LouLife

(First printed April 1974)

Downtown, brilliant hissing gaslights turned night into day in the lobbies of the big Main Street hotels, where milling crowds had gathered to make their bets on the big race coming up the next day. Spirited bidding in the auction pools showed H. Price McGrath’s three-year-old Chesapeake clearly the favorite of the throngs of out-of-towners and Louisvillians savoring the flavor of a unique event.

It was May 16, 1875 — Louisville’s first Derby Eve.

The city was bubbling with the greatest ferment of racing fever it had ever known — greater than the excitement generated in 1839 by the famed match race between Wagner and Grey Eagle out at the old Oakland track. And no wonder!   Louisville was witnessing the beginning of what was to become the top American turf classic, and Louisvillians knew it. A lot of other people suspected it. That’s why they were streaming into the city by train and boat, filling up the Galt House, the Louisville Hotel, the National Hotel, spilling over into the city’s 30 or so other hostelries.

That’s why there had been 42 nominations for this first-ever Derby, slated as the second race on the opening day of the brand-new track of the brand-new Louisville Jockey Club. The purse itself promised to be phenomenal by the standards of the day, with the club adding $1,000 to the entry and other fees. By contrast, the Phoenix Hotel Stakes at the Lexington track had only $250 added.

That big purse was a deliberate lure. The Louisville Jockey Club had been formed for one primary purpose: to rescue Thoroughbred racing from the doldrums, and the word had been spread far and wide. Louisville had taken the initiative.

“St. Louis has her fair,” noted the Louisville Commercial , “Cincinnati her music festival, New Orleans her Mardi Gras, and Louisville can gain equal fame for her races.”

Now it was the eve of the opening of the new track (it wouldn’t gain the sobriquet Churchill Downs for another decade) and of the first Kentucky Derby.

Anticipation of the Monday opening (yes, the first Derby was run on a Monday!) had been growing keener all through the week, whetted by the Kentucky Association’s meeting at Lexington, where many of the Derby hopefuls limbered up their long legs, getting ready for the big week coming up in the city by the Falls of the Ohio.

The Kentucky Association race results were front-page copy in Louisville in a day when the front page was reserved for advertising and such news as troubles in Europe, political scandals of the Grant Administration in Washington, and the trial of the nationally eminent Henry Ward Beecher, accused of seducing the young and attractive wife of Theodore Tilton, one of his parishioners at Brooklyn’s fashionable Plymouth Church.

Race fans must have chewed a little harder on their stogies at the news of the upset in the Phoenix Hotel Stakes: Frank Harper’s Ten Broeck handily defeated the favorite, Price McGrath’s Aristides. That chestnut colt didn’t even finish in the money. What did that do to the odds in the Derby, where both horses were entered? And then, McGrath was also entering Chesapeake, which just added another element of suspense.

Now it was time to remember the great horses of the immediate past, names like Lexington and Leamington and Glencoe.

“The most celebrated racers, with few exceptions, of the past 20 years have been representatives of the Lexington-Glencoe cross,” the Commercial reminded its readers. It took only a quick glance at the lineage of the probable starters to see that practically all of them filled that bill. This first Derby was obviously drawing the cream of the three-year-old crop.

By the week/files/storyimages/before the opening, the streets were full of track folk and track talk. Horses had been arriving every day from the South and the East. When the horses from Lexington arrived on Sunday (the Kentucky Association meet had closed on Saturday), they found the Jockey Club grounds almost awash with their Thoroughbred cousins: 26 stables came to town for the first meeting.

Hotel dining rooms were a blaze of glory and polished silver, with crystal chandeliers glowing on perhaps the largest assemblage of owners, trainers and breeders ever gathered for a single meet.

Newspapers had upped their press runs (“owing to the great influx of strangers”), and Galt House proprietor Jillson P. Johnson had a telegraph line strung between his establishment and the track so that race results could be flashed to stay-at-homes, and owners could keep in touch with trainers.

Louisville’s theatrical entrepreneurs, joyfully contemplating a week of overflow houses, plastered colorful playbills all over town. Barney Macauley gave his beautiful wife, Rachel, star billing in The Sea of Ice, or The Thirst for Gold , at his new theater on Walnut Street. She took a double role in fact, playing both Marie de Lascours and Ogarita, the Wild Flower of Mexico, in a spellbinding performance that was called a “romantic spectacular drama.”

And for those visitors who desired more-earthy entertainment — well, there was the Vaudeville Theatre on Third Street, where the fare was strictly in the rated-R class.

Then, when it seemed Louisville could bear its pent-up excitement no longer, The Day arrived — Monday, May 17.

Early-morning workouts were well under way and Col. Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr., president and guiding genius of the Jockey Club, was all over the grounds, checking every detail, greeting early-arriving owners, making sure all preparations were ready for the massive onslaught of humanity that would soon desc/files/storyimages/upon his yet-
untried plant.

Some race fans were already streaming in, arriving on the mule-drawn streetcars that rolled smartly along newly laid trackage through the lush green countryside directly to the gate. The colonel welcomed them jovially. They were his first customers and they deserved personal attention.

The track was spick-and-span and Col. Clark was proud of it. Proud, too, of its site on over 100 acres of land that the club had leased from his uncles, John and Henry Churchill.

The setting that greeted the grandstand crowd at that first Derby was captured by a reporter of the time: “ . . . green fields and woodlands… to the left, cottages dotted here and there over the plain. Behind, the Nashville railroad, winding like a snake through the woodlands. In front, a vast cloud of dust that indicated the road (Third Street) over which the vast crowd was approaching.” (That first grandstand was in today’s backside area, opposite the present grandstand.)

It was a tremendous crowd that arrived by streetcar, train and private carriage — 10,000 all told and probably the largest that had ever assembled for the opening of a new track or the first running of a new race. Band music added to the festive air as the throng increased through the morning and spilled over to the infield.

Col. Clark had to be elated: perfect weather, a fast track, a huge turnout, 15 starters for the Derby, and all the best of Thoroughbred horseflesh. As the man responsible for making it all happen, he knew better than anyone else the truth of the Commercial’ s admonition that “the present meeting marks a new era in the history of racing in Kentucky and upon its success depends the future of the Club.”

Well, things were off to a smashing start.

Col. Clark was especially pleased by the caliber of the throng that was quickly filling up the grandstand. “In the crowd were many of our most prominent merchants and businessmen,” the Commercial reported, then made an even more significant observation:

“A Kentucky race-course has never before presented such a scene. The grandstand was radiant with loveliness. Many of the first ladies of the city were there. . . . Many ladies in conveyances were at the side of the track.”

The gentlemen had brought their wives and daughters.   That was a real turn-around, and something Col. Clark had labored to achieve. If racing were to be successful, he knew, tracks had to erase their old image as slightly disreputable places where women seldom ventured. One newspaper spelled it out: “If the track can be made a place of fashion, its success is assured.”

Thus another Derby tradition — and another ingredient of success — was established that day.

The first race on the card, a 1?-mile sprint won by Bonaventure, was the stage-setter, whetting the appetite of the 10,000 spectators for what the press, in a burst of understatement, called “the event of the day and, we might say, the event of
the meeting.”

The 15 starters were led to the post while the restless crowd waited for the big event; 15 jockeys, their adrenaline levels rising, tensely waited for the starter’s signal; the little knot of owners and trainers tried to appear nonchalant.

Then the president of the Blood Horse Association, which operated the track at Nashville, stepped forward. He was the special guest starter for the Derby. He dropped the flag, the drum rolled and 15 Thoroughbreds thundered away into a bright new page of turf history.

Here’s the way the Courier-Journal called the race for its readers:

“Colonel Johnson (the starter) got his cavalry marshaled into two ranks at the half-mile pole and sent them away to a good start. Aristides, McCreery and Volcano seemed to get off in front. Chesapeake, who is a vicious starter, being one of the last away.

“McCreery got to the fore before rounding the turn and was first under the string, with Aristides second and Volcano third, the rest in a bunch close behind them. Before reaching the [second] turn, McCreery retired, as his owner expected, for he had not recovered from a severe attack of distemper contracted at Nashville.

“Aristides went on with the lead after McCreery retired, with Ten Broeck, Volcano, Bob Woolley and Verdigris, who had begun to close up, not far in his rear. The others seemed to be outpaced, for Aristides was cutting out the running at an awful speed, getting back to the half-mile pole in the neighborhood of 1:43.

“Here Volcano dropped back, his rider, with good judgment, taking a pull on him. Lewis, on Aristides, too seemed to take a pull on his horse, expecting Chesapeake to come in and take up the running, but where, oh where, was Chesapeake?

“Away back in the ruck and not able to do anything for his stable; fortunately for the favorite, McGrath (the owner) was near the head of the stretch and, taking in the position of affairs at a glance, waved his hand for Lewis to go on with the good little red horse and win, if he could,
all alone.

“Right gallantly did the game and speedy son of Leamington and Sarong answer the call on his forces, for he held his own all down the stretch in spite of most determined rushes on the part of Volcano and Verdigris, and dashed under the wire the winner of one of the fastest and hardest run races ever seen on a track.”

Aristides had scored an easy victory, winning by a length. The time, 2:37?, seems slow by today’s standards, but that first Derby was a 1?-mile race and Aristides had set a new record for a three-year-old at that distance. The Derby was not shortened to the present 1?-mile configuration until 1896.

That was it.   Poor Chesapeake, favorite in the Derby Eve betting, ran ninth. But Price McGrath couldn’t have cared less. Ten Broeck also finished out of the money (running fourth), while McGrath’s “little red horse” had won immortality in a single stroke and never mind what happened in Lexington the week before. Besides, Aristides had already shown his mettle at Saratoga and Jerome Park and Baltimore, carrying the green and orange silks of McGrath’s stable ahead of the field.

And the racing fraternity, partial to the ‘Lexington-Glencoe cross,’ saw its faith justified again.

Aristides, foaled on McGrath’s farm near Lexington in 1872, was sired by Leamington. But the colt’s mother was Sarong, sired by Lexington. And her mother, Greek Slave, was sired by Glencoe. Interestingly, McGrath’s other entry, Chesapeake, had been sired by Lexington.

So there it was.   A Kentucky colt, winning a Kentucky classic on a Kentucky track and carrying away a huge purse of $2,850. The news was telegraphed to the turf press and to the newspapers in all the nation’s racing centers. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher had to share the front pages again.

Aristides had won the Derby, but the real winner was Thoroughbred racing, which began its resurgence that day. All Louisville bathed happily in the reflected glory.