TDN, Keeneland Library, UK, Kick Off Oral History Project

[Wandering Eyes]

About once a quarter I sit down with Christa Marrillia, Keeneland’s VP of Marketing, to kick around ideas for the paper, talk about our kids, and, of course, pitch the latest advertising opportunities for Keeneland in the TDN. It was during our latest chat over coffee at Keeneland’s January Sale that Price Bell stopped by our table to join our brainstorm session.

Never short on ideas, Price came up with his best ever. “It’s too bad that Keeneland isn’t still recording the life histories of the prominent people in racing,” he said, “so that we’ll have them for posterity.” For decades, Keeneland had collected video and audio interviews of icons in the industry and preserved them in the Keeneland Library. While Keeneland still occasionally records these testimonials, lack of bandwidth, interviewers and resources had drastically slowed down progress on the project.

After one cup of coffee turned to three, Christa and I had quickly drafted the beginnings of what would become the Life’s Work Oral History Project. When considering who to conduct the interviews, there was no better candidate than Chris McGrath, who loves nothing more than a good profile piece of an industry figure.

Over the next few months, we all threw out names, switched from just audio to video, made a long list, then a longer list, stole Chris from his family in England for three weeks, set him up at the cottage at Keeneland and let him run with it. Every day, he and the Keeneland broadcast crew sat down and spent hours with one of the sport’s iconic figures–Seth and Arthur Hancock, Gus Koch, John Phillips, Dr. John Chandler, and more: in fact, more than a dozen have been recorded and are in the process of being turned into a multitude of written, oral, video and searchable media products.

The project is a joint collaboration between TDN, Keeneland, the Keeneland Library, and the University of Kentucky’s Nunn Center for Oral History.

At the TDN, we will release them once a month in our TDN Look Series, where they will be comprised of a written story, video interview, and podcast. The podcasts will also soon be available through iTunes and Spotify. Keeneland, with the Patty Wolfe Media Group, will create a monthly longer Facebook documentary series. And at the Nunn Center, the videos will live in their entirety and be viewable and searchable by the public.

Today, we kick the series off with Seth Hancock. The first section of the interview appears on page one of today’s TDN, and is viewable in its entirety in the TDN Look.

We hope you enjoy it.

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