Jon Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines, and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Complete index of Jon Kennedy's Jonal articles

Jon Kennedy's latest book is The Everything Guide to C.S. Lewis and Narnia, now in stores, from Adams Media, F&W Publications. From May 9, 2007 through July 2, 2008 his blog entries or "Jonals" were articles inspired by readings in Lewis's work that didn't fit into the book. Click here for a list of all articles in the C.S. Lewis Overflow series. The book is available for purchase in support of the Liberty Museum in Nanty Glo and is also available on Amazon.

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Bill Hartack

Jonal entry 1093 | March 11 2009

I've been reading the links Kathy McKinley recently sent for newly available information about Bill Hartack, the 1950 graduate of Blacklick Township High School who went on to fame and fortune as one of the winningest jockeys in twentieth century horse racing, and that reading is making me rethink the Bill Hartack I thought I knew. This should come as no surprise, because if I ever saw Bill Hartack it would have been when he was changing buses at Belsano School when I was in first through third grades and he was in his sophomore through senior years of high school. But I have no such recollection, nor do I know if Blacklick Township High students from the north end of the township, as Bill was, even changed buses there to get to the high school. I'm sure there was some bus changing at Belsano School, but I know not what buses to which school(s).

Nevertheless, l have had a Bill Hartack in my mind, even more chimeral than the Nanty Glo in my mind that I've been writing about off and on now for the past ten years. I overheard something here, I knew my brother Gary claimed to know Bill even though they were six years apart in school, there, and my good friend John Golias, whom I got to know about the same year Bill Hartack became famous, is Bill's cousin, I knew from somewhere else.

It's natural that us Blacklick kids would have Hartack myths in our minds. We sat under the same teachers in high school even twelve years later, most of our dads worked in the coalmines as Bill's dad did, most of us lived in poor houses lacking modern amenities as Bill's family did. And then one of us moved after graduating from Blacklick High to West Virginia—West Virginia! is there any place more forsaken than Western Pennsylvania?—and became a millionaire five or six years later and got his picture on the cover of Time magazine three years after that by riding horses, another thing many of us had done a time or more, but not professionally. He was the closest thing to our Elvis Presley we were likely to have. What could we learn from him and his experiences? To find out that, we'd have to listen as closely as possible to whatever was being said about him.

One of those things was speculation that "everyone" probably told him that because he was so slight of build and short, the best thing he could hope to become was a jockey in horse racing. That turned out to be completely untrue. Even when Bill took the bus trip down to Charles Town, W.Va., to find work at a racetrack, he had no idea of becoming a rider, he writes in the first of three autobiographical articles linked here. He got work there quickly, leading horses through their warmup walks around the barn that was part of the horses' daily routine. He liked it because it was healthy outdoor work in a beautiful setting, and much easier than the coalmining he'd left Blacklick Township to avoid, but even after a year of that work and related tasks like grooming, he not only did not want to ride, he wanted to avoid riding.

A horse owner, Bill's employer and a father figure to him, figuratively twisted his arm to manipulate him onto his first horses in races. In the first three races Bill forgot to pull his goggles down over his eyes, so by the time the race was half over, he couldn't see where they were going. In the third of these races, on the fastest horse he'd been givin to ride thus far, he decided to loosen up on the reins long enough to pull down his goggles, and by the time he had them on, because he had signalled freedom to the horse to break pace, discovered once he could see that he and his mount were far ahead of the rest of the field. The rest, as they say...needs no retelling.

One other thing. I'd heard somewhere that Bill disliked the press and treated it badly probably because much of the press more often called him "Willie," and that was the name of another famous jockey, when he preferred and was always known by friends and family as, Bill. Well in these articles he says a lot about why he disliked the press, and admits often treating reporters rudely, but his being called Willie never came up.

—Webmaster Jon Kennedy

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