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At Churchill Downs last week, bettors wagered nearly $500,000 on the Derby. On an ordinary horse race, for every dollar that is bet at the track, $10 are bet elsewhere. Total moneys that changed hands on the Derby probably amounted to more than $10,000,000. Conspicuous by their absence in the crowd at Churchill Downs last week were the two bookmakers generally surmised to have handled a larger share of this than any of their confreres: Thomas J. Shaw of New York and Thomas Kearney of St. Louis, the only important bookmakers in the U. S. who make "winter books" (i. e. bets made long before the race, at correspondingly long odds, and forfeited if for any reason the horse named by the bettor fails to run) on the Kentucky Derby. Tom Shaw had such a busy summer at the New York tracks in 1934 that he took a holiday last winter, handed over his winter book to his longtime assistant Frank Shannon. A few weeks before the race, an attack of indigestion that sent Tom Kearney to the hospital was front-page news in St. Louis. Last week at the first Kentucky Derby he had missed for 30 years, he was represented by an employe, John Ticacy.
Dean of Manhattan's bookmakers, "Long Tom" Shaw, 6 ft. 3, grey-haired, with a diamond stickpin in his tie, a grey felt hat over his shrewd Irish face, has been taking bets at New York tracks since 1906. At Belmont Park and other New York tracks his stool is No. i in the. line of bookmakers in the betting shed. The odds chalked on his slate are highly respected by his confreres. A onetime New Orleans bicycle-racing champion, Tom Shaw, now 60, rides in an open Rolls Royce.
St. Louis' Tom Kearney is five years older than Tom Shaw, more famed among Midwest bettors than Shaw is in New York. In 1924, when Black Gold won the Derby, Kearney and Shaw cornered the winter-book business by paying their losses while almost all their competitors, who had laid odds as high as 100-to-1, felt forced to "welsh." At Tom Kearney's office—a large room in the rear of a 20-by-25 ft. wood-paneled cigar store opposite the Jefferson Hotel where he lives—nine clerks handle his business at five long tables. When in good health, Tom Kearney spends most of his time behind his cigar counter which, unlike those run as blinds in most bookmaking establishments, actually makes money. His private office is a lounge behind the counter furnished with easy chairs, a safe. Once a gunman entered the store to hold him up. Tom Kearney shot him dead.