Carter, Richard 1918–2007

(Tom Ainslie)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born January 24, 1918, in New York, NY; died September 1, 2007, in New York, NY. Horseracing statistician, publisher, journalist, and author. Carter worked as a journalist for various New York City newspapers throughout the 1940s, as a nonfiction writer and biographer in the 1950s and 1960s, and as the president of Millwood Publishers throughout the 1970s, but he was best known as Tom Ainslee, horseracing handicapper and betting expert. He wrote The Compleat Horseplayer in 1966 when, as a racetrack bettor with no money to waste, he realized that there were no "how-to" books on the subject to augment the racing forms in the newspaper. By the end of his career there were at least a dozen, in various editions, under the Ainslee name alone. Carter analyzed all of the statistical approaches to betting and recommending using a combination of the most successful strategies, including the less tangible ones, as he wrote (with Bonnie Ledbetter) in The Body Language of Horses: Revealing the Nature of Equine Needs, Wishes, and Emotions and How Horses Communicate—for Owners, Breeders, Trainers, Riders, and All Other Horse Lovers—Including Handicappers(1980). He emphasized that thoroughbred racing is as much an art as a science, and there is no strategy for striking it rich in a hurry. Carter the newspaper journalist did not particularly favor books as replacements for the sports section; however, as Ainslee, he was also a longtime columnist for the Racing Times and the Daily Racing Form. He also wrote books on other forms of gambling, notably on card games and casino gambling. Works under his own name cover a wide range of topics, including organized crime in The Man Who Rocked the Boat, written with attorney William J. Keating (1956); medicine in The Doctor Business(1958); and biography in Breakthrough: The Saga of Jonas Salk(1966).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, September 8, 2007, p. A13.