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(05-09) 22:19 PDT — For 10-year-old Bob O’Neil, the horse-race track they built practically in his San Mateo backyard, Bay Meadows Racecourse, was as magical as Alice’s Wonderland. For Alice to enter her fantasy world, she had to fall through a rabbit hole. O’Neil, to enter his new land of wonder, only had to shinny between the iron bars on the window of the women’s restroom.
Hey, how was young Bob to know that, since his previous visit, workers had switched the men’s and women’s bathrooms?
O’Neil’s parents were a bit concerned that their son was spending every spare minute of his life wandering around a racetrack, but the lad overheard his father say to his mother, “Oh, it’s just a phase. You know how kids are.”
Hell of a phase. Bob O’Neil - known to everyone in California racing as Boots - is 84 now, still stuck in that phase. As of Sunday afternoon, Boots O’Neil will have outlived the track where he fell in love with the roar of the crowd and the smell of the horse manure.
Sunday will be the last day of regular-season racing at Bay Meadows, which opened in 1934 and will give way to development.
O’Neil, the dean of California pari-mutuel clerks, will take his bet-taking skills to an off-track betting site. And he will remain in racing as a small-time owner of several horses.
But he’ll miss this old place, the nostalgic equivalent of Fenway Park or Wrigley Field.
“Sad?” O’Neil says as he sets up his cash drawer before the first morning customers click through the turnstiles. “Absolutely. I’d like to cry; if I was younger I would. It’s my life. I never wanted to be anyplace else.”
O’Neil’s station is the only open ticket window. A small line forms. Most of the customers call him Boots, and he greets many of them by name and all of them with a smile. This is the part of the day O’Neil likes best, when everyone is optimistic, and hope is streaming under the grandstand eaves like the morning sunshine.

sfgate.com