Short on activities after being trapped in Memphis when a distant blizzard prevented my getting home, I found it behind a clutch of chain hotels where I-40 and I-55 briefly converge. The Southland track opened at the tail end of that wave, in 1956, in West Memphis, Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River from the city proper. Greyhound racing first gained a serious following in the United States in the 1930s, and really took off after World War Two. It took some wandering to find the escalator that led up to the stands.

To one side hummed Sammy Hagar’s Red Rocker Bar & Grill, wreathed in flat screens and giant cutouts of the man himself. (On the bathroom wall: a red semi-transparent box with a biohazard sticker, full of diabetes testing strips.) Through the plate glass door was a sprawling casino, mostly slots, and past that a crowd in line for the buffet. There was a valet under a jaunty high-cocked awning, which I soon realized was less for high rollers than the elderly.

From outside the Southland Greyhound Park could be mistaken for an enormous bowling alley-all angles and red neon stripes that light up first to mirror, then exceed, the setting sun.

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