The truth is that I don’t have an Old Kentucky Home. But, at different points in my life, Louisville has seemed a lot like it. In the late 1990’s, I lived at the Brown Hotel for months because it was near my client’s headquarters. Five years later, as I was preparing to do field research on Somali Bantu refugees resettling to the US, I was offered a job the Refugee and Migration Services of Louisville’s Catholic Archdiocese. After a few months living in a temporary home in Old Louisville and working in the shadow of Churchill Downs, my father’s wavering health required me to stop shuttling back and forth from northern Ohio and return to my old home there for a long stretch. As a result, I never settled into the city that has always made me very welcome. I was eager to return.
It was easy to figure out the timing. If you are going to tour this state, you must take in the Kentucky Derby, which is run at Churchill Downs on the first weekend of May. I had been in Louisville for it before, first with a gang of college friends in 1990, when we went to a lot of house parties and never got to the races. It has lingered in memory because we dubbed one of our group “Mr. Frisky” after a long-shot horse, then missed out on making a fortune when he actually won the race (the horse, not the friend). Despite all the teasing, none of us had placed any bets. Whoops. My second time was in 2000, when work friends and I bought the cheapest seats possible–in the infield–so we shared the day crowded in with drunk University of Louisville students and long-time attendees who practically have deeds to the little bit of space at the fences. Rather than seeing anything, we heard horses thundering around us, which occasionally interrupted the constant student requests to show them parts of our anatomy. None of my favorite horses panned out that year, which probably cost me about $5. Still, I had a lot of fun on a glorious spring day.
By 2017, I was prepared to spend some money on tickets, still lose only a little money on horses, give a book talk at a Louisville library that was arranged through a contact on this site, and wander around the state seeing more than my comfortable Louisville haunts.