On the first Saturday after Thanksgiving, there was only one place to be – John and Kappy Hall’s farm, for the big race.

John Hall is fond of the word “heuristic.” It refers to the act of proceeding to a solution by trial and error, by rules that are loosely defined. As John puts it, “One thing just leads to another.” Heuristic is perhaps the perfect word to describe the evolution of an annual horse race that John and his friend Jim Hoe thought up and pulled off back in the early 1970s, back when the Island still had a blush of innocence, back in a time when the rules were most certainly “loosely defined.”

I’d heard rumors about this horse race for years. Often, when I described the location of our house in West Tisbury, people would say, “Oh, that’s up there where they used to have the horse race.” Our property does abut a considerable amount of pastureland, but I’ve had a difficult time imagining just where such a race could have taken place, and when pressed for details, people have been a bit vague.  

It wasn’t until I bumped into West Tisbury native Sandy Fisher last winter that I started to get a clearer picture of the event and, moreover, to appreciate its significance. Sandy grew up on Nip ’n Tuck Farm off State Road, just over from John and Kappy Hall’s farm, where the races were held. Sandy informed me that she had been to all the races, and in fact, her brother Fred Fisher had won the first one. She gave me the names of many of the people who were involved. She also told me I absolutely had to speak to a gentleman named Hector Asselin of Vineyard Haven, who had in his possession an actual film of the event.

The “film” was twenty minutes of black-and-white, sixteen-millimeter footage that was shot by Allen Look. Allen had cut together a four- or five-
minute video of the 1972 event, but the outtakes somehow found their way to the Tisbury dump, where some twenty years ago they were discovered
by Hector. When I spoke with Hector, he thought he still had the footage somewhere in storage, but being an avid film collector, he had thousands of feet of film to search through, and it took him a couple of months to locate it. In the meantime, I began speaking with people who had been involved with the races, starting with John Hall.

As John recalled, in 1971 he and his friend Jim Hoe were sitting around playing backgammon near a place they called Magic Pond when the idea was hatched. The summer was over and they were looking for something to do. Jim had recently bought a horse, which is what sparked the idea for the race.
Racing is an old Vineyard tradition. Harness racing was popular on the Island in the late 1800s; races were held on a track built by Johnson Whiting at the Old Parsonage Farm. But thoroughbred racing was another thing entirely.

Back in 1971, if you had an idea to do something, even something as ambitious and potentially dangerous as a horse race, you just did it. There was no permitting process, no insurance waivers, no police details to assemble. As Stefan Baumrin of West Tisbury recalls, “It was a whole different time back then; there were less than 150 houses in all of West Tisbury. You also have to remember that this was right at the time of the Vietnam War, and the kids out here were part of the fringe population. You had trust-fund kids and kids just running away. It was very counterculture, and just the appearance of a policeman exercising authority was as spooky as the National Guard.”

It was decided that the race would be held the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and a week or so prior to that, John had a circular track cut in his field.
However, after some of the riders tried the track out, it was decided that with its unbanked curves it was too dangerous, so the course was reconfigured to be a straightaway, about one-fifth of a mile in length.

 Julie Hoffman Hursey, who was sixteen and living in Oak Bluffs when she first raced, remembers, “The track went straight across the field to the finish line, and then you had to take a sharp left to avoid running into the trees. That’s where things got dicey. The first year, my pony William pulled a muscle making the turn and it took months to heal. Sometimes the track was frosty or muddy, and when you got a group of horses turning sharply, it was a bad accident waiting to happen.”

And yet somehow, in the five years that the races were held at John and Kappy’s farm, there was never a serious accident. The closest call was in the first year when Julie La Hart was thrown from her horse and received a slight concussion. But other than that, the race was, by all reports, a huge success. Even without any official publicity, a couple hundred spectators turned out to watch thirteen horses compete that first year.  

According to an account in the Vineyard Gazette, “a German shepherd and a grey Nubian goat had to be removed from the track before the first race could begin.” Fred Fisher Sr. of Nip ’n Tuck Farm was there giving rides to kids on his horse-drawn wagon. Bob Woodruff of West Tisbury had a “stone sled” pulled by his ox Gerry – although having nothing to hold on to, kids and adults alike frequently fell off as they went around in circles.

But the big winner of the day was young Freddy Fisher, who was fourteen. There were several preliminary heats, and the winner of each heat competed in the final race. As Fred recalls, “I was riding a horse called Frosty; he was a real mongrel – mixed breed, crooked legs, worst-looking horse we’ve ever owned – but he was quick off the line. It was a short race, so that’s what it all came down to.”

More than one person commented on Fred’s riding ability. Pam Wall, now living in Connecticut, remembers, “Fred was such a good rider . . . like an Indian who could ride bareback, backwards and forwards.”

Everyone who participated in the race paid a $10 entry fee, and the money was then divided among the first, second, and third prizes. Fred won the purse of $90, along with a bottle of champagne (not a bad haul for a fourteen-year-old) and a wreath that Frosty managed to partially eat before it actually found its place around his neck. But that wasn’t the only money to change hands that day. John Hall’s brother Joe was in charge of the betting.

 “I was trying to figure out what my role would be in the thing,” says Joe, “so I set up a betting booth. It was pretty disorganized at first. I think I had a pad and a pencil the first year, and people would say, ‘I want to bet on this,’ and I’d say, ‘Okay, give me your money, and here’s a receipt.’ But by the second year, I got pretty good at it, and by the third year, it was quite a feat. The last year, I was working at Helios and we had six or seven people from the restaurant standing in the back of a pickup truck taking bets. I actually made the tickets ahead of time so there were corresponding numbers to the horses, and I had a chalkboard with everybody’s name on it and the horses’ numbers.”

As Stefan Baumrin points out, “The betting pool was primarily on the riders, because no one had ever seen the horses before.” And what a group of horses
it was.  

Sandy Fisher remembers that there were a lot of horses on the Vineyard back then. Tashmoo Farm in Tisbury, Sweetened Water Farm in Edgartown, and Pond View Farm in West Tisbury boarded horses; as many as a thousand horses of various breeds may have been on the Island. There was everything from Arabs and Appaloosas to standardbreds and even a few thoroughbreds, but by and large, they were a pretty motley group.

Wendy LeRoux of West Tisbury recalls, “They were the shaggiest, most mud-caked, burr-ridden bunch you’d ever seen. There would be the occasional well-groomed horse, but not many.”

But that didn’t mean they couldn’t run. Pam Wall was the overall winner in 1972, but as she remembers more than thirty years later, she definitely didn’t win on style points.

“I was supposed to ride an elegant, gorgeous horse called Holly, but at the last minute Kate Murphy took Holly, and I ended up with a horse called Zach. Zach wasn’t much to look at, but he had a big heart. I strapped on a motorcycle helmet and went up to the starting line. Most of these horses weren’t used to racing, and at the starting line, anything could happen. Some horses were traumatized and some actually went off in the wrong direction. I was lucky; Zach headed straight for the finish line, lowered his body mass to about three inches off the ground, and we won.”

Julie Hoffman Hursey faced a similar challenge:

“I remember the race in 1974 so clearly. The horse I was riding was named Horatio. Horatio was about seventeen and had not been getting much exercise in recent years. He was pleasant but pokey. Not a contender, I thought. There was a woman named Cheryl Leavitt who raced against me in the first heat. She worked at Scrubby Neck Farm and arrived with a beautiful black horse that was quickly considered to be the favorite. Cheryl was decked out in jodhpurs and boots and the whole equestrian kit, and her horse had a beautiful saddle and martingale and some kind of wraps around its front legs. They looked like professionals.  

“I was riding Horatio bareback with an overly large hard hat someone had lent me. He had a swayback and a barrel belly and stood grazing at the starting line while Cheryl and her spirited horse pranced around us.

“‘Just stay out of my way!’ She barked. I didn’t think it would be a problem.  

“Then the starting gun went off. Horatio picked up his head and bolted to the other end of the field with the black horse in hot pursuit. It was over before I could get over my shock at what had happened. Horatio had continued to run around the track and head toward home, and I realized I should probably go back and congratulate the winner. My borrowed hard hat had been over my eyes, and I couldn’t really tell what had happened. I was so surprised that Horatio could run that fast, and was concentrating hard on making the turn at the end of the track. When I came back to the field everyone was yelling, ‘You won! You won!’ They were as surprised as I was. Cheryl loaded her horse into a trailer and left in a huff. She didn’t even stay to watch the next heat. It was probably humiliating to lose to a horse that was old enough to be her horse’s great-grandfather.”

The horse races were run at John and Kappy’s for five years, the last race being held in 1975. In the first year, there may have been two hundred people in attendance. By the last year there were well over one thousand. Today, if someone whips out a harmonica at Beetlebung Corner, he can draw that many people in a heartbeat, but keep in mind that the year-round population in the early ’70s was only around six thousand people. Fred Fisher believes that it was probably the biggest event ever held at that time of year on the Island. But ultimately, the races may have become a victim of their own success. According to Joe Hall, “It just got a little too big to manage.”  

In the following years, the races would be resurrected out at Scrubby Neck. They became a fundraiser for the Nathan Mayhew Seminars, a nonprofit center for advanced education and career development. Back at John and Kappy’s there was no admission, no charge for parking . . . no rules. That was the beauty of it. People cooked up big vats of stew, onion soup, cocoa, and hot mulled wine – all free for the taking. John’s daughter Arabella, who was just a preschooler at the time, can still remember helping their friend Alex Taylor crush apples to make cider for the event. And John would go off-Island to buy a truckload of Old Milwaukee at $2 a case that he would then freely distribute at the race. That’s the kind of deal it was.

By the time it got to Scrubby Neck, things had changed. “It lost a lot of its Island charm after those wild early years,” says Julie Hoffman Hursey, “and became a little more of a wine-and-cheese event.”  

Around the middle of September, Hector called me to say he had found the film, so we put together a little viewing. John and Joe Hall were there, along with Arabella and her husband Blair. Jimmy Hoe, Sandy Fisher, and George and Carol Brush were there, as was Bob Ciancio, who had raced one year, and his wife Yolanda. (Bob: “I think I raced at your place, John.” John: “You were definitely there; in fact you raced in the finals one year.” Bob: “Well, that’s good to know.”)  

It was fun to watch as the group picked out faces in the crowd and dusted off old memories. “Look, there’s Allan Miller. . . . There’s Chandler Moore. . . . Oh, my God, look at David and Charlene. . . . There’s The Dutchman!”

More than a few anecdotes were exchanged; however, after thirty years, many of the details were a bit fuzzy – if not downright contradictory. “It was an oval track. . . . No, it was a straightaway. . . . I think it was a horseshoe. . . . There was a starting gun. . . . No, it was a flag. . . . Actually, I just yelled, ‘Go!’”

It also turns out that in the later years, another race evolved out of the horse race – something of a demo derby. As Joe Hall recalls, “After the races, everybody was hanging around and feeling the buzz, and then someone would say, ‘Let’s race the trucks around,’ so we’d end up having four heats of horse racing and then a couple heats of truck racing. There was even a little contact. It was probably the inspiration for the demolition derby that would start up at Hughie Taylor’s place in Aquinnah in the following years.”

Many of the people shown in the film are still around the Island today, and it was interesting to see them through a thirty-year-old lens. The faces were fresh, the waistlines thinner, the hairstyles fuller. It was good fun to watch, but it was also bittersweet. Viewing the film, you couldn’t help but realize that while it was a wonderful moment in time, it was one that can never be recreated, at least not here on the Vineyard.  

Can you imagine: free beer . . . gambling . . .horses running with wild abandon . . . people falling off of wagons . . . and an impromptu demolition derby thrown in for good measure? It would be a lawyer’s field day. That’s what it’s come to; unfortunately, that’s where things stand today.

And that’s what brings me back to John’s word: heuristic. There’s a lot to be said for a time when we kept a looser hold on the reins, when it wasn’t such
a bad thing to just let one thing lead to another and see where it took you. On the first Saturday after Thanksgiving for five years in the ’70s, it led to one hell of a good time.