Kirkpatrick: a celebration as it was meant to be
From the cocktail wiener hors d'oeuvres to the 1970s photograph of a leering Arnold Kirkpatrick watching a female streaker interrupting a Kentucky Derby party, this was no ordinary memorial service for a dearly departed friend.
It’s exactly what Arnold Kirkpatrick would have wanted, his friends said. Don’t mourn his death, but celebrate his life. Good friends, open bar, simple food.
Kirkpatrick was at various times in his life a racetrack executive, journalist, member of the Spendthrift Farm management team that stood two Triple Crown winners at stud, and a real estate broker. No matter what he was doing to pay the rent, he had an unmistakable joie de vivre. His son, Haden, called him “great and gregarious and larger than life,” but also, at times, a “scoundrel.”
More than 200 friends and family,including Arnold's widow, Julia Hurt Kirkpatrick, joined together to remember Kirkpatrick during a very informal gathering at the Keeneland Clubhouse on Saturday afternoon. There were more laughs than tears, but everyone there felt his absence. Kirkpatrick, who had been diagnosed with throat cancer only a few months ago, died suddenly last Tuesday after undergoing chemotherapy treatment. His best friend, Dr. John Garden, said Kirkpatrick died peacefully, in his sleep.
“Arnold was the quintessential Renaissance man and a raconteur of the first order,” Garden told the assembled crowd, “and he would be delighted I’m using those big words, because he was a man of words.”
Nick Nicholson, Keeneland’s president, pointed out that cocktail weenies had never been on the Turf Catering reception menu before but since they were Kirkpatrick’s favorite hors d'oeuvres they were added on this occasion. “Of course we’ll have cocktail weenies – as they were meant to be,” Nicholson said, a reference to the snooty motto Keeneland embraced for so many years. “Seventy five years of tradition out the window.”
Nicholson told the story of Kirkpatrick in the high-flying horse industry era of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when Arnold was traveling first-class around the world on Delta Airlines but came home to a bachelor pad that didn’t even have a full set of eating utensils in the kitchen. Every time he flew home, Kirkpatrick made a habit of sticking a few pieces of silverware into his pocket to help fill the kitchen drawers. He once asked a seatmate if he was done with his dinner so he could grab his utensils, too. The seatmate turned out to be a vice president of Delta.
A quick-thinking Kirkpatrick immediately disarmed any objections the airline executive may have had, telling him a story or two about the horse business and promising to show him a good time if he happened to fly into the Bluegrass region again soon.
Lo and behold, the executive took him up on the invitation a short time later. Kirkpatrick knew most of the Delta ground crew in Lexington, told them about the silverware caper, and with their help temporarily stocked his entire kitchen and dining room with Delta utensils, plates, and stemware. He even filled the bar with a large assortment of those miniature bottles of liquor served on-board.
When the Delta VP came to Kirkpatrick’s residence and was led into the dining room he got a real taste of how far Arnold would go to make someone laugh.
William Nack, the former senior writer for Sports Illustrated now writing essays for ESPN, said Kirkpatrick hired him in 1972 to be the Thoroughbred Record’s New York correspondent and helped teach him the long-form narrative style that Nack used a couple of years later to write his highly acclaimed biography of Secretariat.
Nack then told the story local newspaper columnist Don Edwards dubbed “The Tortoise and the Handicapper” – a challenge by Preston Madden of Hamburg Place that Kirkpatrick could not circumnavigate the 1 1/16-mile Keeneland main track in less than 10 minutes. The two men had been drinking and eating at a Keeneland fish fry, and Madden backed up his opinion with a $100 wager.
“Never one to shrink from a challenge,” Nack said, “Arnold took Preston up on the wager, descended to the dirt course, lined up at the finish line and took off. So there went Arnold, all 250 pounds of him, filled with catfish and Coors, chugging robustly around the track. He would not have shaken off Dr. Fager, reeling off quarter-mile splits in 2 minutes flat, but he sweated, he strained, he turned for home all alone and won by 31 lengths in the time of nine minutes and 23 seconds – a track record that has never been approached.
“Arnold was all full of himself and on the muscle when he trotted back to the winner’s enclosure and Preston handed him that $100 bill. What he didn’t realize is that Preston had bet a thousand dollars with others that Arnold would, indeed, shade 10 minutes.
“If Arnold was miffed that Preston had capitalized on his stupendous effort, he never let on. Arnold loved racing and gambling, and he much liked it when someone won at the races, even if he was the horse.”
There were many more stories, most of them told in quiet corners of the dining room. Some were not for publication, since Arnold loved his “dirty” jokes, too. One of his favorite aphorisms was posted at the front of the room and repeated by Kirkpatrick’s daughter Joyce Kirkpatrick Magruder, when she addressed the gathering: “The two most expensive things in life are a cheap horse and a free piece of ass.”
Haden Kirkpatrick noted that the celebration had to be planned around a big University of Kentucky basketball game earlier that afternoon, something that would have made his father wince. “He called himself a Kentucky homosexual because he loved women more than basketball,” Haden said.
On this occasion, all those in attendance agreed on one thing. They all loved Arnold and will miss that big laugh and ready smile.
