This is more appealing, though two uncertainties occur to me. The first is that back in the 50s tracks were possibly run by the same roguish rascals as the casinos, so you might still want just a couple of big payoffs and then run; and second, I don’t know when exotics were introduced into parimutuel betting, but I think those would work best, say a pick 6 or superfecta. Even then, if you dropped a couple of hundred bucks onto a pick 6 you might garner some attention at the window when you collect. “Can we talk to you for a minute?” Um, no…
Stock trading OTOH is 100% legal, and you can trade via a brokerage you know will survive, and roll your funds into a bank you know will survive; and I’m pretty sure that you could find small stocks that tripled and quadrupled in a short period of time and use those to accelerate your bankroll.
All of this depends on how much scratch you have to start with, of course.
I imagine I’d live in NYC- it was probably the only place at the time that you could get a lot of interesting foods and beverages.
I’d also drag some sort of e-reader along loaded with plenty of history books- business history, sports history and general history so I could hopefully make a quick moderate buck via a series of reasonable payouts and then parlay that into megabucks via shrewd investments.
Once I was filthy rich enough, I’d probably get a yacht and go sailing around the Mediterranean and hang out in Europe a lot.
Really my current dream, only without the uncertainty.
The horse racing thing occured to me because of a science fiction book about a guy who died, then relived his life starting in his teenage years. He gambled on the Kentucky Derby I think to get started. The story continued with several cycles of this, each time restarting his life a little older and dying younger until he finally passed away for good (as I recall). I think** Andy L** could figure out the book in about 10 minutes if he sees this.
The answer for everyone would probably be to generate decent seed money with a few big bets in scattered horse races. You do it at a few different tracks and get $5,000-$10,000 of capital (a goodly sum in the 1950s) and then you have enough to start in the stock market. An ereader with detailed archives of the WSJ or similar newspaper that regularly printed a big stock results page would be enough to capitalize big on stocks that have very large single day moves.
You’d still be a small enough player that you wouldn’t really be a market maker or truly altering much of history. Once you have a decent fortune (couple of million in the 1950s), then it’s time to use your historical knowledge to find a known future oil boom area and buy up all the land with your money then work on getting the oil discovered, fast.
I known of a few oil boom areas where total recovery ended up being >10m barrels that was all extractable in the 1960s. Several of them (like in Cardington, OH), all the land owners would easily have been people you could have bought out with your stock market fortune. The value of these fields would have made you worth $35-40m/field, and you could probably do this 5-6 times with a couple million dollars worth of property investment. That basically catapults you into being worth in the hundreds of millions by the mid-60s at which point you could just dump it all into a few blue chips that you know will be particularly profitable and you’ll get richer every year until you die. If you’re a young person now, in your teens or 20s, you’ll probably live until the present day and will probably be in the Forbes 100 if not higher.
Also, America has always cared a great deal about money. Rich widows have been a lot better off than all other women since the 18th century and that could easily be true in the 1950s as well. So women worried about their lot, after you’ve made a couple million (which you can do a few years into the 50s) most of your concerns disappear. Make up some story about having a dead husband somewhere and you won’t have many problems.
Minorities too, you may not get in the country club but you’ll live in the most accepting parts of the country and again, even hundreds of years ago there were people in white society willing to be on friendly terms with a wealthy minority. IF anything women and minorities would need to get rich with the most urgency, far more than a white male like myself.
Everyone is so concerned about getting rich, and yeah I would take some data to help me capitalize but it is all the other stuff that could be interesting.
What sort of changes could you cause with some nicely photoshopped pictures of J. Edgar Hoover in drag or Nixon in bed with a man?
Another good thing to take would be lists of natural disasters.
Storms might vary because of the butterfly effect, but earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc, are probably not sensitive to changes you might make in your new timeline.
I’m pretty sure no state had lotteries back then. That’s a more recent invention. 1990s? Certainly not earlier than the 1980s. But I still maintain you could do a big win without the Mafia breaking your legs. Maybe not lots of big wins, but it would be very bad for business if people thought they dare not win big ever, for any reason.
Being a non-Christian unmarried childless woman professor, there really isn’t a way that you can convince me that returning would benefit me in any way. I’d end up drinking myself to death quickly.
