A Blast From The Past
Larry King’s recent announcement of his retirement brought back memories of a visit to his radio show in the middle sixties. Charlatan staffers Bob Brown, Lieuen Adkins and I travelled to Miami Beach to promote and distribute the magazine for the first time in South Florida and Larry somehow got wind of it. He invited us to be on his WIOD radio show, which was broadcast weeknights from the old Surfside Six houseboat located across the street from the Fontainebleau Hotel. For those of you too young to remember, Surfside Six was a weekly television show which dealt mainly with crime on the Miami hotel circuit. The good guys lived on the houseboat. To make a long story short, Larry was a nice guy, we got good publicity and sold a lot of magazines.
The original Charlatan was published in April of 1959, when I was a freshman at Oklahoma State University. Main assistants in the endeavor were Ron Smith, an OSU student artist and John Muscato, a New York transplant who helped with circulation and a little bit of everything else. We had no idea what we were doing. The university wouldn’t let us sell the magazine on campus so we blitzed the dormitories at night, staying only seconds ahead of the determined resident assistants. Four Charlatans were published in Stillwater, and one, later, in Massachusetts, before I moved to Florida in 1963 and restarted the magazine in Tallahassee with my first wife, Marilyn Todd. Naturally, we were not allowed on campus, so we set up tables in front of Bill’s Bookstore and The Sweet Shop, enterprises which are actually still there.
Our real objective, however, was Gainesville, which had a very popular college humor magazine called the Orange Peel, which had tons of advertising. We initially drove to Gainesville to sell magazines and procure advertising for a few days each month, then moved south full time when the Orange Peel faded.
Charlatan was published until 1967 and provided the funds to open the Subterranean Circus in September of that year. I originally intended to continue the magazine but the rapid growth and many demands of the store made it impossible. The Circus was great fun and very lucrative but I always missed the opportunity to write and communicate via the Charlatan.
Horse Question of the Week: How do I know if my (potential) racehorse is any good?
You may not know for sure until he/she runs. Some horses are precocious training in the morning but don’t have the intestinal fortitude to compete in the afternoon. Others are slugs in the a.m., but pick it up in a race. Some colts are terrible until they are gelded (John Henry) and become great thereafter.
Basically though, the majority of horses will run like they work. “Working” means training harder and faster than the usual morning gallop. When two-year-olds are being prepared for their first race, they generally work about once every 7 to 10 days. Ours start at a quarter of a mile and then gallop out three-eighths. If that goes well, next time they go three-eighths, hopefully in a time under 37 seconds. Somewhere along the line, the trainer will pair them with another horse to give them a dose of competition and speed things up. If the half-mile work time is 49 and change (anything under 50 seconds), we generally feel we at least have a horse which may be competitive at the allowance level. Allowance horses are a level above claiming horses, which is a subject for another day…a very long subject.
Memories of Marie
When I was young, my parents lived in my grandmother’s house in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She lived upstairs, we lived down. But the sleeping accommodations were limited so some years I slept upstairs in my grandmother’s section of the house. We became great friends and, in good times and bad, she was my most loyal booster. So, in prosperous times, I named a horse (Proud Celia) after her and sent it to race at Rockingham Park in New Hampshire so my grandmother could attend in person.
Proud Celia promptly won and my grandmother was thrilled to be in the winner’s circle photo. So was my mother (Marie). As they hustled from the stands to the winner’s circle, the trainer admonished the track photographer, “Wait for the mother, wait for the mother!”
Move forward one month. Proud Celia is scheduled to run again. This time, I remain in Florida, so my family is on its own, which is always a worry. My mother notes in the entries column of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune that Proud Celia is Number 6. Never one to shy from a bet (Marie was big on bingo and slot machines and cashed in on Celia’s first win), she and her husband Pat are at the windows at Rockingham for the filly’s next start. Pat is flummoxed, however. Looking back at the track, he muses, “That doesn’t look like Celia to me, Marie.”
My mother, impatient with such foolishness, reminds him that the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune would never get the number wrong. But, of course, Marie doesn’t realize that in horse racing we sometimes have scratches and, when a scratch happens early enough, the numbers move up. The six horse becomes the five, etc., and this is reflected in the program, where the numbers are correct, but not in the newspaper, which is not privy to later happenings.
So my mother and Pat (still concerned) are rooting like hell for the six horse, although Celia is now number five. And the six horse WINS, to their great delight, which would be fine if all they were to do was to collect their winnings. Are you remembering now the part about the winner’s circle? Good.
They go racing down from the stands, my mother remembering to advise, “Wait for the mother! Wait for the mother!” Which everybody politely did. Even though they had no earthly idea who these strange people were who were so determined to be in their winner’s circle photo. Marie and Pat were also a little surprised to see no one they knew, including the horse and trainer, but they brushed it off and went up to collect their winnings.
“After we were back home, we realized what happened,” Marie told us, still amused at herself. “We laughed like fools for about an hour. Your grandmother didn’t think it was so funny, having lost—after having won—the race.”
Old college magazine joke (from 1965):
A woman approached the Pearly Gates and spoke to St. Peter.
“Do you know if my husband is here,” she inquired. “His name is John Smith.”
“Well, lady, we got lots of Smiths here. You’ll have to be more specific than that.”
“There’s one thing that might help,” she remembered. When he died, he said that if I were ever unfaithful to him, he’d turn over in his grave.”
“OH!” said Peter, “you mean Pinwheel Smith.”
That’s all, folks.
