Bloodlines - Father's Day 1998

“I am writing on the eve of what is now known as Father's Day - the same being, for the year 1942 (and 1998), Sunday, June 21. It is not possible for my piece to get into print until after that date, so I have entitled it an Afterpiece. But it is not an afterthought. By no means. For the subject has been in my mind a long while ...

... As an afterpiece for Father's Day for 1942, I would like to offer a few reminiscences of my own father, whom I lost over forty years ago but to whom I not only owe my existence but, by and large, everything that has gone to make it up since first I drew breath. For it was from him that I inherited that love of horses and horse racing that was to shape my life throughout and make me both humanly and professionally what I am and have been. That - and a lot more.

It was really impossible for a man to be a greater horse lover than he was; and as he was born in 1826 and grew up in a period and an environment in which horses and horsemanship were one of the chief essentials of American life, it is not strange that what was in his blood as his birthright became an integral part of his existence not only, but the dominant one.

The business in which he engaged (harness-maker’s trade) made my father's natural love of horses and expert horsemanship an invaluable asset. To my Father, horses were an absorbing passion and far indeed from just a business adjunct. His whole activity centered in and around them and this fact lent his vocation an interest aside from its commercial angles that made it pleasure as well.

The greatest gift and privilege which a boy born with horse-love deeply implanted in his nature is to have such a Father - and such was my own great luck. Observing how early it cropped out in me, when still hardly out of (diapers) he began taking me to the races with him, and seated on his lap or perched on his shoulder I learned to love them - one might say as a baby.

As soon as able he began teaching me about horses - their good and bad points, their natures and habits, their conformation and temperament, and always their bloodlines and breeding. The traits of different strains, families and tribes; their differences in gait, in aptitude, in strength, in speed and gameness; their racial faults and excellences, - the tendency here to bad feet, there to ring-bone or spavin or other unsoundness; their reliability or bad temper; their hardiness or washy constitutions; the difference between superficial attractiveness and less flashy but more solid merit - and so on through the endless category of things that go to make up the equine genus, he knew or knew about with a correctness and familiarity only to be arrived at by endless experience at first hand combined with theoretical study and discrimination.

There were literally millions of American Fathers who closely resembled him and in turn endowed their sons and pupils with the love and knowledge of horses and horsemanship which they possessed in such a high degree. First by heredity, as in physical verity their progenitors; then secondarily, as their teachers and preceptors, handing on to them both innate faculties and their development by teaching and precept.

Everything in the last analysis in a great and solidly-built civilization depends upon the virility and forcefulness of its males - their capacity to go in front and dare and endure and conquer, to make themselves respected and to be worthy of that respect both literally and figuratively. When we have ceased to do so and have sunk into mere auxilliary personages, trailing along behind the march of progress (?) with such things as Father's Day draped ludicrously about them ... just a sort of errand-boy where once they commanded and shaped both what was and was to come - the difference is so immense that it can only be comprehended by one like the present writer, who was born into the world that has gone and has lived on into that which we have.

And on Father's Day, pauses, to take stock of what once was and what now is. Which is to say, the world of yesterday and the world of today - not caring to look forward into the world of tomorrow, or what sort of creature Father by that time may have become."