Jockey John Quotes

The day Spenkelink was put to death a popular Jacksonville disc jockey aired a recording of sizzling bacon and dedicated it to the doomed man.

Please take heart. You don’t have to jockey for a position. You don’t have to fight for approval. You don’t need someone else’s celebration of you. You don’t need someone else to fail for you to succeed. The anointing that has your name on it, the calling, the gift that has your name on it, is irreversible and irrevocable. Your job is to be faithful, and everything with your name on it will get to you.

Sinatra’s final radio days were filled with minor quarter-hours and one full-length series in which he was relegated to the role of a disc jockey. By 1950 people were writing his professional obituary. His public image had taken a beating, his personal life a succession of wives, scrapes, and alleged friendships with gangsters. It would take a 1953 film, From Here to Eternity, and a subsequent acting career to save him.

A quarter-horse jockey learns to think of a twenty-second race as if it were occurring across twenty minutes--in distinct parts, spaced in his consciousness. Each nuance of the ride comes to him as he builds his race. If you can do the opposite with deep time, living in it and thinking in it until the large numbers settle into place, you can sense how swiftly the initial earth packed itself together, how swiftly continents have assembled and come apart, how far and rapidly continents travel, how quickly mountains rise and how quickly they disintegrate and disappear.

Dawn was casting spun-gold threads across a rosy sky over Sawubona Game Reserve as Martine Allen took a last look around to ensure there weren’t any witnesses, leaned forward like a jockey on the track, wound her fingers through a tangle of silver mane, and cried, ‘Go, Jemmy, go!’ The white giraffe sprang forward so suddenly that she was almost unseated, but she recovered and, wrapping her arms around his neck, quickly adjusted to the familiar rhythm of Jemmy’s rocking-horse stride.

Yet, despite the snappy repartee and often-witty scripts, West Wing was a remarkably silly program. Has there ever been a group of real White House staffers as admirable and lovable as the West Wing ensemble, that selfless, high-minded, public-spirited, fundamentally decent pack of . . . political operators? Sorkin’s White House existed in a Bizarro World where the Oval Office is apparently devoid of office politics. Fans of the show never saw the sort of infighting, backstabbing, and jockeying for position that appear in real-world accounts of White House life, like George Reedy’s Twilight of the Presidency and John Dean’s Blind Ambition.

This series capitalized on the new Red scare of the early 1950s: 78 episodes were recorded, without any assistance from the FBI, which refused to cooperate. It didn’t matter: anti-Communist hysteria was at a peak, and by the end of 1952 I Was a Communist was scheduled on more than 600 stations—far more than if it had been on any network. The show was based on the book (and subsequent movie) by Matt Cvetic and purportedly told of his adventures as an undercover operative who joined the Communist Party to spy from within. Many of the stories contained double-edged conflicts: Cvetic constantly jockeyed for information, walking a tightrope among suspicious Party officials while unable to reveal his true mission even to his family, who shunned him. Communists were stereotyped, much as Hitler’s Nazis had been a few years before: they were seen as cold and humorless, with their single goal to enslave the world. Cvetic could never be sure who might be a Party spy. Dana Andrews gave it an air of Hollywood glamor, always closing with these words: “I was a Communist for the FBI. I walk alone.

More and more, I began helping around the homestead. I learned to operate my John Deere mower so I could keep the yard around our house--and our half-remodeled, boarded-up yellow brick house--neatly trimmed. Marlboro Man was working like a dog in the Oklahoma summer, and I wanted to make our homestead a haven for him. The heat was so stifling, though, all I could stand to wear was a loose-fitting maternity tank top and a pair of Marlboro Man’s white Jockey boxers, which I gracefully pulled down below my enormous belly. As I rode on the bouncy green mower in my heavily pregnant state, my mind couldn’t help but travel back to the long country drive I’d taken when I was engaged to Marlboro Man, when we’d stumbled upon the old homestead and found the half-naked woman mowing her yard. And here I was: I had become that woman. And it had happened in less than a year. I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of our bedroom window and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The Playtex bra was all I was missing.

Then, in 1942, a disastrous strike against the record companies disrupted the industry and upset the delicate balance of business. Though it hit directly at record producers, the real target was radio. James C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, was alarmed at the rapid proliferation of disc jockeys. He objected to the free use of recorded music on the air, charging that jocks had cost musicians their jobs at hundreds of radio stations. Petrillo wanted to impose fees at the source, the big companies like RCA and Columbia, where the records were produced. The final agreement, which was not accepted by the two biggest companies until 1944, created a union-supervised fund for indigent and aging musicians

nine categories of value ideas: Graham-style deep value, Greenblatt-style magic formula, small-cap value, sum-of-the-parts or hidden value, superinvestor favorites, jockey stocks, special situations, equity stubs, and international value investments.

For those who are skilled, industrious and ambitious, work does not dull their lives. It is a source not only of income but of significance and identity for people like surgeons, teachers, writers, masseurs, professional tennis players, jockeys, managers, actresses, gardeners, publicans, publishers, poets, footballers and craftsmen. The greatest number of these live active, creative and autonomous lives. They can develop, do better, excel; they feel inwardly rewarded by what they do, and by its value to others. For them, work is where life is now.

Otis and I were in jockey formation as we approached Farmer John’s chicken farm. Once the large flock of captive chickens came into view, Harold and Bob skidded to a halt. The two chickens stopped so quickly, Otis and I fell off their backs, tumbling to the ground, landing squarely on our butts. “Nope,” Bob said.

Isn’t Finland kind of a satellite of Russia?” he asked. (Later that same morning, Trump asked Kelly if Finland was part of Russia.) I tried to explain the history but didn’t get very far before Trump said he too wanted Vienna. “Whatever they [the Russians] want. Tell them we’ll do whatever they want.” After considerable further jockeying, however, we agreed on Helsinki.

Peary played the role in its best years, he and Waterman shared about equally in real time as Gildy at the NBC microphone. After Gildersleeve, Peary shaved his mustache, lost 50 pounds, and, in 1954, turned up as a disc jockey on KABC. He died March 30, 1985; Waterman died Feb. 1, 1995.

Jack Webb had been active in radio for several years before Dragnet propelled him to national prominence. He had arrived at KGO, the ABC outlet in San Francisco, an unknown novice in 1945. Soon he was working as a staff announcer and disc jockey. His morning show, The Coffee Club, revealed his lifelong interest in jazz music, and in 1946 he was featured on a limited ABC-West network in the quarter-hour docudrama One out of Seven. His Jack Webb Show, also 1946, was a bizarre comedy series unlike anything else he ever attempted. His major break arrived with Pat Novak: for 26 weeks Webb played a waterfront detective in a series so hard-boiled it became high camp. He moved to Hollywood, abandoning Novak just as that series was hitting its peak. Mutual immediately slipped him into a Novak sound-alike, Johnny Modero: Pier 23, for the summer of 1947. He played leads and bit parts on such series as Escape, The Whistler, and This Is Your FBI. He began a film career: in He Walked by Night (1948), Webb played a crime lab cop. The film’s technical adviser was Sergeant Marty Wynn of the Los Angeles police. Webb and Wynn shared a belief that pure investigative procedure was dramatic enough without the melodrama of the private eye. The seeds of Dragnet were sown on a movie set.

And he had an overwhelming feeling—only for a moment, but dangerous at any time—of completeness, as if he had met a family, only to discover it was his own. He had a feeling of arrival. Here was a man, housed this way, married that way, striving and playing in ways Jerry effortlessly understood. A man of no particular persuasion, yet Jerry saw him in that moment more clearly than he had ever seen himself. A Chiu Chow poor-boy who becomes a Jockey Club Steward with an O.B.E., and hoses down his horse before a race. A Hakka water-gypsy who gives his child a Baptist burial and an English effigy. A capitalist who hates politics. An incomplete lawyer, a gang boss, a builder of hospitals who runs an opium airline. A supporter of spirit temples who plays croquet and rides about in a Rolls-Royce. An American

And he had an overwhelming feeling—only for a moment, but dangerous at any time—of completeness, as if he had met a family, only to discover it was his own. He had a feeling of arrival. Here was a man, housed this way, married that way, striving and playing in ways Jerry effortlessly understood. A man of no particular persuasion, yet Jerry saw him in that moment more clearly than he had ever seen himself. A Chiu Chow poor-boy who becomes a Jockey Club Steward with an O.B.E., and hoses down his horse before a race. A Hakka water-gypsy who gives his child a Baptist burial and an English effigy. A capitalist who hates politics. An incomplete lawyer, a gang boss, a builder of hospitals who runs an opium airline. A supporter of spirit temples who plays croquet and rides about in a Rolls-Royce. An American bar in his Chinese garden, and Russian gold in his trust account.

So Jerry said “Yes, sir,” and a few days later, out of sheer boredom, began his own entirely informal investigation into the life and loves of Mr. Drake Ko, O.B.E., Steward of the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, millionaire, and citizen above suspicion. Nothing dramatic; nothing, in Jerry’s book, disobedient ; for there is not a fieldman born who does not at one time or another stray across the borders of his brief. He began tentatively, like journeys to a forbidden biscuit box. As it happened, he had been considering proposing to Stubbs a three-part series on the Hong Kong super-rich. Browsing in the reference shelves of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club before lunch one day, he unconsciously took a leaf from Smiley’s book and turned up “Ko, Drake” in the current edition of Who’s Who in Hong Kong: married; one son, died 1968; sometime law student of Gray’s Inn, London, but not a successful one, apparently, for there was no record of his having been called to the bar. Then a run-down of his twenty-odd directorships. Hobbies: horseracing, cruising, and jade. Well, whose aren’t? Then the charities he supported, including a Baptist church, a Chiu Chow Spirit Temple, and the Drake Ko Free Hospital for Children. Backed all the possibilities, Jerry reflected with amusement. The photograph showed the usual soft-eyed, twenty-year-old beautiful soul, rich in merit as well as goods, and was otherwise unrecognisable.

Home,” he repeated to himself. Bit of a problem. Home to Tuscany and the yawning emptiness of the hilltop without the orphan? Home to old Pet, sorry about the teacup? Home to dear old Stubbsie, key appointment as desk jockey with special responsibility for the spike? Or home to the Circus: “We think you’d be happiest in Banking Section.” Even—great thought—home to Sarratt, training job, winning the hearts and minds of new entrants while he commuted dangerously from a maisonette in Watford.