Global Warming ???

Lucy racing through the snow in the backyard
April 22, 2008 Bend OR


How fitting here we are on earth day... waking up to snow. Actually it was a little warmer today. The last four days it has been 20 degrees or below every morning, this morning it was 34. Feels like summer. Actually as I'm writing this it's already 10:00 am and up to 42 degrees and the snow is all gone.

Russcenes the 2nd place horse

Boots Durnell won the Kentucky Derby with a maiden horse so he won a ton of money. Charles “Boots” Durnell was the trainer and owner of the horse "Elwood" who won the Kentucky Derby in 1904.

So he was going to do it again, so he looked and several years later he thought he’d found one he thought could do it. and this horse, a 2 year old, was fast and he was sound and so he bought him an he wanted to go up to where he could get a good price when he bet on him. Cause that’s the way he made so much money when he won the first one. He would let this horse be in front and he’d get up to the wire and they would take him back. They’d never let him finish in front at the wire so the horse learned his lesson real well, to stay back and not finish first.

When he was a 5 yr old, I think it was the meet was up at Long Acres. (WA) This old irish groom had got ahold of the horse, and he had a little accident and he got tangled up with a hind leg and the bumper of a car. It didn’t hurt the horse much, it shoulda hurt him real bad, but it didn’t, it barely took the skin off, but it made a couple of big dents in the car, and the guy needed $25.00 to fix his car. And so my Dad bought Racines for $25.00 and we took him to CA, to Tan Foran, and started him 5 times, I rode him and he was second all five times. He could have won all of them, but he was trained real good, trained to not go to the front.

But I did win once on him up in Winnepeg, Canada at Whittier Park in 1934. So the way I got him to win… the track didn’t have much space it had real long stretches and short turns. Going down the back stretch here, I always ran him in a nose band and blinkers, we weren’t close to the wire, I got him out about the middle of the race track where he couldn’t see another horse and so we went to the front, he was in front when he headed into the stretch and he finished in front. Russcenes, won that race but that’s the only race he ever won. His Dad traded Russcenes to a race announcer for a little filly that was out of a Son of Man O War, her name was Opie Field.

Whittier Park, Winnipeg July 4, 1934

E.M. Marshall, owner (Papa holding horse) A. Marshall up (Ansel)