought about him a lot this year,” he said. “And the thing is, it’s the first time I was ever able to get back to the barns with the horses. My daughter works for Amazon down in Louisville now, and she loves horse racing, too. Once she was old enough, she’d go to the Oaks and the Derby with us.
“And this year she knew a girl who was friends with a trainer, and she came out and picked us up and brought us back with the horses.
“Tommy would have loved being back there.”
While he never got onto the backside at Churchill Downs, Tommy’s ashes did get spread across the finish line.
Kessler said he and Hill went on an all-day excursion a while back and took his ashes to six tracks in Ohio and Kentucky. His ashes have been spread up at Woodbine in Toronto, too, though there he was left near the half-mile pole on the turf track.
Every place else it’s been more or less at the finish line.
“We only take about a pill bottle full of ashes, maybe an ounce or less, and we just sort of dump them there when nobody’s paying a lot of attention,” Kessler said with a shrug, then a grin.
Hill was all for the stealthy send-offs: “I said, ‘Sure, as long as we don’t get arrested, let’s throw a little of Tommy everywhere.’ I think it appropriate. He loved racing.”
She started to laugh: “At River Downs, though, we threw him out and then went to get a drink and, next thing I know, one horse got loose during a race. He started going around backwards. He went to where we’d dumped the ashes and I go, ‘Oh (crap), he just ran over Tommy!’”
When it comes to a sense of ceremony during their quest, Kessler said he says the same thing every time he spreads some of Tommy at a track:
“I always say, ‘There you go, Tommy. You’re at the finish line!’”
And when the races start, he says one more thing:
“Hey, Tommy, now how ’bout helping me out.”