Prologue
Cosmic Song runs in the second race Saturday at Calder. We expect a big performance. She should be 2-1 or better. If you have Dish TV or get HRTV via some other means, you should be able to get the race. This filly is training like gangbusters, but still has to translate it to the afternoon. We’re optimistic.
Republicans Through The Years
1950s: “Vote fer us or the Commies will gitcha!”
1960s: “Vote fer us or the niggers will gitcha!”
1970s: “Vote fer us or the hippies will gitcha!”
1980s: “Vote fer us or the queers will gitcha!”
2000s: “Vote fer us or the Arab terrorists will gitcha!”
2010s: “Vote fer us or the budget deficit will gitcha!”
Do we see a pattern emerging here?
Addenda to The Cast of Characters
Last week, I somehow forgot to include Bob and Nancy in the crew of various knuckleheads, ne’er-do-wells and comic characters which, at one time or another, spent time on my farm. This was a deplorable oversight. How could we ever forget Bob and Nancy?
They came in response to an ad in The Gainesville Sun, which I had learned delivered substantially more responsible farm help than did like ads in the Ocala Star-Banner. When they visited, they looked like they had just come from church. And that is because they did. They were members of the Latter Day Saints and it’s possible they even knocked at your door one day.
Bob and Nancy were very nice. Nancy was beyond nice. They brought along their wedding picture album, which they must have just known I was longing to see. Inside were pictures of their marriage, on horseback, at the beach, which, if not the corniest bit of shenanigans I have ever seen, achieved a very high spot in the order.
I thought gee, how could these guys be a problem? Nancy would feed and tend to the horses and Bob would travel around with his churchy friends, knocking on doors and selling—or not selling—religious books. Everything went fine for awhile.
One day, they came to me with a problem. They weren’t absolutely sure, but they didn’t think God would be wanting them to work (feed horses) on Saturday, their holy day. There was some vacillation, however, because God, in His infinite wisdom and common sense, would not want any horses to starve. This was quite a dilemma, solved only after much praying and gnashing of teeth. Ultimately, however, they decided God said No.
Irritated by such nitwittedness, I nonetheless came up with a simple solution, although one which I did not like. I would swap feeding days with them, taking Saturdays and giving them Sundays, even though I liked to work at the Subterranean Circus on Saturday, the busiest day. This worked for a few weeks until they came up with another religious problem, for which there was no acceptable solution and they were gone.
Naturally, I ran into them months later and they had the same kind of job at another farm. And they were feeding Saturdays. They had fallen upon hard times and they were sure that God would appreciate their need for a roof over their respective heads even if they had to abuse the Sabbath. I agreed that He would. Siobhan, my vet at the time, told me she was just as happy to see Bob gone.
“He never smelled very good, anyway,” she attested, grumpily. “God wouldn’t approve.”
Down on the Farm
In our last exciting episode, we were discussing agriculture, mainly the establishment of our farm in Orange Lake. Many of my friends used to ask me, disbelieving, “How did you get in the horse business?” How do you get in any business? It’s like learning to type. The first day, you sit in typing class looking mystified at the keyboard as if you’ll never understand it. After all, there’s a lotta stuff there. Then the teacher tells you you’re going to have to learn to hit all these keys without looking. You’re pretty sure that’s not going to happen. But, eventually, it does, just by taking one little step after another. And so it is with any venture, from magazine publishing to retail business to a horse operation. You are definitely going to do some things wrong. The trick is to learn the business before you run out of money. Some people don’t.
The first thing a horse farmer needs to do, obviously, is to select a farm. The county offers maps and charts and assay offices which help you to analyze your soil, your grass, the potential for sinkholes to open up on your property, etc. You might want to take advantage of these. Or you can buy a farm where good horses have been raised for generations, a place which has already proved its worth but will probably be more expensive.
We decided to start from scratch with 40 acres just south of Orange Lake. One of the previous partners in the group which had owned the land was a well-driller, so we had water access all over the place. Geologists from UF told us our sinkholes were very old and unlikely to expand and the University soil labs advised on fertilization. It didn’t take much reading to learn that we needed to plant either Pensacola or Argentine Bahia grass for the eventual horse population, which we must contain with some sort of fencing. And we’d need a barn.
Alrighty, then. We found a man with a tractor named Alton Deweese to do the grass planting. Alton was a jolly fellow with more gold in his mouth than Fort Knox had in its storerooms. Grass planted. We found a man named Mack Gornto to help with the fencing. Mack looked just like his name portended—about 5-10 tall, about 5-10 wide, and very strong. When he took off his shirt, other men would leave the room. Mack loved to fish and said he would contribute his labor on the fences and the barn in exchange for an acre of land on which to build a home. Deal. I volunteered to help. Silly me.
We didn’t have a tractor with an auger at the time, so we had to dig the post holes for the fences either completely by hand (too many for that) or with a gas post-hole digger. Only problem was, when the post-hole digger hit an ornery piece of limerock, of which there was much, it would come to an abrupt stop, swinging around the people controlling it like rag dolls. Mack’s bulk kept his swinging to a minimum but I think I weighed 150 at the time, and decreasing by the day. We ran out of drinks a lot, which was okay by me because that meant we got to stop awhile and tootle down to the nearby 7-11. I was ready to do this about oh, say, every half-hour, but Mack kept us to a strict schedule. Eventually, the post-holes were dug and we moved on to putting up the boards. This is when I learned about creosote. Mainly, that it will burn the skin off your hide if you let it. Mack, of course, being that kind of guy, just tolerated it and burned off a few layers of stomach skin. I opted for long-sleeve shirts and sweated like a dog….but a dog with skin intact.
Next came the barn. We decided to build it mostly with concrete block. To keep the stalls breezy, though, we would separate them with expanded metal. We farmed out the work on the roof tresses. I was still helping. Not the best part of my job was handing Mack the concrete blocks high over my head for the window framing. Eventually, you get pretty strong from this. But first, you die a little. I was always happy to go home at the end of the day.
Eventually, the grass grew, the fences were up, the barn was completed and we had purchased a mobile home for our farm manager. We had one little job left. We had to connect all this with PVC water lines, a thankless job that took forever. My favorite part was using the PVC cement. The people who make this stuff must be incredibly rich, because if you even think about opening the can, it will solidify. And you have to buy another one. And sometimes, you had to use, like, fifteen pieces of PVC to hook up the water line to a water trough. And there will always be a leak….usually a very small leak, but there was no such thing as an acceptably small leak to Mack Gornto.
“A small leak,” he pontificated, “will always get bigger. And then you will have to dig up the line to fix it. And I might not be here to help.” Oh. Good point, Mack. Let’s attend to this problem right now!
Hard as it was to believe, all eventually was in readiness. We brought over Harolyn’s two riding horses and the two thoroughbred mares we had bought earlier, which were boarding in Micanopy, one of which now had a foal. His name was Star Spectre (by Star Envoy) and we were sure he was the greatest thing since powdered milk. We’d even stand out there and hold a feed bucket in front of him so he would consume the maximum amount of nourishment, grow big and strong and win the Kentucky Derby. He did turn out to be a nice horse. He broke his maiden in an allowance race at Arlington Park, near Chicago, and, at the recommendation of our trainer, Bob Dubois, we nominated him to the Florida Derby. Next time he ran—at Calder—he bowed a tendon, the death knell for race horses. Harolyn and I drove over to what is now South Beach, sat in the sand and looked out at the ocean. For a very. Very. Very. Long. Time.
Old College Magazine Joke (from 1966):
A young engineer got a job in a remote mining camp. On his first day, he approached the foreman and asked, “Say, what do you guys do around here for entertainment?”
“Well,” the foreman replied, “most of us usually go over to the mess shack and watch Sam the cook drink a gallon of whiskey, another gallon of gasoline, and then a quart of red pepper juice. Funniest thing you ever saw! You wanna come along today?”
“Uh, no, no….” the engineer managed, looking a little green around the gills. “I don’t go in for that kind of amusement.”
“Aw, y’never know til you try,” scoffed the foreman. “I sure wish you’d change your mind. We’re one man short today and we really need six men for the show.”
“Six men….why is that?” asked the engineer.
“Well,” explained the foreman, “it takes six men to hold Sam. He don’t go in for that sort of amusement, either.”
That’s all, folks….
