You lay people out there sitting around watching the Kentucky Derby probably think “Oh, aren’t those horse names interesting? Wouldn’t it be fun sitting around the campfire, eating moon pies and coming up with clever monikers for the little devils?” Well no, not so much. See, in the horse racing business we have this outfit called The Jockey Club. If you want to stand a stallion, breed a mare or register their progeny, you will be dealing with The Jockey Club. If you want to register your racing colors, you will be dealing with The Jockey Club. And if you don’t want tomatoes on your tuna sandwich for lunch, well, you know who to talk to. It only makes sense, therefore, that you won’t be getting any horse names approved without the imprimatur of The Jockey Club. We understand, of course, why somebody must be in charge. It’s a lot like life in general. How would right-wing fanatics know how to behave if they couldn’t get up in the morning and listen to Rush Limbaugh’s instructions? What would happen to all its needy customers around the country if the Headquarters of Dunkin Donuts was temporarily derailed by sunspots? What kind of tripe would we all be watching on television were it not for the wise administrators who patrol the corridors of the network programmers? Okay, scratch that last one. You get the point.
Nobody forces you to name your horse, of course. He can be “Old Chucky” or “Blissful Sunrise” for all anybody cares. It’s when you put the horse in an actual race that you’ll be needing an approved name and somebody has to see to it that there are not twelve horses named “Trigger” in the same race, a phenomenon that could prove very confusing for bettors in general and apoplectically vexing for little old granny ladies who like to play the names. This is where the Jockey Club comes in. They keep track of EVERY horse name ever given out in their magic computers. So chances are you will not be sneaking War Admiral or Seabiscuit by any sleepy Jockey Club monitors. Because The Jockey Club is not totally unreasonable, however, in recent years they have begun allowing re-use of names of horses long retired from the racetrack and the stud, which is very good since when a poor horseman is trying to get a name registered it seems like every goddam horse name in the world has been taken! Sometimes, the latter policy bears surprising results. After twice being turned down over a period of years for the name “Juggernaut,” I got it for one of my best horses, which is pretty spooky. It’s almost like The Jockey Club knew the lesser applicants were unworthy and were saving the name for the good horse.
In your casual browsing of racing programs, you may have noticed the occasional horse name with all the letters jammed together. This is usually because the Jockey Club limit for letters—including spaces—is eighteen (no numbers are allowed). This may also be due to the very bad taste of many horse namers who think it is very clever to jam all these letters and words together. Fortunately, perhaps by Divine Intervention, very few great horses have been saddled with these cumbersome appellations.
It is considered a great coup in horse racing circles to come up with a name limited to one word, since virtually all the desirable ones and even many of the undesirable ones have been taken. We got Paramount, once, which probably qualifies as a major miracle. Siobhan the Englishwoman got Soho and Brigand. Famous names are out unless you get the written approval of the person named and commercial names are verboten. I tried to get Star Trek for my first colt in 1976, he being a son of a horse named Star Envoy who was starting out on the long and difficult road to hoped-for success, literally a star trek. No soap, said The Jockey Club, without the written permission of the Star Trek producers in Hollywood who seemed bemused by my request, considered it for awhile but eventually turned it down. I did get Black Limousine, also the name of a Rolling Stones song, and Clockwork Orange, the latter only because I hired a retired Jockey Club president, Alfredo Garcia, then working as a horse identifier. There is no doubt that certain elite entities, notably Paris, Kentucky’s prominent Claiborne Farm, seem to curry more favor with The Jockey Club than others and thus acquire names thought unavailable. ‘Twas ever thus.
The Jockey Club, of course, must be on constant guard against merrymakers who would deviously slide an unrecognized questionable name past them, as in the celebrated case of Bodacious Tatas. Probably nobody would have noticed if Bodacious Tatas had not developed into a multiple stakes-winner, her name in the newspapers all the time. It could have been worse, of course. At least there were no headlines like “Milk Maid Squeezes By Bodacious Tatas” or worse, “Bodacious Tatas Nipped At Wire.” Although there certainly would have been if I was working for the Racing Form. All this is prelude to announcing that we have received the name Cosmic Flash for Puck. They wouldn’t give us Puck (the name of a famous horse) or Nobody’s Fool (a name already in use) so now our friends will be further subjected to cosmic confusion, trying to keep all the horses straight. There is one less to worry about, of course, Cosmic Crown having been claimed from her last race, which she won by seven. All the cosmic names emanate from the dam, Cosmic Light, who is still at the farm and now in foal to St. Andaan. Many breeders use ancestors in the pedigrees to come up with names for their new babies, as did we with all the cosmics. If we are going that route with Hannah, we will probably have to move past her dam to deeper recesses of her family tree. Hannah’s mother is named Fortyninejules (and not by us). Her father is Juggernaut. If there was ever an excuse for deviating from a name tied to the pedigree, this must be it. All suggestions would be welcomed.
Cosmic Flight By Daylight In Second Start
Planes, Trains And Automobiles. And Tractors
I took my car in to Harry’s Garage the other day to try to determine the reason for a persistent rattling underneath when the vehicle was in idle. Harry found a broken bracket that needed to be welded and sent me down the street to a muffler shop which did welding. The escaped criminal who performed the task for a mere $20, a grand bargain in this day and age, gave me the bad news: “You’re going to need motor mounts. The motor moving is what caused the bracket to break.”
“How does that happen,” I asked him.
“Well, with me it was too much drag racing,” he confessed, looking at me like I might be someone in his second childhood.
“Naw,” I said. “That can’t be it. My other car is the dragster. How much to fix it?”
“We don’t do that here. Better go back to Harry. It’s not cheap.” And here I was celebrating my $20 car repair.
Harry delved deep into his library of car-parts books and came to the gloomy assessment that the charges would be “over $700.” This sort of news makes you wish you had been part of the car-obsessed crowd in high school, one of those guys who would now gallumph off to his neighborhood junkyard, negotiate the requisite motor mounts for twelve dollars and fix the damn car himself. Seven hundred dollars, indeed. Truth was, in our high school that was a compact group. First of all, very few of us gave a thought to ever having a car in high school. Additionally, everybody was sports-obsessed or academically driven. Cars were for other people. This was the fifties, after all. My mother never even had a car until well after she was married. So no car knowledge for Bill. Tractors, now? I can tell you a little bit about tractors.
I never really thought too much about owning a tractor. Then, in 1975, I bought a 40-acre horse farm. Extensive reading on the subject convinced me I should turn the soil over and plant my own grass—Pensacola or Argentine Bahia, the book recommended for thoroughbred horses. I hired Alton Deweese, a happy black man with a gold star in a front tooth to do the job.
“When all this grass start growin,” said Alton Deweese, “you goin’ need y’own tractor out here.”
“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no tractors, Alton. I’ll get you or someone else to do it.”
“No—too expensive,” he said. “Be people comin’ out here all the time. Need your own tractor, Mister Bill.”
At first, I hired a high-school kid to do the mowing. That grass grew fast and he was there a lot but not as often as I needed him. Then, other little niggling problems arose for which a tractor would have been a big help.
“We need a tractor,” announced my then-wife, Harolyn, for whom I’d bought the farm in the first place.
“How much does a tractor cost?”
“Maybe five, six thousand dollars. And we need a bushhog for the mowing.” Geez, Louise. This farm stuff was getting expensive. Nonetheless, we traipsed off to Lake City, which seemed to have the best tractor prices, and bought a nice John Deere, replete with bushhog. All this happened during the sixth year of our ten-year marriage. At first, we shared the mowing work, which was considerable. After a couple of years, marriage waning, the bulk of it was left to Bill, who was beginning to discover that sometimes things happened to tractors. The first realization was that you had to keep leveling the bushhog, but that was relatively easy. The second was that if you did not filter your gas, the tractor carburetor would get gummed up and the tractor would not actually go. When you are out on your horse farm, miles from anywhere, you will not be calling the tractor fixit man to come and help you out. Nope, you will have to attend to the problem your very self, otherwise the tractor would sit out in the middle of the field for the horses to abuse. Fortunately for all concerned (me), the carburetor sits on the outside of the tractor. It can be unscrewed, cleaned or replaced, if necessary. To do this, of course, you need to shut off the gas to the carburetor. Then, when you have fixed the problem, you need to “bleed the lines” to get the air out of them so everything runs hunky-dory again. Occasionally, you discover another problem—the lines may be blocked. And, if they are, it is always with some disagreeable little tarball of a thing which you must, well….suck out of there. This is not proper work for any self-respecting son of New England but there you have it—do or die. In short order, all this nastiness seems just a part of the daily job, no longer a particularly big deal. Once you have mastered the art of tractor repair, you can move on to PVC installation.
I had no experience with PVC, of course, living in the city. Who does? On the farm, however, PVC is ubiquitous. Why? Because it is cheap. Compared to the cost of running metal water lines, PVC is a walk in the park. Trouble is, PVC breaks. A lot. And when it does, you will be required to fix it with the aid of the lunacy-inducing PVC Cement. I know many of you out there have used rubber cement at one time or another and you probably became annoyed at how quickly it dried, rendering it useless. The rapid drying speed of rubber cement is nothing, however, compared to the supersonic drying speed of PVC cement. If you open it once without saying the magic words—and nobody knows them—the PVC cement will immediately harden, spit at you and smile. You need to keep eighteen cans of it around at all times. I decided, after a few bouts of this torture, that all aboveground pipes should be metal, which doesn’t rupture every time a horse pokes it with his nose.
There are, of course, many other exciting adventures involved in the proper care and maintenance of horse farms and we’ll be certain to go into them all in great detail in future installments. Meanwhile, I just heard a loud noise outside. I think someone just ran through a fence. Have we ever had a discussion about fence repair? Well, the basics involve….
That’s all, folks….
