Outdoors on a grassy field, a man in glasses writes at a wooden table while a man in a hat and checked jacket stands at an easel holding a chalkboard of horse names — Open the full imageJPG, 640 × 631 px, 0.1 MB

Bookie figuring out bets for Kentucky Derby, Warrenton, Virginia (1941)

Farm Security Administration photograph by Marion Post Wolcott, captioned as a bookie figuring out bets for the Kentucky Derby at Warrenton, Fauquier County, Virginia, May 1941.

Date: 1941
Kind: photograph
Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Retrieved: 2026-10-12
Rights: The Library of Congress item record states: "No known restrictions." Collection: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, a federal collection. Call number LC-USF34-057427-E; digital ID LC-DIG-fsa-8c31144.

The Library of Congress title is “Bookie figuring out bets for Kentucky derby, Warrenton, Virginia.” Marion Post Wolcott made the photograph for the Farm Security Administration in May 1941. One man writes on a large sheet at a table; the other stands at a board of horse names, holding a betting sheet. A hand-lettered negative number is on the frame.

The caption calls the man a bookie; the men are not named. It is filed as a view of betting away from the track on a race run in Kentucky, the business the racing wire served. The copy stored here is the Library’s medium-size JPEG.

itemKefauver Part 2: testimony of Wayne Coy, FCC chairman, on Continental Press and leased wires (20 June 1950), pp. 4-31The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission told the committee that "the principal disseminator of racing information used by illegal bookmakers is the Continental Press Service," described its leased Western Union circuits, and read the carriers' tariff clauses into the record.itemKefauver Part 5: wigwag testimony and Exhibits 51-52 on relaying race results from outside Garden State Park (18 December 1950)A track-crew employee of a Baltimore news service testified that his job was "To get the race results out of the race track" by signalling from a tavern roof across from the Camden, N.J., track; a staff report describes a surveillance there on 2 November 1950.