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Old 05-05-2006, 03:20 PM
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Default To whom it may concern- focus of this board

Posted By: Howard W. Rosenberg

Cap's 1900 book was written by a Chicago horse racing writer and poet named Richard Cary Jr.

Cary had the pen name of Hyder Ali. Right after the book was published, Cary told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "I really thought when I started that the 'Cap' [sic] would be able to reel off the story of his life about as fast as a nimble man would care to write it. It took me just two days to find that was not the case. A day and a half to get the 'Cap' to sit down and the other half day in egging him on. The story had to be literally dragged out of him. The incidents of his baseball career were apparently fresh in his mind, but when it came to actual dates he was all at sea. When he did give a date nine times out of ten it was wrong and had to be corrected later on." By the way, the New York Times said whether Anson "wrote every word in this volume of reminiscences or not[,] the book reads characteristically. The expression is Ansonian."

For those who may have been inspired by the thread, the foremost horse racing library in Kentucky is in Lexington, at Keeneland. According to the following link, http://www.keeneland.com/faq/, the library is open from 8:30 a.m until 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, except during live racing when the hours change to 8:30 a.m. until 11:30 a.m. Cary has a file there, of course.

Cary's two other books are Tales of the Turf; and, 'Rank Outsiders' (1891); and Sporting Ballads, and Other Verse (1903). The library has at least one of them; both are mainly about horse racing.

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