No more horse racing, but future appears sweet for Rick Baedeker

Here I am feeling sorry for the guy, maybe even a little embarrassed as I stopped by to visit Friday.

Just a great, great guy too, down on his luck, as I saw it, unable to work at what he does best and now selling jello.

“Gelato,” says Rick Baedeker.

Whatever.

The guy has already been leveled by the worst thing that can happen to any parent — the death of a child, a drunk driver taking away teenager Jill and two of her friends eight years ago — “eight years,” he says, “but too soon to talk about it.”

He’s 60 now, and the cold jello facts — nobody wants him anymore in the industry he knows better than almost everyone.

For months he’s in denial. He waits and waits for someone in the horse racing business to reach out to him.

He’s willing to move to Kentucky for one job, but the offer never comes. He e-mails everyone he knows and gets only one response, a promise of a phone call that never comes.

“In a declining industry,” he concludes, “there just wasn’t room for me.”

His father, Bud, was a handicapping institution in horse racing. His brother, Mr. B, is as good as they come doing the same now while also working for a racing TV show.

Rick was president of Hollywood Park, a key player in making a great show out of the Breeders’ Cup the last two years, but no one cares much about racing anymore — seemingly more people in his jello store Friday night than most days at Hollywood Park.

“Gelato,” Baedeker says.

Whatever.

At a time when most folks are thinking about finishing, he’s starting over because there really is no other choice. He sells the family home, moves and rents.

Maybe it’s the economy and he’s not alone, a whole lot of people late in life left stranded. What do you do? He studies various franchise opportunities, and imagine a novice trying to decipher a racing form. He doesn’t believe it will come to this.

But it does, and although he has known the finest restaurants, his wife, Claudia, packs a lunch and they squeeze a half-hour out to walk the half-block down Broadway Street from Dolce Gelato to Laguna Beach.

“We watch everybody on vacation,” he says, “get bitter, and then come back to the store.”

He takes a food safety exam, and when is the last time he went to class and took an exam? He’s putting in 12-hour days, seven days a week, 15 pounds lighter, and worrying, he testifies, is a diet that works.

Claudia asks if she can help, husband and wife of 37 years now working side by side, and the obvious question, “How’s that going?”

“Amazingly good,” he says.

His daughter Emily, who has been living in San Francisco, returns to manage Dolce Gelato. Danny is prepping to make it in the golf business in Scottsdale, Ariz., but he comes to his parents and says he wants to return home to help.

“They realize I needed help; that’s why they’re here,” he says, as proud a gelato daddy as there is, while also joking as a dad would, “They gave up their dreams, but they’d have to at some point anyway.”

Danny and Emily left home, Rick says, because they had to for their own reasons following Jill’s death.

“She’s ever-present for all of us,” he says, Rick and Claudia beginning each day with Mass for their own reasons. “To have us all back together as a family, however long it lasts, I’m telling you — what a great thrill.”

So now I’m talking to George Bailey, the luckiest man to ever start over, who probably hears bells going off every time he rings up another sale.

And business is good, although it tastes nothing like jello.

“Whatever,” Baedeker says.

“It’s just a chance to control our own destiny,” he says. “Sure, it’s past scary, and sometimes I wonder if it’s too much, but the great thing about family when I’m thinking like that, they’re all saying, Dad will be OK because he needs to be OK.”

He’s almost drooling as he points to the trays of sorbet and gelato, talking up the pistachio because it’s made from “100% Sicilian nuts.” His passion runneth over just as it did for so many years when talking about horses and his own golf game.

Both are in now decline, of course, horse racing in California, he says, lacking leadership ever since R.D. Hubbard left Hollywood Park. As for golf, let’s just say the local courses are in better condition without him.

“I’m not angry about what’s happened to me,” he says, although he ducks his head and apologizes for being overwhelmed with emotion. “Just tired, I guess.”

He misses his first Kentucky Derby seemingly in a lifetime because it’s the first day he took to selling gelato. He now remembers it as the day he worked from morning to night, back aching, feet hurting, leaving the store to find the battery in his car dead.

“I’m disappointed,” he admits, still a little choked up, but maybe it’s just the chocolate gelato laced with a habanero pepper.

“I go back to the Breeders’ Cup, my last day as it turns out, watching Zenyatta, the noise thundering from behind in the grandstand, the stretch run and I’m standing there crying like a baby.

“I took it like she was doing me a personal favor winning the way she did. It was a nice way to go out.”

As life goes on, Zenyatta ran again Saturday, Rick and Claudia cooking their gelato, Emily working on menu prices, Danny doing cleanup.

“Embarrassed?” he says. “Maybe if it was just me as owner I’d say so. But I look out front and what I see is family. Doesn’t get much better than that.”

t.j.simers@latimes.com