Letters from an American - May 3, 2024

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

May 3rd, 2024. It has been quite a week of news, and I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one who's tired. So I figure it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to look elsewhere for a bit of a break. Tomorrow is the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, and in its honor, I'm posting a piece my friend Michael S. Green and I wrote together a number of years ago on 10 famous American horses. It has no deep meaning, it's just fun. And it was totally fun to research, too. I watched hours and hours of Mr. Ed and read television history to try and figure out what made it such a popular show. This remains one of my favorite things I've ever had a hand in writing. Number one, Traveler. General Robert E. Lee rode Traveler, spelled with two L's in the British

style, from February 1862 until the General's death in 1870. Traveler was a gray American saddlebred of 16 hands. He had great endurance for long marches and was generally unflappable in battle, although he once broke both of General Lee's hands when he shied at enemy movements. Lee brought Traveler with him when he assumed the presidency of Washington and Lee University.

Traveler died of tetanus in 1871. He is buried on campus, where the Safe Ride program still uses his name. Number two, Comanche. Comanche was attached to General Custer's detachment of the 7th Cavalry when it engaged the Lakota in 1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The troops in the detachment were all killed in the engagement, but soldiers found Comanche, badly wounded, two days later. They nursed him back to health, and he became the 7th Cavalry's mascot. The commanding officer decreed that the horse would never again be ridden, and that he would always be paraded,

draped in black, in all military ceremonies involving the 7th Cavalry. When Comanche died of colic in 1891, he was given a full military funeral. The only other horse so honored was Black Jack, who served in more than a thousand military funerals in the 1950s and 1960s. more than a thousand military funerals in the 1950s and 1960s. Comanche's taxidermied body is preserved in the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. Number three, Beautiful Jim Key. Beautiful Jim Key was a performing horse trained by formerly enslaved veterinarian Dr. William Key. Key demonstrated how beautiful Jim could read, write, do math, tell time, spell, sort mail, and recite the Bible. Beautiful Jim performed from 1897 to 1906 and became a legend. An estimated 10 million Americans saw him perform, and others collected his memorabilia, buttons, photos, and postcards, or danced the Beautiful Jim Key two-step.

Dr. Key insisted he had taught Beautiful Jim using only kindness, and Beautiful Jim Key's popularity was important in preventing cruelty to animals in America, with more than 2 million children signing the Jim Key Band of Mercy, in which they pledged, I promise always to be kind to animals. Number four, Man O' War. Named for his owner, August Belmont Jr., who was overseas in World War I, Man O' War is widely regarded as the top thoroughbred racehorse of all time. He won 20 of his 21 races and almost a quarter of a million dollars in the early 20th century. His one loss, to upset, came after a bad start. Man o' War sired many of America's famous racehorses,

including Hardtack, which in turn sired Seabiscuit, the small horse that came to symbolize hope during the Great Depression. Number five, Trigger. Entertainer Roy Rogers chose the Palomino Trigger from Five Rented Horses to be his mount in a Western film in the 1930s, changing his name from Golden Cloud to Trigger because of his quick mind and feet. Rogers rode Trigger in his 1950s television series, making the horse a household name. When Trigger died, Rogers had his skin draped over a styrofoam mold and displayed it in the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum in California. He also had a 24-foot statue of Trigger made from steel and fiberglass. One other copy of that mold was also made.

It is Bucky the Bronco, which rears above the Denver Bronco Stadium South scoreboard. Number six, Sergeant Reckless. American Marines in Korea bought a mare in October 1952 from a Korean stable boy who needed the money to buy an artificial leg for his sister, who had stepped on a landmine. The Marines named her Reckless after their unit's name, the Reckless Rifles. They made a pet of her and trained her to carry supplies and to evacuate wounded. She learned to travel supply routes without a guide. She learned to travel supply routes without a guide. On one notable day, she made 51 solo trips. Wounded twice, she was given a battlefield rank of corporal in 1953 and promoted to sergeant after the war when she was also awarded two Purple Hearts and a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal. Number seven, Mr. Ed. Mr. Ed was a talking palomino in a 1960s television show by the same name.

At a time when Westerns dominated American television, Mr. Ed was the anti-Western, with the main human character a klutzy architect and the hero a horse that was fond of his meals and his comfortable life, and spoke with the voice of Alan, Rocky, Lane, who made dozens of B-Westerns. But the show was a five-year hit as it married the past to the future. Mr. Ed offered a gentle, homely wisdom that enabled him to straighten out the troubles of the humans around him. The startling special effects that made it appear that the horse was talking melded modern technology with the comforting traditional community depicted in the show. Number eight, Blackjack. Blackjack, named for John Jay Blackjack Pershing, was the riderless

black horse in the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Douglas MacArthur, as well as more than a thousand other funerals with full military honors. A riderless horse with boots reversed in the stirrups symbolized a fallen leader, while Blackjack's brands, a U.S. Army brand and an Army serial number, recalled the Army's history. Black Jack himself was buried with full military honors. The only other horse honored with a military funeral was Comanche. Number nine, Khartoum. Khartoum was the prized stud horse of Jack Waltz, the fictional Hollywood mogul in Mario Puzo's The Godfather. In one of the film version's most famous scenes, after Waltz refuses requests from Don Vito Corleone

to cast singer Johnny Fontaine in a movie, Waltz wakes up to find Khartoum's head in bed with him and agrees to use Fontaine in the film. In the novel, Fontaine wins the Academy Award for his performance. According to Old Hollywood Rumor, the story referred to real events. The rumor was that mobsters persuaded Columbia Pictures executive Harry Cohn to cast Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. As Maggio, Sinatra revived his sagging film career and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Number 10, Secretariat. Secretariat was an American thoroughbred that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown winner in 25 years. His records in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes still stand. After Secretariat was stricken with a painful infection and euthanized in 1989,

an autopsy revealed that he had an unusually big heart. Sports writer Red Smith once asked his trainer how Secretariat had run one morning. Charlie Hatton replied, the trees swayed. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Denham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.