Winner at Aqueduct
JOHN H. KRUMPE '55 is at Aqueduct every day of the racing season and hasn't lost a cent in six years. As Director of Mutuels for the New York Racing Association he routinely handles $3 million daily, but doesn't try to beat the machines in his charge.
Jack is responsible for every figure displayed at Aqueduct, Belmont, and Saratoga from odds to dollar results and supervises more than 525 pari-mutuel clerks, cashiers, and statisticians who put them out.
"We no longer hand-calculate anything," he says, though he wouldn't describe himself as a "computer head." He is mathematically inclined, M.B.A. qualified, and administratively proven. But he has taken this enormous job because the track is and has been his greatest love.
As a teenager he and his Staten Island friends would spend summer mornings with a newspaper, handicapping the races at Monmouth, Belmont and Delaware, and their afternoons at whichever track promised the most excitement.
A Phi Beta Kappa student at Dartmouth, Jack played tackle and was in ROTC until an eye injury forced him out of football and the Army program. Summers during college he worked at the Bethlehem Steel yards to defray his jousts with the mutuels.
Jack earned his M.B.A. at New York University and went to work for Union Carbide in 1956, but three years later with an if-you-can't-lick'em-join-'em attitude he went to work in the accounting department of the New York Racing Association, a private organization. He started with the NYRA at a cut in salary, but last year was named to head the entire accounting operation.
Though this bachelor expresses a desire to own and train race horses, he won't because he is too much aware of the conflict of interest.
He casts a kind of Damon Runyon eye on the whole racing scene: "In my teens it was the element of return that interested me, but as I got involved it was no longer paramount. I love the entire aspect of racing - the color, the people, the rewards and disappointments, the employees and the customers - they're different from others."
And he has to love it to take it. During the season, mid-March to midDecember, he sprints back and forth between Aqueduct and Belmont in a six-day week. "I wear two hats, have two desks, two heads," he quips.
It's a year-round job. Off-season he catches up on bookkeeping and finds it the only time he can do long-range planning.
Aqueduct is now in full swing as the world's largest race track, in both size and action. The new Belmont, just opened, may be even larger.
The job itself is a race with figures, handicapped by constant deadlines, ridden under tremendous pressures. With the odds for an ulcer heavily against him, Jack has yet to have his first taste of Maalox.
"I'm too happy-go-lucky," he boasts. "I guess that's my protection. It's kind of a grind, but I'd rather be here than any place I know."
