Derby Dreams

Since I was a small boy the Kentucky Derby has always figured prominent in my daily dreams.  Growing up on a farm in Kentucky I listened to stories about legendary horses and their exploits in the most famous race of all.  Citation, Whirlaway, Gallant Fox, and Count Fleet were magical names that stoked the fires of my imagination.  I remember laying out a race track around the garden, just beyond the old farm house, and riding tobacco sticks through the dust and screaming the names of these titans of the turf.  I know riding a pointed stick was probably as dangerous as if I had been riding Hill Gail to the finish line, but the memories are still vivid to this day.  If it was a particular lucky day I coerced my cousins to mount a tobacco stick and the taste of the dust from those Derbies is still fresh in my mind.

I guess that's when I fell in love with the drama of the Kentucky Derby even though it was all conceived in a youthful mind.  It wasn't long until I attended my first Derby in 1958, I was ten years old.  My father was a National Guardsman who at that time had the high honor of guarding the rail at Churchill Downs on Derby Day.  I remember dawn breaking and the twin spires of Churchill Downs rose from the mist as if in a dream.  That moment did not disappoint.  The rest of that day is a blur, Tim Tam won,  and for me a life long passion for the Kentucky Derby still burns.  I have been to many Derbies since that day and have raced many horses of my own at Churchill Downs, though not in the Derby, and I still get cold chills when I think back to that morning long ago when I first saw the twin spires.  I suppose that's what the Derby is to me, a dream I still enjoy to this day, and come to think of it, that might be the best thing about the Kentucky Derby.  After all if you could talk to everyone who ever attended or participated, I think they all would echo that the Derby is a magical dream.