DERBY DELIGHTS : Two-Year-Old Museum in Louisville Is Paradise for Fans of the Run for Roses

If you phone the Kentucky Derby Museum and are put on hold you hear a playback of Alysheba winning this year’s Derby.

Every day of the year is Derby Day at the Kentucky Derby Museum a few steps from the main entrance to Churchill Downs.

The museum is alive with the sites, sounds, traditions, emotions and dramatic moments of 113 consecutive years of what many consider the greatest two minutes in sports.

The run for the roses is a special two minutes in the lives of most Americans the first Saturday each May.

If you visit the $7.5 million museum you enter a time machine filled with photographs, films, audio-visual exhibits and memorabilia of the history of thoroughbred racing in general and the world’s most famous horse race, the Kentucky Derby, in particular.

Since the Kentucky Derby Museum opened a month before the running of the 111th Derby in 1985 more than 325,000 men, women and children have seen it. Already it is the most popular attraction in Louisville and one of the most popular places to go to in all of Kentucky.

Most people, who visit the museum, have never seen a Kentucky Derby. Many have never seen a horse race.

Corky Probst, 10, sixth grader from Collinsville, Ill., in the museum with his mother, Jeanie, had never seen horses race. Yet, here he was, bent over the back of a life-size thoroughbred in an electric starting gate used in 18 Kentucky Derbys, pretending what it would be like to be a jockey in the big race.

For the avid racing fan the museum is pure heaven. It’s the largest museum devoted to showcasing the thoroughbred horse, the racing industry and the Kentucky Derby, from its first running in 1875.

That was the year 29-year-old Meriwether Lewis Clark, grandson of William Clark of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, owner of a track later named after his uncles, John and Henry Churchill, held a race for championship 3-year-olds, a stakes race he called the Kentucky Derby.

A crowd of 10,000 was on hand. Aristides won the race in 2 minutes 37 3/4 seconds on the same ground trod by Derby winners ever since. It was a mile-and-a-half run in the old days, a mile-and-a-quarter today. Best time ever was Secretariat’s 1:59 2/5 in 1973. The purse for Aristides’ owner totaled a mere $2,850. Pamela and Dorothy Scharbauer, owner of Alysheba, walked away with $618,600 this year.

In the museum’s Great Hall is the Aristides Theater, named after the first winner, where films celebrating the history of the Kentucky Derby are shown.

Suspended from the ceiling of the three-level, 46,000-square-foot museum are banners with profiles, names and winning years of 12 of the greatest horses in the history of the Derby:

Hindoo, 1881; Exterminator, 1918; Gallant Fox, 1930; War Admiral, 1937; Whirlaway, 1941; Count Fleet, 1943; Citation, 1948; Swaps, 1955; Secretariat, 1973; Seattle Slew, 1977; Affirmed, 1978 and Spectacular Bid, 1979.

A spectacular 360-degree sight and sound multi-image show of a typical Derby Day utilizing 96 projectors is viewed on huge panels above the Great Hall which is oval-shaped to represent the famous mile oval Churchill Downs track.

Depicted is the running of the 110th Derby in 1984 won by Swale out of Claiborne Farm, Perris, Ky. The feeling, flavor, color, sound and ambiance of Churchill Downs is captured in sound bites made that day and from thousands of still photographs projected on the panels.

The crowds in the historic green and white grandstand, the longest grandstand in North America. The masses of people in the infield. The beauty of the gardens. The activity in the jockey’s room. The playing and singing of “My Old Kentucky Home.”

The gates open. The horses race around the track. The result board. The Winner’s Circle.

Before the race jockey Laffit Pincay expresses his emotions: “The Kentucky Derby is a fantasy for me, a beautiful feeling, what you like to do best.” In the Winner’s Circle he confesses: “I asked God to help me win this race. I never asked God to let me win a race before . . . “

Head stones mark the grave sites of three Kentucky Derby winners on the museum grounds, Broker’s Tip, who won in 1933, Swaps (1955) and Carry Back (1961).

Broker’s Tip won the famous “fighting finish” race when jockeys Don Meade aboard Broker’s Tip and Herb Fisher on Head Play were embroiled in a heated slash and pull altercation in the final seconds of the race.

It was the only race Broker’s Tip won in his career. The purse was $48,925. Broker’s Tip was donated to the University of California Veterinary School at Davis. For more than 30 years after the horse died in 1953 students studied Broker’s Tip’s bones in a comparative anatomy course.

Jim Bolus, sports writer for the Kentucky Thoroughbred Assn., has a hobby of finding out what happened to Derby winners. He tracked down Broker’s Tip’s bones. Charles G. Plopper, chairman of the Department of Anatomy at UC Davis’ Vet School was contacted and asked if the university would donate the remains to the Kentucky Derby Museum for proper burial.

Plopper shipped the skeletal remains to Louisville and for that was made an honorary Kentucky colonel. Interment ceremonies were held for the horse this past April 15, a few hundred yards from his greatest glory.

A Derby time machine permits visitors to select any Derby race since 1918 and watch a filmed replay on a giant screen. You can weigh yourself on a jockey’s scale used for 60 years on Derby Day.

In the Grandstand Theater famous races from around the world such as the English Derby, the Japanese Derby, are screened. The Churchill Downs Winner’s Circle and tote board are reproduced in scale.

Memorabilia from winning horses down through the years, shoes, tack, saddle and silks are on display. A fine arts gallery features artistic work focused on thoroughbreds.

Graphic displays explain such things as terms used in racing like “going to China” meaning a horse that constantly paws the ground, and “smart money,” sudden significant bets. A huge photo caption “how the hat industry went down the tubes” shows a photograph of the crowd at the Kentucky Derby in 1925. All the men were wearing hats.

A photo of Eddie Arcaro shows him face down in mud after being thrown from a horse. The caption reads: “A jockey must be strong and agile, must be brave, must be tough . . . “ Arcaro appeared in the Derby 21 times is tied with Bill Hartack for the most winners with five.

Visitors to the museum are given a short walking tour of Churchill Downs and have an opportunity few ever get, to pet a thoroughbred, Groton Cup, bred to race but injuries ended his career. Groton Cup, grandson of Citation, is also descended from Groton, Nashua, Nasrullah, Epitome and Bull Lea on both the dam and sire side.

Bill Ray, 40, executive director of the Kentucky Derby Museum, is a native Southern Californian. He received a U.S. history degree from University of California and a Master’s in history from Cal State Hayward. He spent time as exhibits curator at the State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, helped build the world’s largest petroleum museum at Midland, Tex., and was executive director of the Museum of Science and Industry at Tampa. The Derby Museum has a $1.2 million annual operating budget and a staff of 20.

The museum is the legacy of J. Graham Brown, avid horse owner and breeder, a major stockholder in Churchill Downs for years. Brown owned the famous Brown Hotel in Louisville and was one of the largest land owners in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida with hundreds of thousands of acres.,

Single his entire life, he left his fortune to the Brown Foundation which supports the Brown Cancer Center and numerous major philanthropies in Kentucky. One of the few specific requests in his will was to build a world-class museum for the Kentucky Derby. The museum is a non-profit corporation with no legal or formal connection to Churchill Downs. It is administered by a 12-member board of directors made up mostly of Louisville people.