The Preakness's Steady Phone Jockeys

Directions to Pimlico, Track Conditions, Recipes Served Up by Friendly Voices

BALTIMORE, May 21 -- The calls began before dawn, flooding into the tiny yellow room deep within the creaky hollows of the Pimlico grandstand. The callers were lost, they were confused, they wanted to know what the track conditions were. Some were frustrated and angry. Some just wanted a good recipe for a Black-Eyed Susan -- the signature drink of Maryland's signature sporting event, the Preakness Stakes.

Cecilia Barry had the answers Saturday, at the 130th running of the grand Maryland tradition, just as she has for every Preakness since 1966.

Barry, a 73-year-old Maryland native and grandmother of seven, has for 39 years been "The Switchboard" -- as in: "I don't know directions to the track. Try calling The Switchboard."

"Good morning. Pimlico," Barry answered early in the morning. The voice was staccato and urgent, but polite. "Well, where are you driving from?"

Along with fellow switchboard operators Marion Talbott, 76, and Sharon Clemmer, 57, Barry is the nerve center of an operation that experiences a storm of activity for a single day in what is otherwise often a long and glamorless year.

The state's horse racing industry has been on a long, slow decline for decades, but attendance at the Preakness has ticked up in recent years to a record 115,318 yesterday. The event remains an attraction -- drawing racing neophytes by the thousands. Many of them have little clue exactly where Pimlico Race Course is or how much tickets cost or whether folding metal chairs can be brought in.

"Honey, they won't let you in with those," said Barry, closing her eyes in concentration to hear over the cell phone static. "It's standing room only."

At 9:30 in the morning, Barry was well into her 12-hour day but still a long way from the finish. Outside, the raucous thousands were trickling in -- the college students lugging massive beer coolers, the men in expensive suits, the celebrities.

For the Brooklyn, Md., native, the wife of a supermarket meat cutter, the Preakness is a chance to see the stars -- even if it's glancing contact.

At her home in Odenton, Barry keeps a snapshot of former president Bill Clinton, who came to the race a few years back and posed for photos with The Switchboard. Maryland governors and Baltimore mayors are frequent visitors. On this day, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) dropped by for a visit. All the ladies got photos with the smiling governor. In the 1980s, pop singer and congressman Sonny Bono came by.

"I'll never forget -- he wore a royal-blue suede jacket," Barry said.

The phone rang again -- a long, plaintive beep accompanied by a blinking red light.

"Good afternoon. Pimlico," Barry said. "Well, happy Preakness Day to you!"

Barry retired as a full-time switchboard operator in 1997, but she still works part time. Preakness Week demands three telephone operators, although one will usually do during the rest of the year.

With Pimlico's circa-1982 telephones the size of VCRs, Barry and her colleagues channel an interminable flow of information in and out of the track's warren of administrative offices. They also take questions, in person, from the people who stop at the plexiglass information window just in front of Barry's face.

"Can you move closer?" Barry said, her bright blue eyes peering out above her bifocals, linked around her neck with a beaded chain. "It's hard to hear what you're saying."

Of all the dozens of people who came by the information window yesterday, few didn't end up smiling after watching Barry and her colleagues at work for a while. They moved deliberately but quickly in the face of a formidable flow of frustration, anxiety and, sometimes, cluelessness.

"These girls, we'd be lost without them," said Douglas Simpkins Jr., transportation coordinator for the Maryland Jockey Club. "They're like air traffic controllers."

The job is less physical than it used to be. Until the mid-1970s, Barry remembered, The Switchboard really was a switchboard -- the classic telephone operator station, with phone cords that had to be moved from plug to plug.

That, of course, was well before cell phones, when people had to stay in one place to make a phone call. Now they can call from anywhere, under any conditions. Loud background music is a common distraction. Traffic noise, too.

"You know how you pray in the morning for good health or whatever?" Talbott asked during a rare respite between calls. "I prayed this morning, 'Lord, please let me stay sweet!' "

And then another call came in.

"One part Cointreau, one part rum, one part vodka," Talbott said, reciting the Black-Eyed Susan recipe from memory. "Fill it up with the pineapple and the orange juice, and garnish it with a slice of lime.

"And it's delicious," she said with a smile. "It really is."