It Don’t Take Long To Look At A Horseshoe

There were no Blacks in Northern British Columbia; there might be a few now, I don’t really know. The first Blacks I ever saw were in Virginia during a trip to visit relatives. I must say, I was probably guilty of staring as a young teenager, it is hard to remember exactly. I remember being shocked at the sight of Black people; I had seen many natives, including my own mother, and a few orientals, but Blacks are truly unique to someone who has never seen them.

I loved their spicy foods and was always anxious to walk down to the barbecue joint in “colored town” as the local Whites called the area where Blacks lived. I was the only non-Black to walk around in “colored town” and the Blacks found me amusing, most of them were very outgoing and greeted me warmly. The restaurant owners and employees were always glad to see me and treated me as a special customer. I loved barbecue mutton on rye bread with huge slices of Bermuda onion and dill pickles, the barbecue chicken I miss to this day, and the ribs were fantastic.

I plan to go to a barbecue school when I retire to see if I can learn to recapture that flavor. I took some of the techniques and recipes back to the ranch and everyone loved my imitation Woolfolks Family Barbecue at least to the degree that I was able to reproduce it. The Woolfolks employed the whole family, from the grand parents down to little kids gathering kindling. White people would drive to Woolfolks and bring huge pots for meat or beans, but as far as I know I was the only non-Black to sit down at the bar and eat my meals. I wasn’t allowed to drive because I didn’t have a driver’s license, I was too young for civilized Virginia, but I already drove everything from tractors to semi-trucks back home, we all make concessions to live in civilized areas. So I walked to the Wollfolks Barbecue to eat barbecue, a fact that was a source of amazement in the nearby community where I stayed.

Whites asked me about walking through “colored town” and wondered if I was afraid. I always told them that once you have stared the Grizzly in the eye up close and seen his eyelids drop and the eyes go from brown to fiery black and live to talk about it, you have no need to fear anything for you are lucky to still be alive. I figured I was skating on borrowed time at 14, so what was there to be afraid of?

Unfortunately, everyone considered my bubble to be a few degrees off center, but that’s the way I have gone through life and I have outlived almost everyone I knew as a lad.

I later went to college in the US. I am not a social butterfly, but I was so countrified that most of the people in college considered me an oddity. Of course there were many Blacks at college, but I didn’t really fit in with the cosmopolitan kids that were there. Realistically, I should have gone to an agricultural college and had a social life.

My college days were interupted by a period of motorcycle travel and time in the military. In the military, I met Americans of Mexican heritage for the first time, most of whom could speak Spanish. My best friend in the service was an Apache from New Mexico, we traveled through Northern Mexico together and he taught me the basics of Spanish and of Mexican cuisine, skills that I still use.

After finishing up my college career, I made a living using the skills I used on the ranch, skills that I acquired as a young teenager before becoming educated, skills that I still use to make a living, 50 years later. I could shoe horses and hold my own, but my real skills were in doing teeth. There are many guys who can shoe horses and have them able to walk away without being lame after nailing on four shoes; however, there aren’t but a few that can do the dental work without restraint and a bottle of sedation and syringes. I have an unusual ability to put horses in a deep trance state and they allow me to grind, cut, and extract teeth. I know it sounds unusual, but I do it almost every day and I can do the same things on humans and have done it many times for cowboys who couldn’t afford to go see a human dentist. I’ve extracted tens of thousands of teeth, some are easier than others.

The fastest and easiest money was to be made on the race tracks. To work on the big tracks, you need a license to perform the different trades. I wasn’t allowed to have a dental license, unless I worked with a vet. Since I have been fiercely independent all my life, that didn’t really appeal to me. My other option was to get a horseshoer’s license and perform dentistry as a side line. There was one hitch, I had to pass the union exam and join the union. Thus I began my only union affiliation. I showed up for the winter meet at Oaklawn during the mid-seventies, back then they used Clydesdales to pull the starting gate around to the different starting positions. The owner of the track needed shoes on his beloved draft horses and none of the racetrack shoers or platers as they liked to be called, wanted anything to do with those big bruisers, most of them had never worked on draft horses. I had learned to shoe on big work horses so the owner wanted me to take the test so that I could hurry up and shoe his horses and the platers wanted me to pass the test so that I could shoe the big horses and they wouldn’t need to worry about a non-union horseshoer working on the track doing work that they didn’t want to do.

I stayed with a horseshoer, Melton Everson, we had met down in Louisiana a few years earlier; like me, he had never attended primary or high school, but unlike me he had never learned to read or write. Yet he had an unusual gift, he could play poker with high rollers all night while sipping a fifth of whiskey. He would often clean out the jockeys, agents, and trainers who were foolish enough to play against him, because the next morning he could tell you about every hand, the cards that were played, the sequence of cards, the cards that were still in the deck and the amounts of the individual bets. He was six foot three, always wore a western hat, chewed snuff, was a champion bronc rider, and he drove a one ton truck a long time before they were popular.

Melton usually traveled to Detroit Race Course for the summer and had been there for the race riots. Years later he would be asked to describe what happened when he became lost and drove through the middle of the race riots with his one ton pick up, wearing his Western hat. Using his accent rich and laconic way of speaking he woud describe driving through the chaos of burning cars and buildings and then he would say, “but those people are not so bad, they would hold up their fist in the air and look at me and I’d wave to them and they would just bust out laughing. I think everybody has got them figured all wrong.” Of course Melton’s naivete and slow manner of speaking was hilarious to the cynical race track gamblers and he would be asked to repeat the story several times a week; of course, he was trying to get them to think he was an ignorant country bumpkin so that they would all sit down to a high stakes poker game and he would slowly skin them alive.

Melton was always lost because he couldn’t read road signs or maps and had to pull into places like Chicago and ask which road to take to get to New Orleans or Hot Springs. Needless to say, it always took him a few extra days to make a trip. He is still alive and heads up a large wholesale business with a young beautiful wife.

Melton was an officer in the Hot Spring Local and that is the only reason I went there to take the union test. In great secrecy, he told me there were problems because I was supposed to take my test in the area I was planning to work and that my home in Canada, no one had ever heard of BC or the Peace River Country, was closest to Chicago and that by union law, I should be taking my exam in Chicago. Melton was distressed over the issues that I thought were almost laughable. A few days later, he told me that the Chicago Local President was going to be there for my exam and that he thought everything could proceed normally. He said the Chicago President was really different, but that I would probably get along with him. While I wondered whether I had been insulted or complimented, he told me the Chicago President’s name was Slim Shady and I would know him when I saw him. That was all he planned to tell me and once Melton was done talking he was done; you might as well talk to a tree.

The race meet at Oak Lawn in Hot Springs is a winter meet, so as luck would have it there was a thunder storm the day I was supposed to take my union test. I only needed five Journeyman Horse Shoers to be on my board, but only a crazy man would try to shoe race horses during a thunderstorm; consequently, there were a bunch of them crowded into a tiny blacksmith shop to watch me take my examination. Six of them were playing poker at a table with several more including Melton watching the game. They knew his uncanny abilities and he was only allowed to observe and could be called upon for an accurate history of each hand, as far back as five years. There were several more standing around watching me and since the youngest ones were at least 20 years older than me, I was a little nervous.

It is traditional for the guy taking the test to bring a fifth of whiskey and I had asked Melton what kind of whiskey I should buy. Unfortunately, Melton gets words transposed, he had meant to say Crown Royal, but instead told me they liked Royal Crown. Back then they actually made Royal Crown whiskey and it only cost five dollars a fifth. That was all right with me, I had to be careful, setting up at a new race track was a gamble as to whether you would pick up new business or not. I was spending a lot of money on the exam and the initiation fee; so, I was glad not to be buying a twenty dollar bottle of whiskey.

The whiskey was in a brown paper sack on a small counter by the door; although, several of the platers looked at the bottle, they just put it back in the sack and walked away. I was feeling insulted and nervous. I had wondered why they liked such cheap whiskey and now they wouldn’t even drink it.

Most of these guys were locals right out of the hills of the Ozarks. They were salt of the earth and out of a different era with all the typical prejudices of that time and place. They were successful and made tremendous money from their trade; some of them held onto their money and parlayed it into estates like Melton and others tended to let their money slide through their fingers indulging in the three vices of horse shoers women, whiskey, and gambling. Most of them were hooked on all three.

In the mean time, I was expected to take my test with a small anvil that I could pick up with one hand and a bunch of hammers, tongs, and other equipment that I wasn’t familiar with. The forge was working well and I had my own coking coal so there would be not problem with soft, cheap coal with impurities that can ruin a weld.

I was expected to heat three bars of iron and pull them through a die while they were red hot and hammer a continuous groove in the metal on three different bars. One bar was to made into a bar shoe, one was to be made into a front racing shoe with a racing toe grab welded into place with copper, and the last one was to be made into a hind racing shoe with a turned heel caulk on one heel and a grass racing caulk on the other heel. The front and hind shoes were expected to be perfectly shaped, the bar shoe was expected to fit a pattern.

The president of the union local drew the pattern for the bar shoe on the wall from a used shoe and said, “there it is, make it match”. He was the only one in the room who was acting halfway friendly towards me, as I got started with the exam. I dropped my tools several times and was wondering if I was going to fail miserably. A Black man walked in the Blacksmith shop; he was well dressed in fancy city clothes, instead of the Western duds the rest of us were wearing. He also had a bowler hat and he seemed quite comfortable in the shop, despite his appearance. I was frustrated and was wondering who this new stranger was who just dropped in to watch me struggle.

He pulled the bottle out of the sack and slid it right back in and said, “He buys cheap whiskey.”

Right then, I figured this had to be Slim Shady. I dropped my tools a couple more times and the Black man said, “Maybe you should have a drink of whiskey.”

I walked over to the fifth of whiskey and drank about a quarter of the bottle. One of the old guys at the poker table said, “That’s the first time we ever had a guy drink his own whiskey.”

I thought to myself, to Hell with you, if you don’t want to drink my whiskey, I will. Walking back to the anvil and forge I could feel the whiskey’s warm glow giving me power and confidence. I pulled out a red hot bar of iron and rubbed it back and forth in the swedge block to heat up the die and the put the iron bar back in the fire. I then rubbed a ball of bees’ wax over the block. The wax melted and burned leaving a waxy coating over the die. It allows the hot iron to slide through without sticking.

One of the poker players said, “What’s he doing over there.” Melton said in his slow, quiet rodeo cowboy voice, “Maybe you should watch and learn something.” There were two things that I knew at the time and later confirmed, no one ever challenged Melton or Slim Shady and they were the only two guys in the room who seemed to be on my side.

I started swedging the next red hot bar and was swinging the hammer from way above my head. Each time the hammer hit it stretched and grooved three inches of bar stock at a time. The hammer hits were so powerful that the swedges on the bars looked like they had been cut by a machine. I heard one of the poker players say, “if he misses that swedging block, a piece of that old anvil will be coming over here”. I laughed to myself, there was no way I was going to miss today.

It only took three or four heats to swedge each shoe. I turned the shoes with a wooden mallet by wrapping one side at a time at a diagonal around the little horn of the anvil. In this red hot condition the shoes were really soft like cooked pasta. I turned the heels for the hind shoe and sweated in a spring steel toe grab with copper and borax. I tossed it on the floor and let it smoke a bit as it burned the plywood floor. The front shoe received a toe grab and the I cut the heels with a “V” shaped ‘hardy’ so that the ends were tapered in a uniform manner. I decided to make a heart bar, the most difficult of the three different bar shoes. I walked over to the whiskey and had another good drink, Slim Shady smiled and said, “All right, my kind of man”.

I turned the heels up and shaped them like the frog of a hoof. I put a welding compound between the two heels and the poured borax over the area to be welded. I heated up this shoe a little hotter than the others, until the heel area was sparking and starting to burn.

I pulled the shoe out of the fire and got ready to hit it with the hammer to weld it when I noticed that all the weld splatter and flux would fly all over Slim Shady and his fancy clothes if I hit it straight ahead, so I angled it toward the poker table a smacked it hard, the white hot splatter flew all over the table and players. They were cursing and jumping around to put out the little fires in their clothing. Slim Shady started chuckling, in the six years that I knew him as a friend, it was to be the only time I ever saw him laugh.

Normally, when a guy makes a bar shoe he checks it with the pattern to make sure it is the right shape or fit, because you can adjust the shoe a bit if you are off. Race horse shoes have a tolerance of a sixteenth of an inch so it is important that they fit well or you can cause a wreck out on the track. I threw it on the floor and walked over for another drink of whiskey. I was already drunk and had lost interest in the test.

The Hot Springs President looked at me like I had lost my marbles, he bent a heavy piece of wire and picked up the shoe to cool it in the quench bucket. He then put it against the drawing on the wall and said, “It fits perfectly.”

Now the poker players crowded around to look at the shoe and the pattern as if they didn’t believe him, I glanced over and sure enough it was exactly the same size. Some times you just luck out.

Slim asked me if I was going to Chicago to work. I told him I had work waiting for me, once I got there. He asked me to step outside for a conference.

We walked into the shed row of the closest barn. He explained that I should have taken my exam in Chicago. These guys just wanted to get the cost of the exam for their local. He assured me that everything would be OK because he was the President of the Chicago Local and he understood the situation. He said he couldn’t do anything about the cost of the test, but he was going to get my initiation fee for the Chicago Local. It was all news to me, I had no idea how these things worked. Slim said if anything came up, I was to come see him and to consider mysef a member of the Chicago Local and not the Hot Springs Local, because Canada is a lot closer to Chicago than it is to Hot Springs. He shook my hand with a strength that belied his fancy clothes and a hat that looked vaguely like an upside down chamber pot. He said he would get me some horses to work on and not to trust these guys too much. I told him I had known Melton for years and I was staying with him. He said that’s a good situation, at least, until I had built up a business. We walked over to the club house and had a couple of drinks, I could tell by the reactions of some of the local bettors that I was crossing a line, but I didn’t really care, bettors are stricken with a weakness of the spirit and they weren’t going to intimidate me because I had a new friend that dressed a little fancy.

After my first race meet was over, I drove down to see Slim at his winter home in New Orleans. He gave me some work at the Fair Grounds (the New Orleans Race Track) and introduced me to his life in New Orleans. I think the best way to describe Slim’s life In New Orleans is to say that he was a Hedonist. His girl friends literally timed their arrivals and departures according to the bus schedules. After entertaining all night, he would drop into the race track to start work at the crack of noon. He would shoe six or eight horses and rush back to his house to meet the onslaught of determined admirers.

I would be exhausted after shoeing 8 to 10 horses and doing dental work on that many again and go back to Slim’s house to pass out, only to be awakened over and over by the all night parties and the sound of the front door and other noises I wont mention. After a couple of weeks, I told Slim I needed to go to Keeneland and Churchill to do some dentistry work and that I would see him in Chicago at Hawthorn, but the real reason I wanted to leave was that I was exhausted and needed to rest.

He shook my hand and told me that I was a true gentleman and that he was anxious to see me in Chicago. I’ve always questioned that remark, I knew that officers were deemed gentlemen, but some of them weren’t. I had never been called a gentleman, but I appreciated the compliment.

I met Slim Shady at Hawthorn and he invited me to share his blacksmith shop. Judging from the tight knit group of Chicago platers and their reactions to me, I figured t was a good thing to have Slim Shady as an ally. The platers in Hot Springs were not overly friendly, but they were not gossipy types like these Chicago platers, a very feminine like trait in my opinion, they made sure to make me feel unwelcome in apposition to Slim’s offer of welcome. There was only one other Black plater in Chicago and he tended to range between Detroit, Chicago, and Kentucky. His name was Sylvester and the two men were in stark contrast. Sylvester was a tan color and Slim was as black as coking coal. Sylvester was without muscles and Slim was built like one of the Greco/Roman statues portraying the perfect masculine form. In this day and age we have athletes who work out to build musculature and we have body builders who try to build huge muscles, I personally think all this work out stuff is vastly inferior to the muscles brought on by hard work.

Almost every night, Slim and I would meet in the blacksmith shop to make tools and shoes. Slim was an artist and a musician with a hammer over an anvil or a stall jack. He could also carry rhythm while driving the nails through a shoe and the hoof. He would place leather or styrofoam under his anvil to get different ringing tones and no matter what he was making, rhythm was employed. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but I enjoy listening to good rhythm and Slim was the best. Sylvester also had a talent for music with a hammer and it was fun to listen to the two of them shoeing in the same area and responding to each other’s music with the same rhythm or a complimenting rhythm.

It’s funny that the platers in Chicago were almost all Irish and lived life in a glum sulk, resenting everyone, but taking great pride in their Irish heritage. In a few years, I would be taking several trips a year to Ireland and found the Irish people in Ireland to be the warmest, happiest people on earth. Yet, at the time these guys were all wrapped up in the Northern Irish problems and although none of them had been to Ireland, they all assumed a great injustice was being committed in Belfast and Northern Ireland, which is a very small section of Ireland. There were large jars in the bars that had signs that said give a dollar to buy a bullet to kill an English soldier. I didn’t contribute, but years later I heard that most of the funds just gave the bar owners and jar men an extra source of tax free income, yet the hatred was encouraged and allowed to fester.

One of the Irish platers came up to me one afternoon and insisted on knowing what my heritage was. I told him my first relative in the new world came over on the Mayflower as an orphan and indentured serving boy. That was 375 years earlier and since then there had been thousands of antecedents in my blood line, but I didn’t get a chance to explain. He backed off in anger and said, “I should have known you were English.”

I thought to myself, damn that pesky relative of mine tainting my blood stream with his unworthy DNA almost 4 centuries ago, how dare he! Although, my dad had this early man’s family bible, he was one of maybe ten thousand who donated to my DNA that were alive at that time, but he was more than enough to mark me as an evil seed of England.

Slim and I enjoyed our time together, he made a custom driving hammer for me and I asked Melton to do the same thing in 88. Eventually, Slim’s hammer developed a crack and I had to retire it, but Melton’s hammer is still usable, but I will never wear it out at this late stage of m life. I hope to give the hammers to one of my boys along with a written history.

We liked making tools and instruments from used tool and spring steel from cars and trucks. First we would anneal or soften the steel by letting it cool slowly from a red heat while sitting buried in a large bucket of sand. The next evening we would shape the instrument over the anvil while red hot and then we would temper the steel with a controlled quench in water or oil when the steel cooled to the straw color.

I was making shoes one evening and tossing them into a sand box to cool: Slim was sitting at the table drinking Crown Royal. Beaudro the Tout walked in and feigned interest in the shoes I was making. A tout is considered the lowest life form of the low life’s on the track. Despised by hard working types, the tout has no shame. They mingle with the crowds and claim to have inside information and they will give you a sure winner if you will bet for them or share your winnings with them. If they can find enough saps for each race, one of the horses is bound to win and they can make money. It’s a sad way to plod through life, but there are touts at every race track.

He picked up a shoe and instantly threw it back in the sand. He acted as if nothing happened and stood there hoping to get information for tomorrow’s racing from Slim or me. I looked up from the anvil and asked, “What’s the matter, was it hot?”

He looked me in the eye and said, “No, no, it just doesn’t take long to look at a horseshoe.” It was all I could do to keep a straight face. He asked us a few questions and then moved on, realizing that Slim and I planned on taking secrets and inside information to the grave.

Usually when Americans find out a politician isn’t what he was supposed to be, they vote him out of office and consider it a lesson well learned. The process of determining a man’s level of incompetence usually takes years or nearly the length of office; there are exceptions, Jimmy Carter displayed his incompetency and weak willed indecisiveness early on and America had to suffer interminably through his presidency. Obama has also been a hot horseshoe for America; his view of America as just another nation without its shining beacon of freedom that has held promise for generations to people from all over the world, but more of a average country that sits ready to be judged and directed by a corrupt UN does not sit well with Americans except for Marxist Ideologues and their Useful Idiots.

As Obama’s contempt for America and his desire to see America struggling and weak in the face of aggression and terrorism, we can see his distaste and disdain for the America of history, much like the distaste Slim Shady and I felt toward the tout who lived by perpetuating a continuous confidence game to make a living and get by without working. To us he was despicable and unworthy of consideration or conversation. Did we engage in prejudicial behavior? Your damn right we did!

Slim and I took chances every day to work on the fastest, most dangerous horses in the world. We had marketable skills and people were anxious to contract us to provide those skills to keep their expensive racing horses in top shape. Although Beaudro lived by his wits, he had no marketable skills and was a parasite that cheapened the race track experience for the innocent race fan. Thus he was not worthy of us and was beneath our contempt, later on we laughed at the burns he must have received from the hot horseshoe. In the world of Political Correctness, a phrase borrowed from the worst years of Sino-Soviet Communist purges when hundreds of millions were being either killed or reeducated to become Politically Correct, this phrase was implanted into our national consciousness by the Socialist left to be acceptted without question like the student goons of Mao during the Cultural Revolution; Slim and I would be considered politically incorrect for having revulsion at the sight of this low life and not warning him of the potential danger of hot horseshoes and not giving him inside information that he could take into the stands to be even more of a cultural wonder for the rubes in the stands.

While some matters of prejudice seem natural, others are based on faulty logic. In Chicago and Hot Springs, I was considered an outsider and there to rob the local tradesmen of their potential for money and business. Except for Melton and Shady, I would have been lonely and depressed with the rude and derisive treatment I received. I am classified as White because of the color of my hide, but up close, when you examine my features and the coarse texture of my hair and the strange green color of my eyes, it is easy to see I am not the Lilly from pure Northern European stock you might have expected. If I wanted to translate that rejection into a bigger issue because of my mixed race status, in our modern society we would have a serious conflict; if we blame the rejection on my foreign sounding accent it doesn’t seem so serious; perhaps, if we say that the Irish platers disliked me because I wasn’t Irish and the Ozark platers disliked me because I was the wrong type of hillbilly, it becomes even less serious.

I was left with two choices, I could complain, piss, and moan to people who could care less or do my work and consider the Irish platers to be a bunch of jerks. I chose the latter and worked in Chicago for almost six years before opting out for semi-retirement in British Columbia. During this period of my life, Slim Shady was my only friend among the platers.

In this life, we have fears, some are real and based on fact, others are imagined and may not even be real, based purely on vivid imaginations. I consider crossing wild rivers to be a reasonable fear; although, like Grizzlies you don’t need to fear them, but you damn well better know what they can do and respect them and their unique abilities. Walking down through “colored town” was an unnatural fear that wasn’t based in fact, nor was the fear of sitting at the counter and eating barbecue. I must say that while walking through “colored town” and eating at Woolfolks, I was shown the most respect and kindness by strangers that I have ever known.

Epilogue: Two years after I left Chicago, the wife of a Black trainer, (the business that I had waiting for me in Chicago that I had told Slim Shady about) wrote and informed me that her husband had just recently died of a heart attack and that Slim Shady also died of a disease that took him very quickly, while he was in a charity ward of the hospital. She said he had turned almost white at the end with white hair as he lay wasting away to nothing. She told me how proud her husband was to have a “White” dentist and plater that treated him with respect. She said that he told all their friends about me and loved to tell the story of the first horse I did for him at Churchill Downs, a horse that the other guys wouldn’t touch because he liked to “Jump Around”. I was profoundly saddened by the loss of two friends.