Into each life, an occasional Mister Diz should make an appearance to enliven some dreary hour.
He was there on my first afternoon as a professional sports writer at a vanished newspaper called The News American in the vanished summer of 1966. I miss him still.
I thought about him over the weekend on Preakness Day when I took a stroll outside Pimlico Race Course and looked at all the young men and their ladies decked out as though this was their second chance at prom night.
It was lovely to see them all.
And yet wistfully, I thought, “Where are the great old racetrack characters of yore, such as Phillip ‘Pacie’ Silbert and Julius ‘Lord’ Salsbury, and Louis ‘Gus Funk’ LeFaivre and Robert ‘Fifi’ London?”
And Frank “Mister Diz” Rosenfeld?
All of them seemed as if they’d been invented by Damon Runyon for a road company version of “Guys and Dolls.”
Except Diz, who never really dressed for such a role. Even on the balmiest days, he’d wear a heavy overcoat, a sports coat, a couple of sweaters, a dress shirt, all of it looking as though thrown together in the dark.
He’d wear all of this whether hustling balloons and touting horses just outside the track, or standing near the finish line, wondering why his horse seemed to have disappeared before the last turn and escaped to Northern Parkway.
He wasn’t much for picking winners, but he had a bunch of pals who helped him get through the worst of days. “Angels,” he called them. He was always broke, and always hoping one of the angels would come through for him.
One time, he made a list of the people he owed money. He said the list was 82 pages long.
“Isn’t that amazing,” he said one time, “that a guy who doesn’t have a job can owe so much money to so many people?”
The angels saw him for what he was: an overgrown kid with his defenses down, an innocent at heart in a world that could be both colorful and cutthroat.
The first time I saw him, he walked into John Steadman’s old sports department at The News American, a joint so battered and dusty and disheveled it must have made Diz feel like it was home.
Steadman, always eager to bring happiness to a room, asked Diz if he could re-create the broadcast of some classic horse race of maybe 20 years earlier. At the first sound of Diz’s raspy voice, the entire third floor newsroom seemed to gather to hear the outcome.
There was Diz, arms waving about, voice imitating the great announcer Clem McCarthy, spittle flying, and dozens of newsroom people cheering him on as though they all had bets on the outcome.
Folks, they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
The old racetrack characters kept getting busted for bookmaking, and eventually barred from the tracks. Now it’s the state cashing in big on sports gambling.
But those like Mister Diz, who died in 1985, were part of an era when racing was flourishing around here, and even the most ordinary times at Pimlico could remind us of Preakness Day. And those vanished characters seemed decked out for Damon Runyon’s Broadway, and not once-a-year prom night.
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