Events & Discoveries

Bluegrass or Siberia?

A certain cautious taciturnity can generally be expected of Iron Curtain athletes emerging to compete in the free world. To come suddenly from a land where talk is always dangerous and dreams must ever be censored into a world where everyone says what he likes is in some respects like rising too fast from the depths of the sea. Small bubbles of hope begin pounding in the bloodstream like nitrogen in the arteries of a skin-diver with the bends, and the better part of survival lies in applying a high degree of recompression. A noncommittal grunt is about the best any reporter can hope to get from a Russian athlete breathing free air for the first time.

All of which is only to say that the latest Iron Curtain athletes to arrive in this country have been just as tight-lipped about their first impressions, their plans for the future, their hopes and their dreams as any of their predecessors. The fact is that Zaryad and Garnir, the Moscow 3-year-olds who came over last week to carry the colors of Horse Training Factory No. 33 in the $100,000 International at Laurel, Md. (see page 33), have refused to say a single, solitary word.

We frankly can't blame them. We don't know much about a horse's life in Russia. As top Thoroughbreds, Garnir and Zaryad probably have it a good deal better than many a lesser comrade. But what if they lose the International? What if they shatter a sesamoid in some later race? Does that mean the glue factory then and there? Or perhaps an endless wintry life of Siberian troika hauling? We don't know, and we suspect that maybe Garnir and Zaryad are not too sure themselves.

But we do know, and we guess they do, too, by now, that endless acres of rich Kentucky bluegrass lie only a reasonable number of kilometers beyond the finish post at Laurel, green pastures that beckon to all who would browse in the sweet scents of freedom.

What are the Russian horses thinking? What do they say to each other in suppressed Slavic whickerings? Will they stand obediently at the end of the race and let themselves be shipped back to bondage, or, with one great effort, will they toss their jocks, clear the nearest fence and head for the bluegrass?

We're thinking of Boris Pasternak, too.

Design and Effect

The sports car boom in Florida has led one enterprising bank, First National of Fort Lauderdale, to provide what may be a national first—a low-slung drive-in window for the low-slung depositor. All First National did was to erect a 12-inch wooden ramp below a regulation window. "Now the driver and the teller are face to face," said First National VP William B. Lennan, affably rubbing his palms. "Up to now all the sports car customer ever saw of the teller was her hands."

While we're on thesis, antithesis and synthesis, we'd like to pass on these crises: