A Real Life Exacta

This is a story about a man who has survived various situations—good, bad, and unique. It is about the family that brought about the circumstances that allowed him to be able to attend one of the most iconic sporting events in the world—the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Kentucky, held now every year since 1875. He has attended the Kentucky Derby for eighty-three consecutive years and counting starting in 1940. The condition for this race is for three-year-old colts, geldings, and fillies that were nominated and qualified. The qualifications have changed over the years, but was meant only for the top-notch horses (generic) in the USA and later globally. He is the only person on the planet to have achieved this record. Not only the number of years, but continuously, and also to be present in the paddock to view every horse that has run in that race for eighty-three years. This came about when he attended the Kentucky Derby with his father when he was eight years old. His father was a thoroughbred racehorse aficionado who studied the lineage, breeding, and genetics of thoroughbred racehorses most of his life. His father—my grandfather—was a blacksmith who owned a horse and carriage shop in Loretta and Elizabethtown, Kentucky. This was the beginning and primary incentive for my interest in and knowledge of horses. At the turn of the twentieth century, most people traveled by horse/horse and buggy, and the maintenance of this means of transportation was essential to civilization all over the world. To my grandfather (Francis Eugene Sutton), this was a means of supporting a family with nine children. This in itself is not significant except this is where the interest in horses was spawned. He shod rogue draft horses weighing up to one thousand eight hundred pounds. His methods were sometimes harsh when the situation demanded, but he had a way of calming these rogues that were second to none. My father spoke of helping his father by holding the horses nose in a twist in order to keep them from tearing up the shop and injuring anyone around. That’s where the “Don’t get your nose in a twist” originated. He spoke of times when he viewed his father standing in the doorway with sweat pouring down his body and trembling from the exhausting effort of shoeing these powerful animals. His outlet, as with others of that era, was bourbon, bourbon, and bourbon, especially in that area of Kentucky, where it was primarily made up of distilleries and Catholics with monasteries and nunneries spread throughout the region when they settled after the revolutionary and civil wars. As a child, I learned the disposition of horses and their cause for various behaviors from his father. Certain traits carry over to those of the same species. He developed a so-called sixth sense as to their well-being. John Sr. was also valedictorian of his class in high school due to his educated mother (Susan E. Donahue), who tutored him at an early age, being he was the first child. He was chosen by Sister Josephine to represent his county to take a job at the L&N Railroad in Louisville at the age of seventeen in 1919—a worthy prize in those days. To make a long story short, he married my mother (Ruth E. Roby), and I was the second child of three. My father developed an avid interest in genetics due to his intellect and predisposition in analyzing the behavior of both horses and humans. His desire to be an MD was shattered due to the lack of funds and connections, which was mandatory in those days (the 1920s). This frustration stayed with him along with the hum-drum accounting work he did at the L&N Railroad.