Sport: The Galloping Hatraclc

The most dramatic of U.S. race horses came into the world a goblinish sort of creature. As he grew, unlovely bones poked out his chestnut hide like tentpoles. He had an elongated neck. He slept standing up. The Galloping Hatrack looked like an appropriate steed for Sleepy Hollow’s legendary horseman, but he had his own legend to make.

A good actor, he played his first big role in knee-deep mud at Churchill Downs, ploughed theatrically from last to first to win the 1918 Kentucky Derby. Suddenly the silence of amazement was split by a colored boy waving his $2 ticket (worth $61.20) and shrieking: “‘Ster-minator.” After that Exterminator was known to millions by his right name—as well as by his nicknames, which ranged from Hatrack to Old Slim to Poison to Old Bones.

Exterminator liked racing. He was famed for carrying back-breaking poundage and running long distances (from behind) over any kind of track. For variation, Old Slim occasionally knocked off sprint champions at their own distance. Henry McDaniel, one of his seven trainers (in seven years of racing) said that he was one of the dumbest horses that ever lived—he didn’t know the difference between 115 and 135 Ibs.

After winning exactly 50 out of 100 races, and $252,996, Old Bones pulled up lame. By now a sentimental trouper, forlorn and desolate at being exiled to Owner Willis Sharpe Kilmer’s Binghamton, N.Y. farm, he went off his feed. Then he got a new interest: a pint-sized pony pal named Peanuts II, who could walk under Old Bones’ belly. When Peanuts died last year, Exterminator again stopped eating, until his pal’s body was left in his stall overnight; they found him kneeling with his head on Peanuts’ cold flank.

Last week, Old Bones, at the great age of 30, was found lying very still, with Peanuts III nibbling at his ear, trying to wake him up.