You might not have been able to see him, but you always knew when Louis Olah was just around the corner.

“La la la,” he would half-sing, half-speak. “La la la.”

Turn around, and there he would be, all 4-foot-8 inches and 90-odd pounds of him, usually with an armful of jockey silks and always with a wide smile. For more than 40 years, Olah, a former rider himself, was the “Keeper of the Silks” at Aqueduct, Belmont Park, and Saratoga, presiding over thousands of the brilliantly-colored jackets that jockeys wear during races. While internet wagering and simulcasting may have altered the face of horse racing, Olah was unchanged, as much of a tradition as the bugler’s call to the post or the cry “They’re off!” as horses spring from the gate.

Today, the silks room is a little quieter, and a lot less colorful. On Saturday, Olah, of Howard Beach, N.Y., passed away after a brief illness. He was 79.

“He may have been the smallest guy, but he had the biggest heart,” said jockey valet Harry Rice. “He was a true gentleman.”

Olah, who was born in New Brunswick, N.J. and raised in Staten Island , began his career at the racetrack at the age of 17. Introduced to trainer John Coburn at Aqueduct in 1946, he started as a hotwalker, soon began exercising horses and later the same year signed a contract as a jockey. For 21 years, he rode up and down the East coast, with his biggest victory coming early on when he booted Tavistock home to win the 1947 Interborough Handicap at Aqueduct.

In 1967, having quit riding after amassing, by his own estimate, 180-190 victories, Olah was offered the job of supervising the silks at the New York Racing Association tracks by racing official John Morrissey.

“I just thought this would be a perfect job for me, a way to stay in the game,” Olah told Vincent M. Mallozzi in a piece that appeared in the New York Times on January 13, 2008.

With no two colors alike, Olah had the silks rooms at NYRA’s three tracks arranged in exactly the same way, with walls of yellow jackets and caps cascading into orange, then red, violet, blue and green, each set on its own hook, distinguishable only by the slightest differences in hue and the arrangement of the hoops, circles, dots, yokes, and chevrons on the bodies and sleeves. As well, Olah kept a record of each owner’s colors in a huge three-ring binder that is the size of a telephone book from a major metropolitan area, each with a notation that might read something like: blue gold emblem gold sleeve gold star.

Not that Olah needed to refer to the book very often. His memory was extraordinary, which he credited to having memorized every bad habit of all the cheap horses he rode.

“That way, the next time I rode them, they couldn’t pull an old trick on me,” Olah once said. “It was a real memory course, helped me remember these colors, whose they are, and where they are.”

It was Olah’s job to keep the silks organized, to lay them out before each race in the jockeys’ room for the riders to don, then to clean them afterward and return them to their correct spot in the kaleidoscope of colors.

“There’s not another color man in the country as good as he was,” said Rice, who began working at NYRA in 1975. “An owner’s colors wouldn’t run for 20 years, and Louis would be able to go right to where they were hanging.”

“He was,” added NYRA assistant clerk of scales Eddie Brown,” a much better color man than he was a jockey.”

But even more than his ability as keeper of the silks, Olah will be remembered for his sense of humor and his graciousness. Every year he would lend the children of racetrack workers sets of silks so they could dress up as real jockeys for Halloween, and he would laugh as hard as anyone when he was the victim of a practical joke.

“He was a good sport,” recalled Hall of Fame jockey Jerry Bailey. “One time, one of the valets took him and hung him by his belt on a hook about five or six feet off the ground. The more Louis kicked, the tighter he got caught. I got such a headache from laughing I was afraid I was going to have to take off my mounts that afternoon.”

“He was always making jokes, always in a good mood,” said jockey John Velazquez from Gulfstream Park. “He was a fine gentleman, well-loved, and he will be missed.”

Olah is survived by Clare, his wife of 58 years, and a daughter, Donna. A memorial service will be held at the Romanelli Funeral Home, 89-01 Rockaway Boulevard, Ozone Park, N.Y. (718) 845-5151 on Wednesday March 12 at 8 p.m. Viewings will be Tuesday, March 11 from 7 - 9 p.m. and Wednesday, March 12 from 2 - 5 p.m. and 7 - 9 p.m.

Photo Credits: Adam Coglianese & Josh Haner