RONNIE BRILLANT:

“I was born in Topsham, grew up in Brunswick, Topsham, and back to Brunswick. When I was a younger kid, my grandmother and grandfather had a farm in Topsham, so I used to bounce back and forth quite a lot, and go haying and stuff like that, clean hen houses,” muck out horse or cow stalls, “you name it.”

As a child, “I had kind of a gang, so when (the Topsham Fair) opened up, we used to come over and help them set up; used to come work for them and they gave us some free tickets and stuff like that, and sometimes there was a little bit of money we could spend on cotton candy and stuff, the Ferris wheel. Probably I was about 8 or 9 years old the first time I done it.”

“As I got older I worked third shift in Augusta and I’d get up at about 4:30 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon and have something to eat, then put on my leather jacket and then used to come out here and play some Bingo and stuff like that. I was about 18.”

He worked at Edwards Mill, “which has burned down, it’s not there no more. I worked there 20 years. I was a third shift senior supervisor and I had two undergraduates under me, junior supervisors, and I gave up my title and that was 1971. In 1972 I went to work for CMP and I retired out of the mail room in 1995. I worked there 23 years.”

“When I worked at the mill, some guys used to approach me and tell me they were going to the Lewiston Fair or Scarborough, and ask me if I wanted to send some numbers, some doubles or whatever,” to bet in harness racing. “There were some times on the weekend some guy would come pick me up and we’d go to Scarborough or something like that, and after I retired 19 years ago, I had more time on my hands so I thought I’d get into it. It helps rid boredom. It’s something different, you get to meet — I met Bill here,” Brillant said, pointing to fellow harness racing follower Bill Sawyer.

In betting, “Doubles is very popular. There’s a lot of people who don’t go to races but they’ll send a number, with somebody. Their kids ages or their anniversary; they just kind of do it to get a few buck for spare and they would do that. The double is the horse in the first race that comes in first, and the horse in the second race that comes in first,” and costs $2 to place. “On this one here, I bet the 1, the 5 and the 4 — one of these horses to come in first and if one of these horses come in first, I have a chance to hit the double.”

As a kid at age 7 or 8, “they used to have a different grand stand here, and usually after the racing they’d have an orchestra there and you had dancing … When I was a kid,” people would be lined up in front of the grand stand, “and sometimes if you wanted to watch the race you’d have to go between the tents and lean against the fence and watch the horses go by. No, racing had slowed down a lot, and you can tell because the Lewiston fair has closed,” and its racetrack, which had yearround racing. “To me they had a lot of gamblers there because they had a lot of French workers there. You had I think seven textile mills there, so you had a lot of these people who used to go hang out at the race track.

Like everything else, you hate to see the old things go and new stuff come up.”

Monday, “It’s a kind of a perfect day to me because I’m not sitting here today,” but a nice breeze instead. The night before, “I stayed the whole time and I got to meet some bums that I use to bum around with, and some relatives I hadn’t seen for a while.”

Brillant, who came three hours early with Sawyer before the race Monday and with about an hour before the first race, said, “Right now you watching the horse and they’re just warming up. The best time to watch the horses is when they’re warming up before the race, the whole line up. You’ve got to check the horses out and see how they’re running.

“I’ll tell you a little secret. Everybody seems to have their own system,” when it comes to choosing winners. With race program and pen in hand, “What I do, is I add up the last three times that horse ran,” and look for the best averages, and check the odds listed. He also goes “by how much money they’ve made… and where they’ve run before,” such as Bangor, Presque Isle, Scarborough and sometimes New York.

Last year, he lost some money at the Topsham Fair and other tracks, but does well at Windsor Fair where he won $900 at the races in one day.

The more money you spend on a bet, the more you stand to win, and Brillant added he starts placing bigger bets “when I’m ahead. You try maybe some long shots.”