Church's-Chicken-Hill Downs

When I expressed an interest in Del Mar horse racing this week, I was asked by a Californian friend, via e-mail, how I had managed to live in Tennessee without having seen a horse race. The short answer is that Tennessee is not Kentucky. The long answer, however, is what I chose to provide.

I explained how, despite the fact that Seabiscuit, War Admiral, and every horse in the 2003 Kentucky Derby could trace its lineage back to a stud (Bonnie Scotland) from Nashville’s Belle Meade Plantation (where I once worked as a waitress), there hadn’t been horse racing in Tennessee, save for an annual fundraising event, since an anti-betting law was passed in 1906. The Iroquois Steeplechase (named for another distinguished Belle Meade sire) is run the second Saturday of May each year at Percy Warner Park without betting, which remained illegal in Tennessee until the legislature passed the State Lottery bill in June of 2003.

That’s the almost-short answer. In my actual reply I allowed my research to elaborate, naming the 30 remaining acres of the once 5,400-acre plantation “one of the South’s most outstanding showplaces” and placing the “beautifully restored” Belle Meade Mansion on the National Register of Historic Places. My online resources spanned the Plantation’s website, the Lottery Insider, and the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. Oddly, one of the better resources came from the American Bar Association which provided tour information for folks attending their spring meeting in Nashville. Go figure.

Having been greeted with a page and a half of research in response to what was barely more than a yes or no question, my friend replied “I’m trying to think of other subjects on which I could get free in-depth research by making casual remarks.” I laughed for a full minute before going on to read “Why is the sky blue? And why DO chickens cross roads?”

Not one to let a smart-assed question go unanswered, I quickly replied that blue was the shortest wavelength of light and the most easily scattered when it hit the Earth’s atmosphere, going on to explain how that also makes a sunset appear red. But in answer to the chicken question I wanted more; a little less science, a little more tongue-in-cheek. I found my answer easily and didn’t edit my reply. If he thought a page and a half was long.... Ha! Some of the answers were too fun not to share, though. So here are my favorite online answers to “Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?”

Plato: For the greater good.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.

Douglas Adams: Forty-two.

Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o'er.

Donne: It crosseth for thee.

Anyone else got a question?