The Kentucky Thoroughbred

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments NoATTEMPT has been made herein to designate corroborative documentation by footnotes. As a personal matter, I abhor the harsh punctuation afforded by a superior number and in my reading have developed skill in ignoring such proffered textual interruptions. The thought here is that ifa statement is so preposterous as to be unworthy of belief, a footnote indicating where it previously had been published renders it no more credible ; prior publication, in itself, does not vouchsafe verity. In point offact, virtually everything in this volume previously has appeared, one or more times in various forms, in The Blood-Horse magazine. Cluttering this volume with citations to earlier efforts on the same subject hardly could enhance its authority. Still, some indication that material was not cut from whole cloth is in order when writing of matters not personally witnessed, as is the case when addressing history. A listing ofprimary sources is essential, if only to provide an opportunity for those so inclined to determine whether an author had any evidence for his inferences drawn and presented as historical fact. Certainly credit should be given to those scholarly researchers whose work product was reviewed, evaluated, and used in forming one's individual concept ofthat which must have occurred. In the course of reading and writing about a single subject over a period of years, one has a tendency to pick up notions, phrases, attitudes from earlier writers; these are assimilated, some embraced and in time adopted as one's very own. Such adverse possession is xv wrong. It is subliminal thievery. Ifone reads enough, it is called erudition. My reading has been restricted. There are those who grew up on Dickens and Dumas, Cooper and Washington Irving, others introduced to the language by Mark Twain or Henry L. Mencken. My frame of reference is derived from Joe Estes, Joe Palmer, and John Hervey. For thirty years, Joe Estes was The Blood-Horse. He was a scholar. He also was a gag writer. He was a statistician , and a poet. He was a handicapper, and a geneticist. He was a historian, and a computer programmer. He was a master of whimsy, and a deft literary infighter. He was a frail man of towering intellectual strength, recognized throughout the world as the foremost authority on matters pertaining to the Thoroughbred. His research studies overturned the Rule ofThumb in breeding, reversed and remanded it for new trials in conformance with his opinions on the probabilities as favoring the mating of horses of demonstrated high racing class, rather than horses distinguished only by pedigree. Joe Palmer, who lectured in English literature at the University of Kentucky during his ten years as managing editor ofThe Blood-Horse, moved to New York in 1944 as turf editor for the Herald-Tribune and CBS, yet continued to brighten The Blood-Horse with his weekly column until his death in 1952. Earlier on, he wrote of horses, Names in Pedigrees, but he was interested more in racing men than their horses, confessing to be "no noted lover of the horse, but a way of life of which the horse was once, and in a few favored places still is, a symbol-a way of charm and ease and grace and leisure. Grace and charm should perhaps not be tampered with at this late date but, at whatever risk of boasting, I am as good at ease and leisure as any man alive." John Hervey compiled the definitive history of the early Thoroughbred here, Racing in America; volumes 1 and 2 covered the two centuries from 1665 to 1865, the xvi importation of Bulle Rock in 1730 up to the Civil War. Walter Vosburgh's earlier volume in this invaluable series published by The Jockey Club covered racing in America from the Civil War through 1921. Hervey in volume 4 covered the period from 1922 through 1936. Hervey's comprehensive research touched all the usual original sources and more; his collection of stallion broadsides, family letters, diaries, and rare issues of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers and sporting journals, from which he drew much of his data, unfortunately was dispersed upon his death. Primary sources for Estes, Palmer, Hervey, and all writers ofthe history ofthe Thoroughbred in America are contemporary race summaries as appear in the American Turf Register, Spirit of the Times, Krik's and Goodwin's Guides to the Turf, and Daily Racing Form chart books, whose...