BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Late in the gathering gloom this week, the operator at the Florida hospice center put the phone call through, and there was Clem Florio on the line. Florio, the ex-horse-race handicapper and ex-fighter. Florio, the Designated Finisher for everybody who ever dined at his table across hundreds of glad and gluttonous meals in Baltimore’s Little Italy.

Only now, it was a shell of his voice coming over the phone, despite the forced bonhomie and the traditional Florio greeting.

“Hey, Rock,” he said. “Why don’t you come down here? I need a win real bad.”

Same old Florio. You could picture him in the usual pose, with the fists up, halfway between a left hook and a hug. Only this time, you went strictly by imagination. Because this time, Clem was lying in a hospice bed, and the voice was hoarse and slow and out of breath after a few seconds.

They’ll stage the 133rd running of the Preakness here Saturday, and they’ll do it this time without Florio. Is that legal? For more than 40 years, Clem was a press box fixture around here. Sometimes, handicapping the races for The News American. Sometimes, for The Washington Post. Sometimes, as Pimlico’s in-house oddsmaker.

But a couple of years ago Clem retired to Florida, where much of his family lives. He’s 78 now. Behind him is a life jammed with smoke-filled boxing arenas, where he punched people out (sometimes under his own name and sometimes not), and with thoroughbred horses pounding down a backstretch, and with cluttered newsrooms and Florio standing there, yelling, “Somebody answer da phones.”

No phones were ringing. It was just Clem impersonating the ex-pug who took a few punches too many. Always the laughter, and always himself as prime target.

He’ll miss the Preakness terribly, he said. He always called it “the most exciting two minutes in sports.” In his great days as a handicapper, Florio could pick ’em as well as anybody in the business.

“Oh, I miss Pimlico,” he said late one night some months back. “When the smoke cleared, the people cared about you, and they cared about the horse. Some old-timers could hardly walk around the track, but they always had a job, they could always get something to eat.

“Somebody’d say, ‘Give him all he wants to eat, I’ll pay you the end of the week.’ Somebody was always looking out for you. It came from struggling in the ’30s, and never losing that common touch, that caring for each other.”

That meant a lot to a guy who’d come out of serious poverty. For Florio, life was more than the numbers on a pari-mutuel ticket. Every day, he gave the whole world lessons on the joy of living.

“Anybody that don’t like this life has gotta be crazy,” he’d say.

He always filled his life with action and with great characters. He was pals with boxing’s Rocky Graziano and Jake “Raging Bull” LaMotta, and show-biz types like the comic Lenny Bruce and the great actor Vincent (“Moonstruck”) Gardenia.

In fact, Florio and Gardenia grew up together. When Gardenia was here, years ago, to do “I’m Not Rappaport” at the Mechanic Theater, he had a bunch of us join him for dinner at Sabatino’s Restaurant.

At 1:30 in the morning, there were Florio and Gardenia crooning Italian love ballads to the whole joint.

A child of the Depression, he was so desperate to make a buck that he had the first of his 85 pro fights when he was 14 years old. He was big enough to fake it, and smart enough to keep changing names any time the authorities started sniffing around.

“I was winning,” he’d say with a laugh, “but I looked like I ran into a truck. I’d come home and my mother would start screaming. You know, I mighta been pretty good if I didn’t have that taste for smoking cigarettes in the dressing room before every fight.”

He had a city guy’s street smarts combined with a child’s sense of wonder. Once, he was talking about the early days of TV. Nobody had one at home, but the neighborhood bars and appliance store windows always had a set going.

“People would be out on the street,” Clem said, “and everybody’s packed around the store window, looking in. You’d go, ‘That’s coming from Madison Square Garden, and we’re in Ozone Park. How’d they do that? It’s a miracle.’ ”

That’s Clem Florio’s approach to life. Every day’s a miracle. Here’s hoping he gets a lot more miraculous days.