It is Saturday afternoon and the nags are running at Churchill Downs as the Kentucky Derby got underway. It is too close to my deadline to tell you much about the race. More about that next week. For now though it has been raining most of the day in that part of Kentucky and the track is muddy. Classic Empire is the 4 to 1 pre race choice but there is no really dominant horse in this year’s Derby.

What there is are lots of women’s large and floppy hats, lots of men in seersucker suits and strange hats, and many, many mint juleps.

When I moved into Henry Moses’ old cabin up Greenough...