Chrysostomos Christopoulos leaned over a black metal cart and sorted through polo wraps, damp and slightly muddy from the racehorses’ morning training sessions. His stubby, aging hands picked off bits of hay stuck to the velcro before throwing each wrap into a dingy washing machine.
“One more. Hasta la vista baby,” he said, his Greek accent thick as he placed one of the jingling quarters in his hand in the coin slot.
He punched the side of the washing machine with his palm, peeking down to see if the quarter lodged in the slot had moved.
Christopoulos threw a couple more punches before the number ticked down to zero and the machine roared on. He flashed a satisfied grin for a small victory.
Five days a week, seven to nine hours a day, this small-statured 89-year-old man shuffles back and forth from a communal laundromat to a barn along the backstretch of the Laurel Park Racecourse – his day filled with small talk with other workers at the horse racetrack who affectionately call him “Pepe [pronounced PP],” “Christos,” or “Chris the Greek”.
“Pepe” is a nickname that emerged years ago for no clear reason. It’s stuck with him ever since.
Christopoulos lives in a motel-style apartment, a walking distance from where he works washing laundry for the barn owned by trainer Hugh McMahon.
Laurel Park will soon host its first ever Preakness Stakes on May 16 as the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore undergoes major renovations.
After Preakness, the Maryland Stadium Authority plans to acquire Laurel Park and turn the racetrack into a thoroughbred training hub. The state’s Legislative Policy Committee, however, delayed the acquisition on May 4, requesting in a letter to the MSA a cost-benefit analysis and a 45-day window to allow time for review and comment.
The future of Laurel Park, and Christopoulos’ decades-long home, is yet to be sealed.
He guessed he’s lived at Laurel Park for 25 or 35 years. Or maybe 40. “All the people here know me,” he touted.
While he has spent much of his later years living at the Maryland racetrack, the horse racing industry is woven throughout his life, both in Greece and in the United States. He’s worked as a jockey, groom, cooled down horses as a hot walker and now, he washes the laundry.
“He’s got a lot of character and anyone that meets him – he wins their affection,” said McMahon.
The racetrack has other elderly workers like Christopoulos who stick around for so long because they love the work and the people they work with, said Jessica Hammond, director of benevolence and counseling for the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association.
“It’s their whole life. It’s not just their job, but it’s their identity a lot of the time,” Hammond added.
‘Movie Star’
Christopoulos keeps a black and white photograph of himself as a young man. His hair and eyebrows are dark and bushy, his face unwrinkled and subdued and his eyes brood back – without the glasses with a thick piece of tape on one side that he now wears.
“Movie star,” he joked, pointing to the photo and grinning widely.
The photograph is pasted in a fading scrapbook, along with a baby picture of his estranged daughter and photographs of his family.
Christopoulos was born in 1937 in a seaside village in a suburb of Athens, Greece.
“One nine 37. The World War II, you know?” he said.
Christopoulos’ father was killed by the occupying Nazi army during the war and his younger brother was fatally struck by a German vehicle when he was eight years old, he said.
He chooses not dwell on that time, preferring to speak about his teenage years, which he speaks about with nostalgic joy.
At age 14, Christopoulos enrolled in jockey school at a nearby racetrack racing for a couple of years, racking up top five finishes and spending his afternoons at the beach swimming and eating watermelon, feta and bread.
“I swimming good,” he boasted, adding that he even occasionally took some of the horses from the racetrack swimming at the beach.
Christopoulos completed three years of obligational military service starting at age 18 – three instead of two because he forgot to show up when he was supposed to and got an extra year of service tacked on.
He narrated his life before he came to the United States, around age 35, as a sporadic collection of moments and seasons: riding his motorcycle in Greece, competing in rock and roll dance competitions with his sister, diving for oysters in the ocean and a stint working at a racetrack in Germany, where he got the black and white photo of him taken.
A five-year job on a petroleum tanker took him around the world – he’s visited 37 countries in all. He even once bought a little white monkey in the Philippines for a carton of cigarettes.
“I love this monkey. He bring me good luck,” he mused.
By the early 70’s, Christopoulos traveled in a new direction, following his two sisters to the United States on the advice of his beloved mother. She didn’t want him to grow old alone in Greece, he said.
‘I’m just a laundry boy’
Christopoulos, who only studied until the fourth grade, said he didn’t know English when he moved to the United States – offering little explanation of how he learned other than he just started talking.
“I don’t know. I’m smart maybe,” he quipped.
His English is choppy but he manages to communicate. His boss McMahon teased him because after 55 years, he still mixes up pronouns. He pronounces longer, more complicated words slowly and liltingly: Phil-la-del-phee-ah. Pen-syl-van-ee-ah.
His memory, diminished by age, has blurred the exact timeline of his 55 years in the United States, but work on Mid-Atlantic horse racetracks is a constant thread, from West Virginia to Pennsylvania and through the dissolution of a marriage and the deaths of his mother and one of his sisters.
Unbeknownst to him, his immigration was part of the second major wave of Greek migration, a phenomenon occurring between 1965-1980 that saw 200,000 Greeks enter the United States, according to the Hellenic American Project.
He is caring and tender around the horses, speaking about each in McMahon’s barn as if he were a proud, doting father. Pausing from gathering laundry off the dirt floor of the barn, Christopoulos grabbed a handful of mints and walked down the row of stalls, giving each horse a mint, a kiss and boasting how smart they are.
Not being physically able to work so hands on with them anymore doesn’t bother him. “Now I’m too old,” he said while chuckling.
Plus, Christopoulos is grateful to be employed by McMahon, who gave him the job almost a decade ago when he could no longer physically work as a groom or hot walker. It’s a job that’s allowed him to keep living at Laurel Park, where working at the race track is a requirement for accommodation.
Christopoulos brings a sense of silliness to his work, even through the tedium of multiple loads of laundry. “Hey, Pepe,” he called out to other backstretch workers he passed en route back to the barn, grinning as they chirped back, “Hey, Pepe.”
He looked at an overflowing pile of dirt-covered wraps and cloths in the barn waiting to be washed and exclaimed, “holy smokey,” before shrugging and loading up his cart once more.
‘It’s just Greece’
Christopoulos’ world is largely Laurel Park – a place on the verge of change as he knows it.
Much of his time off is spent watching movies or handicapping on the machines at the racetrack. He’s unfazed about losing money, declaring that you’ve got to spend to win. “Money honey. No money no play,” he chirped.
His home country has changed too, he acknowledged. The horse racetrack of his youth is gone, and much of Greece may be different than what he remembered.
After more than a half century in the United States, Christopoulos asserted he’s ready to retire in Greece and head to the beach to swim.
He has plans to head there in July, and is determined to stay, so long as he can find a place he can afford. There also remains the possibility the visit may last only three months before he returns to Maryland.
If he makes it to Greece and indeed stays, McMahon surmised that he’ll long to come back and visit the people that care about him.
“I think that’s just the nature of humanity,” said McMahon.
Aside from Laurel Park, though, Christopoulos can’t imagine living anywhere else right now but Greece, even though leaving the backstretch life he’s known for so long comes with risks.
At this stage of his life, it’s a bet he’s ready to make.
“I’m born there. I want to die there,” said Christopoulos. “If you too scared, you die. You go eh. If you don’t care, you live more.”
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