I have always really enjoyed Arkansas and truly wish I could have spent more time there over the years and enjoyed the beauty, hospitality, and unique nature of the state from border to border. While it is not remotely Appalachian, the cultures of the Ozarks and Appalachia do share some significant similarities. I hear people all the time making disparaging remarks about the state and I have never found legitimate reasons to do that. I will admit that after the Clintons left Arkansas the politics has gone downhill terribly and it is, in many ways, a truly southern state, and that is not a good thing in many ways, especially in politics. For me the only truly negative aspect of Arkansas, or at least Arkansas geography, is the long, horribly boring drive on the interstate from Memphis to Little Rock. It is flat as a pancake nearly all the way and you actually want to cheer every time you see a tree standing out in a cotton field or cow pasture. But the people are generally kind, cheerful, and interesting to talk to.
But what I really want to write about here are the first trips both my wife Candice and I made to Arkansas and they came years apart because my first trip there happened almost ten years before I met Candice. In the early 1980's, I was between jobs in the Thoroughbred horse business in Lexington, Kentucky, and I had a friend, Joe Durkin, who owned a small Thoroughbred farm outside Lexington and Joe was having a very bad year. His father had recently died. He and his wife were getting a divorce and he eventually lost primary custody of his young son. Because of the divorce, he also had to declare bankruptcy and was in the process of losing the farm. Between Joe and the one or two Thoroughbred boarding clients he had left, they owned a total of 7 Thoroughbred mares none of which had outstanding pedigrees. They collectively made the decision to sell the mares in Little Rock at an auction of horses of all ages which was known as The Arkansas Thoroughbred Breeders Sale which now seems to be defunct which is not surprising. The next Man O' War was not remotely likely to have ever been sold through that sale.
Joe got me to agree to make the trip to Arkansas with him, drive a horse van he had borrowed from a well known, generally low end horse trainer named Smiley Adams who won a ton of claiming races but very few stakes races. I was going to drive the van and do the work of caring for the horses and showing them to potential buyers at the sale. It turned out the van was a six horse van and we had seven mares. But the van also had a large tack box which extended over the cab of the truck and a narrow walkway between the cab of the truck and the wall behind the three front stalls which faced backward toward the center aisle of the van. We managed to load the normal six mares in the normal six stalls and then got the seventh mare loaded into the walkway behind the cab with her rear end facing the door. We headed to Little Rock with me driving the van and Joe driving behind me in a small pickup he owned with the necessary hay, straw, feed, and other items in the bed of the truck. We didn't quite look like Okies but maybe a bit close.
We got just outside Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and the engine blew in Smiley's van. There we were sitting on the side of the interstate with seven mares in a six horse van which was inoperable and Joe was not a rich man. But amazingly, it wasn't long before a thirteen horse van owned by Sallee Vans in Lexington came along headed straight to Little Rock. At that time and still today, Sallee is one of the biggest, and the best, companies in the horse vanning business. We were able to flag down the van and, to our great surprise, they had only six horses in a thirteen horse van. The drivers agreed to take Joe's mares to Little Rock if we could figure out how to transfer them from the six horse van to the Sallee Van.
Then, which was not surprising, a Kentucky State Trooper came along, turned on his blue lights and pulled in behind the two vans and the pickup truck. We were beginning to look like a drive by parade and traffic was whizzing by at 80 and 90 miles an hour as we held a conference on the side of the interstate. We all knew there was no safe way to move those mares from one van to the other and our six horse van was immobile. But the state trooper had the answer which was also very lucky for us. He said there was an abandoned Kentucky Weigh Station just a mile or so down the highway and we could pull the trucks into there and load the mares on the Sallee van. So the trooper called for a heavy wrecker which showed up fairly quickly and we had them pick the front tires of the six horse van about four to six inches off the pavement and slowly drive it to the weigh station. The wrecker set the van down and the Sallee driver pulled his van up about six inches away from the door to our van. We laid one of the van ramps across the space between the vans, put the side boards up, and walked the mares from van to van. Getting the seventh mare into the Sallee van was the hardest part of the deal since she was loaded with her hindquarters toward the door. The Sallee van driver pulled up beside the door to the walkway and we slid the wooden ramp as close to the mare's hind feet as we could get it and managed to back her from van to van.
The part I hadn't seen coming was that the Sallee drivers wanted me to ride from Elizabethtown to Little Rock as a van attendant in the back of the van with the thirteen horses. By that time, I had done a lot things in the Thoroughbred horse business, including stretches as farm foreman at the Stallion Station in Lexington and a horrible year as a farm manager for a lunatic in Upstate New York, but I had never been a van attendant except to occasionally ride in small van with a brood mare on her way to and from a breeding shed or with a yearling or two on their way to a sale, all of which I had never done except in the environs of the Lexington general area. I had sometimes fantasized that I might like to be a full time van attendant with Sallee so I could travel the country from New York to California. But I had no idea until then just how miserable it is to ride on four bales of hay and straw in the back of a thirteen horse van headed into the deep south on a summer day. It is almost 500 miles from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to Little Rock and one trip in the back of a horse van was enough for me to abandon all my fantasies about being a van attendant.
I have no idea how much money Joe Durkin lost on that trip with the need to have a motor either rebuilt or a new one installed in Smiley Adams' van but Joe said Smiley actually took it all pretty well since it was his oldest backup van. Smiley raced horses at many of the tracks across the country in those days and he had two or three newer vans which he relied on most of the time. But Joe had to pay the repair bill and tow bill on the van, the haul bill on the seven mares from Elizabethtown to Little Rock, the sales commissions on his own mares, my labor, hotel bills and food bills while we were in Little Rock, and he was already facing bankruptcy, divorce, and losing his farm. But after all his legal issues were settled, Joe went to work as a clerk in a liquor store in Versailles, Kentucky, and the last time I had any contact with him a few years later he was the manager of an S & S Tire Store in Versailles and had managed to survive. After we got back to Lexington, he helped me get a job working on a small Thoroughbred farm in Versailles for one of the granddaughters of Huey Long which did not turn out be nearly as exciting as it might sound on paper.
Now, let's talk about my wife Candice's first trip to Arkansas which was actually to Hot Springs. Shortly after Candice and I got married in 1992, I developed a friendship with an old, somewhat broken down Thoroughbred jockey named Quentin Schlafer. Quentin was a wonderful fellow but he lived a life of bad decisions and could no longer ride races and most horse trainers were no longer willing to allow him to exercise their horses. But he got the idea that some trainer he knew who trained horses at Oaklawn Race Track in Hot Springs would hire him if he could get there. His mother, who was a wonderful, hard working Jewish woman about 80 said she would pay Candice and I to haul Quentin and his gear to Oaklawn. It was the dead of winter in late December of 1993, I believe, when we started out with Quentin, an exercise saddle and bride, riding helmet, his clothing, and two tack sewing machines in the back of my Dodge Ram 50 pickup. With three of us in the front seat, it got crowded and both Quentin and Candice didn't like it. The truck had a manual transmission and every time I shifted gears I was banging somebody on the knees. In spite of the weather, Candice and Quentin decided to take a sleeping bag and take turns staying in the back of the truck with all the gear under the topper which was still mighty cold. I would stop every time whoever was riding in the back would bang on the front window of the topper and they would switch. But we managed to arrive in Hot Springs with both of them still alive and without visible frostbite.
The Finish Line At Oaklawn
We dropped Quentin off at the race track where he was able to find some trainer who would let him sleep in a tack room and we took the left over money his mother had paid us and checked into the historic Arlington Resort Hotel and Spa, the best, most beautiful place in Hot Springs. It was between Christmas and New Years and the hotel was fully decorated with a large gingerbread house in the lobby and Christmas lights everywhere. They were also having a New Year's Eve buffet in the dining room which was expensive but loaded with the best food the south can offer. Hot Springs is also the home of Hot Springs National Park which used to be a resort for the ultra-rich in the early twentieth century. We checked in, got reservations for the buffet, and scheduled massages at the hotel which used hot water pumped directly from the hot springs in old claw foot bath tubs with same sex attendants giving the massages while you were in the tub. We had the spa/massage experience, at the buffet, visited the national park, ate lunch the next day in a little restaurant across the street which had great jambalaya, and headed back to Lexington. But it is interesting to me to remember that the first trip each of us made to Arkansas was riding in the back end of a truck.
The Arlington Hotel, Hot Springs
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