03 Feb 2026

Johnny Dee

by Joe MacLeod

For some reason I keep thinking about Johnny Dee, so I’m going to tell you a little bit about this guy and his effect on me, and maybe that will give his shade some rest in my mind.

I knew this gentleman before our current age of state lotteries, off-track betting on horse races, and sports betting on your phone. My birthplace, the Rust Belt city of Schenectady, New York, like a lot of places, had a thriving underground gambling economy and infrastructure. It was a city full of “fronts” in every neighborhood. A front usually presented as a “news stand,” with a rack of comic books by the entrance, a wall full of magazines and newspapers, a glass counter full of cigarettes, candy and gum, and—in the back of the space, typically—a door with an enigmatic square mirror, about head-high. These establishments were generally sleepy, they never seemed to do a lot of business, but they were open daily.

The real business wasn’t in the candy and smokes or the periodicals, these were spots where those in the know would go to get a bet down on a horse race, get into a game of poker in the back room, or just stop in to play “the number,” back then just three digits and typically tied to a supposedly random occurrence such as the end-digits of the day’s take at Belmont or Saratoga race track, some sort of unimpeachable random number outcome.

My mom had an advertising and design shop on Barrett St. downtown, above an optician and a place called Dee’s News, and so when I was around working on projects for my mom, doing logos, letterheads, business cards, stuff like that, I would always stop in for a Daily News and a Coke, and that’s how I made the acquaintance of Johnny Dee, and I never heard him referred to any other way. I’d hang out while he manned the counter and shot the shit with whoever walked in. A lot of the visitors—a cross-section of the city, no particular look—would stop in to play the number, and he kept track of the bets in pencil on little notebooks full of super-thin paper. I got a look at them when I was hanging out, and to this day I believe they were made out of “flash paper,” manufactured to burn completely and almost instantly, should the need to incinerate arise. They still make it, for magic tricks and stuff.