ABSTRACT
On 4 August 1944, 35-year-old Beatrice Hanson put on a pale, eggshell-colored gabardine dress with big gold buttons down the side, a huge pancake-black hat, and elbow-length gloves, and off she went with her father to see the sulky (harness) races at the Bangor fairgrounds. The events that ensued produced a lively wrangle between father and daughter as they vied to pick the winner, and that night, bubbling over with enthusiasm, Bea recounted the story to her two adolescent daughters. Two days later, Bea wrote to her husband, Frank, who was serving overseas, to tell him about it. Somewhere between 1950 and 1983 she revised the letter slightly and included it in an epistolary novel (never published) about their lives during the war. In 1985, as we passed a racetrack while driving down the New Jersey Turnpike, Bea was reminded of how much she enjoyed horseracing and told me the story. A year later, on 28 December, my sister, her husband, Frank, and I were treated to a highly structured and thoroughly entertaining narrative that I recorded for later transcription and analysis.
