Events & Discoveries

No Whiskey for Silky

The year 1938 was significant at Churchill Downs for two reasons. It was the year in which a relatively unknown trainer named Ben Jones saddled his first Kentucky Derby winner, and it was the year in which the Brown-Forman Distillers Corporation began passing out free juleps to Derby goers.

Not all visitors to the famed Kentucky race meeting got a chance to sample the Brown-Forman hospitality. Those who were invited to partake had to thread their way past batteries of hard-working clerks and secretaries at 10 a.m. on the Thursday before Derby Day to reach the oak-paneled Old Forester Room on the second floor of the distillery. But to the 300-odd guests who made it, this rare matutinal ordeal was more than worth it. Once inside, the guests found a platoon of waiters eager to bring them juleps made of the firm's best bourbon, a succulent luncheon that ran the gourmet's gamut from lobster a la Newburg to petits fours and a jug band that set the air atingle with heady melody.

As year followed year and champion followed champion, Whirlaway giving way to Citation, Citation to Iron Liege, the excellence of Brown-Forman's Kentucky hospitality became as firm a tradition of the Downs as the excellence of horses trained by the Jones boys, p�re and fils. And nobody in all of Kentucky seemed to care a jigger that the Old Forester party was in technical violation of a hoary state law forbidding the giving away of free whiskey. Nobody cared, that is, until teetotaling Governor Happy Chandler 's legislature got into a spat with the state's distillers over a 100% raise in the whiskey production tax two years ago.

Last summer, in part at least as a result of this spat, the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board began re-examining its statute books with a sterner eye. The result was a sad letter dispatched last week by Brown-Forman to all former guests who might expect a free bourbon in honor of Silky Sullivan . "We have been forced," said the letter, "to close the bar we maintained in the Old Forester Room and may no longer permit visitors to sample our fine whiskeys. Consequently, we're forced to discontinue our Kentucky Derby party. We do so sadly, not by choice—but by state decree."

Ornery Diplomacy

Tit for tat may not be translatable directly into Russian, but it describes, nevertheless, a method of dealing with Soviet diplomats which they seem to understand. Because the Soviet Union closed a large part of its area to American citizens, the U.S. State Department retaliated by putting a similar portion of the United States off limits to Russians. The restricted areas within the U.S. were chosen at random—certain counties here, certain cities there—and were then announced to the Soviet Embassy in a diplomatic note which pointed out that the U.S. will gladly abolish all restricted areas in this country any time the Russians care to do the same in the Soviet Union .

Now it happens that both Tulsa and Stillwater, Okla. are in counties to which Russians may not go. When a Soviet wrestling team came to compete in the U.S. recently, the AAU had to ask special permission for the group to wrestle in those two cities, which are centers of the sport in this country. Permission was granted. But when a correspondent of the Soviet news agency Tass asked for permission to accompany his countrymen and file news stories about them back to Moscow , permission was refused. (The correspondent is Anatoly Saveliev, one of several Russian newsmen stationed in New York .) He had to content himself—and his Soviet readers—with coverage of only one of the three Oklahoma wrestling meets, in Norman , which doesn't happen to be closed to Russians.

Why did the State Department allow the Russian wrestlers to wrestle and not allow the Russian reporter to report? "We do it," said one of its spokesmen, "just to be ornery. If a Russian hockey team came to the United States ," he went on, "I suppose we would let it play in Detroit , since Detroit is a big hockey town. But the correspondent wouldn't be allowed to go there. Detroit is a restricted area."

Well, this is an excellent example of tit for tat, but it also seems like a fine method of undoing with the left hand what has just been carefully done by the right. The visit of the wrestlers was part of an elaborate exchange of musicians, scientists and athletes, arranged by the State Department itself and designed to further friendship and understanding between the two countries.