Thursday Thoughts with Jason Beem July 9, 2026

A good Thursday morning to you all! Kind of a fun weekend coming up with big days at Horseshoe Indianapolis and Prairie Meadows, along with the usual summer fare of Saratoga and all the rest. I wanted to focus in on Prairie Meadows and the Iowa Derby for this week’s column and share some stories and memories of Prairie Meadows. The Altoona, Iowa track is one of the newer additions to the horse racing circuit, opening in 1989 and going bankrupt within its first couple of seasons. Slot machines were passed in 1994 and Prairie became I believe the first ‘racino’ in the country. 

I first started really following racing outside of my home state of Washington in 2002 or so, and I remember Prairie and Mountaineer being really big deals because of the casino-infused purses. Field sizes were strong and the cards were generally pretty good. Over the years, handle has dipped as now so many of the competing states also have other forms of gaming revenue to tack onto purses. But Prairie is still a little jewel out in the heartland. 

My first visit there was in 2006. I was driving back home to Seattle after my first summer calling the races at River Downs and Des Moines was a pretty logical end stop for the first day being about nine hours away from Cincinnati. A friend had told me to go have dinner at the Big Steer Restaurant, which was located just on the other side of the three-eighths pole from the track. He was right, the Big Steer was delicious and every time passing through there since I’ve gone back for dinner at the Steer before the races. So if you find yourself going to Prairie Meadows some time, give it a try. 

I went back and repeated the same trip in 2007, but my 2008 visit to the Big Steer and Prairie came under worse circumstances. I had quit my job at River Downs because of my anxiety and depression issues getting worse, so my mom and aunt flew back to help me pack up and drive home. We stopped at the Big Steer for dinner and from the parking lot I called the late, great Luke Kruytbosch and told him that I’d resigned my position. I asked him if he might know someone who would be interested in the job at River Downs because they were just going to use a temporary fill-in until they found a permanent hire. (Side note: the temporary fill-in was Ed Meyer who eventually became the full-time caller at the track renamed Belterra Park).

Luke told me he might know just the guy for the job and that he’d put him in touch with River Downs management. The guy was Peter Aiello. And where in the world was Peter when I made that call to Luke? Probably within a few hundred feet of me. Peter was actually working in the race office at Prairie Meadows at that time. He’d just started a few weeks before and when I think about this story I always think of how crazy it is that when I made that call to Luke, Pete was so close by. Pete originally told Luke he couldn’t do it, but luckily Luke talked him into accepting the position. Pete’s career has gone pretty well since then and I love to take credit for “giving him his start” even though truthfully I had nothing to do with it. What’s also funny to me is that Pete has become one of my closest friends in the game and at that time we had never talked and probably didn’t even know of one another. 

Small world indeed. Have a great weekend everyone!