Life and Career
Snyder was born Dimetrios Georgios Synodinos in Steubenville, Ohio. According to his New York Times obituary of April 22, 1996, Snyder's family roots were on the island of Chios, Tholo potami (Θολό Ποτάμι) in the Aegean Sea. As a teenager in Ohio, he became acquainted with bookmakers. Snyder and his eventual wife Joan, lost three of their five children to cystic fibrosis.
According to the autobiography titled Jimmy the Greek by Jimmy Snyder, Steve Herskowitz (editor), and Mickey Herskowitz, he bet US$10,000 on the 1948 election between Thomas Dewey and Harry S. Truman, getting 17–1 odds for Truman to win. In a later interview he indicated that he knew Truman was going to win because Dewey had a mustache and "American women didn't trust men with a mustache".
He invested money in oil drilling and coal mining, but when those ventures failed, Snyder moved to Las Vegas in 1956 and began a weekly pro-football betting line.
Read more about this topic: Jimmy Snyder
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or career:
“One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)