The News Journal from Wilmington, Delaware • Page 33

V'' EVENING JOURNAL HOME GARDEN PEOPLE TELEVISION THEATER Aflli SECTION WILMINGTON, DELAWARE FRIDAY, JUNE 30, 1972 33 She's the Very Model of a Mutuel Clerk 1 jyj By KARL FELDNER She could be a model and, in fact, is one. But modeling is only a sideline with 23-year-old Linda Wilson. A fill-in job for the 5-foot-5, 111-pound long-haired blonde. Her real roje in life, she says, is a mutuel clerk, at Delaware Park and the tracks in Maryland. It is not a question of money.

Modeling would pay more, much more. It is a love for the race track. Not for the horses so much as the people. Her co-workers, the horsemen, the jockeys, even the bettors. "I can't ever imagine not working at the tracks," she says.

"Modeling is fine and I still do it from time to time, but only when it doesn't interfere with my job at the tracks." One finds it easy to refer to her as a model mutuel clerk. Her work is lauded by her bosses she is a supervisor, the only female in that capacity at Delaware Park her co-workers and most of all by the bettors themselves who appreciate her swiftness and accuracy, particularly on those crowded days when the lines are longest. "She's as good as any guy they got selling tickets here," one was heard to say as he walked away from her line on the third floor level of the clubhouse. And, he added, "twice as pretty." The comments are like bouquets to Linda who takes great pride in her abilities as a mutuel clerk. There was a day at Pimlico, for instance, when she sold 1,100 exacta tickets on one race.

That was a record at the time for anyone, male or female. "I guess it has been broken by now," she says, almost sadly. "After all, they have lengthened the time between races since then, which allows more time to sell tickets. But maybe I can break it again myself." It is not surprising that Linda Wilson gravitated to a job in racing. In a way, you might say she grew up with the sport.

Her father, who died two years ago, was Stanley (Highpockets) Wilson, a mutuel clerk for 40 years and before that a jockey, trainer and owner of horses. "He rode his first race in 1904 when he was only 9," says Linda. "Won it, too. But he grew too big to be a jockey. He was 6-feet-l, which is why he got the nickname "Highpockets." Wilson worked all the Maryland and Delaware tracks and Linda was his constant companion, tagging along whenever school didn't interfere.

"She was our says Nick Ladio, a long-time cashier, who works the second-floor clubhouse at the Stanton track. "We'd send her off to one of the concession stands for coffee or Cokes. Why, when she finally started working the mutuels, she wasn't what you'd call a newcomer. Everyone knew her and she knew everybody." Linda is a resident of the Govans section of Baltimore, and still lives there with her mother and two younger brothers, though getting home during her Delaware Park tour of duty is a once-a-week thing. The rest of the time she stays with a family in Newark.

There was never a time when Linda wanted to be a jockey, though she does ride occasionally. She was, however, quite an athlete during her growing-up years, specializing in baseball and basketball. That is she was until she overheard a remark from a neighbor that "she walks like a baseball player." "That hurt," said Linda, "but after thinking about it I realized it was all too true. Until I was 18, I was the biggest tomboy in Govans." The stinging remark proved the inspiration that changed a tomboy into an attractive model. "It prompted me to enroll at Walters Academy, which is a school in Baltimore that teaches modeling," she said.

"It's like a finishing school. "You learn how to walk and how to talk. You learn to sit in a chair rather than flop into one. You learn how to stand rather than slouch. "I went for almost a year and by the time I was ready to graduate I had lost all desire to ever again go sliding into second base." The diploma led to modeling jobs.

"Fashion shows and things like that," she said. "The money was more than I make as a mutuel clerk but, still, it didn't have the same allure of the racetracks." Actually her experince in the mutuels predated her modeling by a couple of years. "I was 16 when I got my first job at Georgetown Raceway," she said. "I was too young to sell tickets, or to cash them. You have to be 21.

But I did work in the ticket room. That's where you check the tickets each day to make sure only the ones that were cashed should have been cashed. Every now. and then, you find a It wasn't long before she was put in charge of the ticket room. She also worked at Dover Downs and Harrington and when she turned 18 came to Delaware Park for the first time the ticket room again.

The real fun came when she graduated to the mutuel windows. There was, for Linda, that challenge of selling as many tickets in as short a time as possible. It is easier to say than to do, especially since the cashier or seller is responsible for making good on errors. "I've been 'short' about $15 in the time I've been selling," says Linda. "That's not bad, considering.

But I'd rather not have any shortages at all. "I have been stuck a couple of times for tickets, too. That is, I've punched out the wrong numbers from what the customer wanted. "I remember one time in Maryland I gave a woman two identical daily double tickets, but she claimed they weren't the ones she wanted and refused to take them. Her husband was right behind her in line and he decided to buy one of them.

This was just before post time and nobody else wanted those same numbers. So, I was stuck with the ticket. "Know what? The double won and it was worth $280. So this mistake actually worked to my advantage. Even so, I still insist I punched out the numbers she asked for.

"This really was the only time I ever won on the races, too, because I never ever bet myself." If Linda has any disappointment in her job at all it is only with Maryland tracks, which sometimes show a reluctance to employ female mutuel clerks. "There are only about five of us girls working in Maryland," Linda says. "And they have a union and go by seniority. I report every day of every meet to get my name on the list and if some people are sick and don't show, I may work that day. "At Laurel I worked only seven days out of the 65, but I did work full time at Pimlico, so maybe things are getting better.

"Look, I'm no women's libber. I just happen to think this is one job we can handle as well as men and we can prove it if we get the opportunity." She has already proved it at Delaware Park. A'" K) Staff Photo by Al Co.ine I Above, Linda Wilson pursuing her first love, working at Delaware l'ark as a ticket seller. At far Jell, 3Iis Wilson strikes a pair of poses she uses in her second career as a model. She makes more money modeling, hut prefers the race tracks.

9 Who Is This Bobby Fischer, Anyway Con Artist May Have Resurfaced By BOB SCHWABACII From the Associated Press wire comes news of yet another "advance man" for a hit TV show conning a gullible town into free drinks and brief notoriety. In a virtual instant replay of a scenario acted out in the Newark area last summer, a man calling himself William (Billy) L. Dalton roused the tiny town of Crescent City, earlier this week with the announcement that he was the advance man for the "Mannix" television series and one of the coming episodes would be shot on location there. The man called Dalton. showed up last weekend, hired 20 extras, arranged for 210 rooms in hotels and motels and ordered 2,000 cupcakes for "coffee-and." He then left town, skipping out on his mo-t 1 bill and claiming the shooting company would be along Tuesday.

When that booking went unfilled, local theater owner William Chapman contacted Paramount Television in Hollywood, producers of the (Continued on Page 38) found it psychologically torturing to sit across the board from this arrogant young man who "likes to see 'em squirm." Spassky may feel extra pressure because of his deliberate and classically correct playing style. Although Fischer's games have the apparent clearness of a stream of fresh running water, they often have concealed within them Byzantine twists that only Bobby foresees. Chess is a game of legerdemain: your opponent can see all of your pieces, and you can see all of his. So you don't conceal pieces but ideas. A winning chess combination is, at its most basic level, a ruthless demonstration of the logical superiority of your ideas.

And Fischer is able to bury his ideas so deeply into his middle-game positions (or, perhaps, to extract them from their subterranean hiding-places) that a positional player like Spassky, with his tenden-c to draw games, might find himself exhausted from forever waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is Fischer's willingness to take chances, and his ability to extract deep combinations from seemingly shallow positions, that make him a popular favorite in the Soviet Union. In a country where chess is the national sport, the national passion and, some say, the national soul, there is an impatience with the conservative playing styles of many of the current Russian grandmasters. While Fischer was mowing down Larson 6-0 with an unending flow of innovative chess, the Russians Petrosian and Korchnoi were bogged down in their quarter-final match with eight drawn games in. a row, also a record of sorts, but a sterile one.

And so the Russians like Fischer, who is the most popular American in the Soviet Union since Van Cliburn. Maybe they don't like him personally, but they admire his style. Of the five games they have played previous- Continued on Page 36) By ROGER EBERT Chicago Sun-Times News Service Nobody knows very much about him, and the few facts have been repeated time and again: He was bom in Chicago, raised in several places but mostly in Brooklyn, learned chess from his sister when he was 6. He lives alone in hotel rooms, relentlessly studying the literature of chess. He has no close friends.

He is 29 years old and for a long time now he has been conisdered the best chess player of all time. On Sunday, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Bobby Fischer may find himself seated across a chess board from a stocky, fierce-looking Armenian named Boris Spassky. This Armenian (he is almost always described as a "wily. Armenian" in the newspapers, because sports-page adjectives are in short supply for chess) is the chess champion of the world, and it will be Bobby Fischer's mission to reduce the number of Armenian chess champions to zero while raising the number in the United States to one. Bobby could have had a crack at the title several times during the past decade, but at the last moment he always drew back.

He charged that there was a Russian conspiracy to keep the world championship in Soviet hands. Conspiracy or not, no non-Russian has played in a championship match since 1951. There were other things Fischer complained about the lighting was wrong; the flashbulbs were a nuisance; the crowds in the hall would not keep still. But mostly he held back from the series of tournaments leading to the world championship because he said the system was loaded in favor of the Russians. At first his objections were dismissed as petulant and unreasonable, because in the world of chess Bobby Fischer is not well-liked.

An American grandmaster once said of him: "We get the greatest chess player in history, and he turns out to be a spoiled boy." But a fair analysis of the tournament system seemed to indicate that Fischer had a point, and the current world championship is the first played under the reformed rules. There are other possibilities. One is that Fischer will find the conditions in Iceland not to his liking, and stage another walkout. This could happen because of Bobby's recent falling-out with Lt. Col.

Edmund Edmundson (USAF, who is business manager of the U.S. Chess Federation and has devoted much of the last two years to keeping Bobby happy. During Fischer's spectacular demolishment of his opposition in the preliminary matches (including his 6-0 wipeouts of Denmark's Bent Fischer faces possible blacklisting. Story on page 50. Larson and Russia's Mark Taimonov), it was Col.

Edmundson who checked out the playing sites, found the quiet hotel rooms, made sure the fans would not be permitted to bring flash cameras into the hall, and hassled room service for the chicken sandwiches and prize sirloins. Now Fischer, who finds it difficult to sustain long personal relationships, is back on his own again. Another possibility is that Fischer will stay the distance, and that Spassky will collapse from a combination of psychological and chess reasons. Fischer is a dogged fighter who will defend a lost position to the bitter end, and there is this curious thing about his opponents: they keep caving in to extreme exhaustion. Tigran Petrosian, the former world champion who was Bobby's opponent in the Buenos Aires semifinal match, had to check into a hospital at one point.

And Bent Larson, whose personal dislike for Fischer is no secret, apparently i 4 Hit a I i Bohhy Fischer Elliot Gould ToV 13 MAN ABOUT TOWN Dv Carl G. Smith drew T. Morrison Jr. is trying to carry out-armed only with a few old-timers' memories and the souvenir program from the 50th anniversary banquet a quarter of a century ago. Morrison's problem is that this is also the 25th anniversary year of a fire that destroyed the records that he needs in compiling the history.

Everything went up in smoke in 1947. The 75-year-old organization is Santa Maria Council No. 195, Knights of Columbus. Actually it was founded 7514 years ago in December, 1896, but Morrison went through the microfilm copies of Wilmington dailies for that entire month and part of January without finding a word about Santa Maria Council. When the council did start getting into the news, it was mostly because of its buildings.

It had a knack for choosing strategic locations. The earliest reference to it in the News-Journal library is in the 1900 city directory, which said the K. of C. Hall was at 1000 King corner now occupied by the city end of the Public Building. At that time, the address was a residence formerly occupied by Susan other 12 years, but the site is now part of a big parking lot.

The knignts moved ineir tiaii to 215 W. 26th St. So much for the buildings. But what about the human history, the men involved in three generations of knighthood? Morrison leafed through the advertising pages of the 1947 banquet program and marveled at how many prominent names had passed from the scene the Hotel Olivere, Diamond State Brewery, Millard F. Davis Keil Motor John A.

Carlson men's store, and attorney Stewart Lynch. One ad was signed "A Friend" and Morrison sighed: "A friend, we still have." Morrison hopes that anybody who knows anything at all about the pre-1947 history of Santa Maria Council will write him at 527 Marsh Road, Wilmington 19309. Today's Horror What do you call the trousers on the famous statue of Caesar Rodney? The Delaware Memorial Britches. Apparently Santa Maria Council stayed at 1000 King St. until April, 1916, when construction of the Public Building was about to start.

Then it bought the old Pennypacker house at 909 West St. (the southwest corner of 10th and WestSts.) The house had been built in the early 19th century for Dr. Wiliiam Gibbons, who sold it in 1856 to his son-in-law, artist Henry Lea Tatnall. It was in the Pennypacker family from 1869 to 1916 when Santa Maria Council bought it. Thousands of World War II veterans remember the house as the Wilmington USO.

The "home away from home" for servicemen was on the first two floors while the knights used the third-floor ballroom. By 1947, the USO had closed and the Columbus Hall Association had spent $20,000 on renovations to convert the first two floors into office space for Family Service of Delaware and the Delaware School of Arts. Then, on the wintry early morning of Feb. 11. 1947, fire broke out in the basement and did serious damage to all three floors.

The building was reparied and used for an To Pay $6,501 LOS ANGELES vP-Actor Elliot Gould lias been ordered to pay $6,501 to a freelance photographer Gould says he never struck, but merely "picked him up and set him aside." Anthony Rizzo, 26, had sought $200,000 damages in his Superior Court suit claiming battery. "I was very careful putting him down as gently as I could," Gould testified before Judge Parks Stillwell ruled in the case Wednesday. The incident occurred more than thr; years ago as Rizzo and other photographers took pictures of celebrities attending a film screening. Barbra Streisand, Gould's former wife, originally was a defendant in the suit but her name was dropped by order of Stillwell. Intercepted inter-office memo: "A man telephoned while you were out.

Said his name was Noah. He says he can't lend you the plans right now because he's using them. But if you can come to the launching party tonight at 7 in his back yard, he'll give you the original working drawings." Memories Wanted "This is our 75th anniversary year. You are hereby appointed historian. Write us a history." That, in brief, is the assignment which An.