Nack's Derby Dream and a Summer on the Backstretch

Shortly after hearing of William Nack's passing, my family gathered in my dad's southern California backyard at his fire pit.

Bill and my dad, John McGinnis, met when they were 10 years old in Skokie, Ill. where they walked to Cleveland Grade School together. They stayed close at Niles Township High School where they ran track and cross country. It was during those years that Bill got racetrack fever, spending time at both Washington Park and Arlington Park, studying BloodHorse with the obsession of a convert highlighting a pocket New Testament.

The summer of Bill and John's senior year in high school, Bill got jobs for both of them walking hots at Washington Park. He wrote a full-length feature referencing that summer called "Echoes of an Equine Past" for the Sept. 18, 1989 issue of Sports Illustrated  imbued with his hallmark combination of astonishing statistical detail, meticulous timing, and wistful charm.

In the seventies, Bill was a frequent guest at our home in Orange County when he was in town to cover races at Santa Anita Park, Los Alamitos Race Course, Hollywood Park, and Del Mar. When my sisters and brother and I were little, Bill heralded his arrival with a remarkable imitation of an African elephant. He lumbered down the halls, with an arm extended in front of his face like a trunk, blowing out thunderous pachyderm wails. The four of us scattered, running in all directions, laughing with fear and glee.

In the afternoons, he set up his typewriter on the ping pong table in our backyard in the splash zone of our brand new swimming pool. My siblings and I implored him to watch us as we jumped in one by one over and over again. He cheerfully obliged while hunting and pecking out stories on deadline, drinking jug wine and smoking cigars. 

As a young girl, horses were a symbol of freedom to me. I read horse-themed books, drew countless freehand pictures of them, and collected plastic models of horses on a long shelf in my room. As I read Old Bones, The Wonder Horse, the true story of 1918 Kentucky Derby winner Exterminator, Bill was writing about the best Thoroughbred racers of the day. He noticed my interest, and brought me AP photos from the newsroom; beautiful black and whites of Ruffian, Secretariat, and Seattle Slew. I listened to his stories of the svelte creatures that he knew intimately and posted their photos prominently on my bedroom walls.

I eventually became a columnist for regional magazines in my hometown. The last time I had dinner with Bill, he generously talked shop with me and admonished me to keep writing. One day, when I was a young mother, Bill and my dad showed up at my house when he was in town covering an event. He fulfilled my request for his famous African bull elephant imitation. My kids were impressed, but I was more intrigued by his ability to quote the first line of Anna Karenina in casual conversation. Bill could combine these things effortlessly; elephant calls and the performance of classic literature from memory. He taught me the value of having my favorite literature handy, not only between pages, but between my ears, so it would become a part of me and influence everything I wrote. Soon afterwards, I memorized the opening sentence from "Love in the Time of Cholera" and started learning my favorite Spanish poems by rote as well.

That night at the fire pit, mourning the fresh loss of his childhood friend, my dad raised a toast to Bill, and then he told a story I had never heard he or Bill tell before in their more than sixty years of collaboration; the story of a magnificent horse foaled only in their boyish dreams. I tell it here with help from my dad and in memory of Bill.

In the summer of '59, after graduating from high school,  Bill and John  started their summer job at Washington Park on the south side of Chicago. They bunked together in a tack room above the barn stables and spent the sultry days hot walking the racehorses after exercise, training, or racing. Often times, they drove back to Skokie in the evening to go out on double-dates, only to drive back to the track and do it all again starting at five-thirty in the morning.

In mid-July, the horses were moved to Arlington Park, and Bill and John followed. In addition to their new tack room bunk accommodations, they made $350 a month and were allowed all they could eat at the racetrack cafeteria.

Bill had a maniacal obsession with race stats, and when he and John weren't working, they placed bets, sometimes winning big, other times blowing most their earnings.

"We would rely on either the groom or the exercise rider or trainer to get tips. As it turns out, tips are a dime a dozen around a racetrack." McGinnis said.

Still, the two continued to study BloodHorse and the Daily Racing Form, and a small dream began to germinate.

The days were spent bantering about the merits and pitfalls of the racers they walked and their extended family lineage.

"We'd talk about horses all the time; in the cafeteria where we sat with the other hot walkers from our barn, when we rode in my '54 Dodge to go out on the town, or just laying on our bunks in the tack room on the nights we stayed in." said McGinnis.

In the days of mid-summer, Bill and John's painstaking research and bloodline theories became a plan. They decided the sire would be Falmer, who in 1958 equaled the record at Arlington Park for six furlongs in 1:08 4/5. "So he was a speed horse. He had retired the year before we got there." said McGinnis.

Marti Diana would be the mare. "Bill came up with the idea of buying her, because she wasn't much of a racer herself, but her bloodlines were great." The idea was to buy her for cheap, pay a stud fee for Falmer, and breed them. "Hopefully, we'd get a foal—a horse that we could train." McGinnis recalled.

And so it began. The dream wafted in, heady as the smell of sweet hay mingled with leather, liniment, and the perspiration of their behemoth, velvety-coated charges. It was nurtured while reading BloodHorse and the Form in their bunks to the sounds of contented whinnying in the stables below.

Every racehorse has to have a name. Something wonderful. Something that would sound elegant rolling off the tongues of race announcers. Something that might convince ladies in pin curls and cartwheel hats to open their purses and old men who know better to buy one more ticket. Something that would look stylish in bolded fonts splashed across the front page of the Chicago Tribune on May 6 with an accompanying picture of an otherworldly creature blanketed in a garland of Freedom roses.

Sometime that summer, while walking beside those intelligent beasts, or listening to the radio, or in the cafeteria sitting with the guys from their barn, a name occurred to them. The name of a mid-tempo ballad so languorous and splendid, it defines the essence of that coming-of-age summer all these years later.

"There was a Henry Mancini song called "Dreamsville" on the Peter Gunn album. I used to watch the show. Bill and I both loved that song, and it seemed like a cool name for a racehorse. We decided we would call him Dreamsville; he would be a Derby winner." McGinnis said.

But the summer was ending, and life at the tracks wasn't easy, as McGinnis recalled.

"Part of my motivation to get out of there was that I always liked to have money in my pocket," he said, "But we had either just won a bet and had a couple hundred dollars in our pockets or we were flat broke. It was a good thing room and board was taken care of." 

And so, just as eagerly as they arrived at Washington Park months earlier, they left Arlington Park at the end of the summer; John to work and attend Lincoln College and Bill for the University of Illinois. In the end, the idea of the dream foal, and the summer itself was as consuming, yet ultimately as transitory as a six furlong race.

Dad remembers talking to Bill about their dream foal over the years, but they hadn't revisited the subject recently.

"I wish we could have rehashed our dream one last time," he said.

Back in my dad's yard, we played "Dreamsville" under the stars that night and in the light of the bonfire, I saw his eyes go misty. 

"It was a pipe dream. We were just a couple of kids." and then he paused, perhaps remembering that his friend always had the scoop.

"Bill knows we're talking about this, doesn't he?" he asked as we listened to the languid strains of Mancini dissolve into the starry night.