Exterminator, a Long Shot to Remember A long shot will seize your attention during the Kentucky Derby television coverage. Among the biopics of sure things and heartwarming stories about trainers and owners will appear a brief moment with that horse who should not win the race. The announcer might mention Mine That Bird (2009 winner; odds of 50-1) or Giacomo (2005, also 50-1) to prove that sometimes the seemingly impossible happens. For me, none of these recent long shots compare to the great Exterminator. His is a famous story: he was the awkward, bony training partner of Sun Briar, a juvenile champion deemed unsound days before the 1918 Derby. Despite opposition and ridicule, seasoned trainer Henry McDaniel, known as "Uncle Henry," fought to enter Exterminator in Sun Briar's place in the Derby. Exterminator went off at 30-1 and won driving in the mud, beginning a career as the iron horse of the golden age. Exterminator ran in 99 races and won $252,996, the equivalent of more than $3 million today. He was twice voted Horse of the Year, and appeared in Life, Vanity Fair, and a Hollywood movie. His farrier patented his shoes. Fans met his trains in each city, called him pet names - Old Bones, Slim, the Galloping Hatrack - and flocked to his birthday parties. Ernest Hemingway even compared himself to Exterminator. My affection and reverence for Exterminator started when I read Mildred Mastin Pace's 1955 "Old Bones, the Wonder Horse" as a child. I became re-interested with his story when I was writing an article about cavalry horses in World War I, and saw contemporary headlines. Now, I've become obsessed, and spend hours at the Library of Congress and the National Sporting Library in Middleburg, Va., leafing through old copies of the Thoroughbred Records from the 1920s. Last year, my preoccupation took me to Pennsylvania, to visit Garrett and Muriel McDaniel. Garrett is Henry McDaniel's great-nephew. "These were Uncle Henry's," he told me, handing over a worn pair of binoculars. They felt heavy and cool in my hand, and I imagined the thrill McDaniel felt as he watched Exterminator flash around the track. We were standing in the McDaniels's kitchen, remnants of Henry's life in racing - jockey silks, newspaper clippings - spread out on a table. Garrett's wife, Muriel, has organized all of the family artifacts in binders filled with newspaper articles, letters and photographs. There are also some materials Henry himself clipped, including a feature article about him riding a bike, a love poem he liked, newspaper portraits of horses he trained, a telegram from an admiring owner saying that if the horses, "don't win for you they wouldn't for anyone." Terri Busch, another keeper of the Exterminator story, knows such objects help keep a memory alive. She inherited relics from her grandfather, M.C. Markham, Exterminator's veterinarian. Exterminator's tack trunk, a metal case with peeling green paint and metal latches, is filled with wheat pennies for her grandchildren to play with. Underneath the lid, a penciled list notes the 6 green coolers, 12 sheets, and 5 blinkers that once filled it. Others, like me, have had to forge their own links to Exterminator. I've corresponded with Bill Gorman, who performs a one-man show as Willis Sharpe Kilmer, Exterminator's owner, in Binghamton, N.Y., where Kilmer and Exterminator lived. I've agreed with Exterminator's (other) biggest fan - Jules Levitt, also of Binghamton who has also dedicated hundreds of hours to researching Exterminator and maintains Exterminator's Facebook page - that the horse deserves a statue. I asked Busch why she thought people like myself and Levitt remain fascinated with a racehorse who died in 1945. "I think it was like a rags to riches story," she said. Kind of an American story. He didn't do well in the beginning, but he didn't give up. Of course, Henry McDaniel didn't give up, either. The year after the Derby, a rift between him and Kilmer forced him away from Exterminator for five years. But in 1924, trainer and horse reunited and earned a chance at an against-all-odds comeback; at stake, Man o" War's earnings record. In 1918, Exterminator had come to McDaniel's rescue. This time, the horse needed him. But that's another story, part of the Exterminator book that I'm working on, and why I was standing in the McDaniels's kitchen. It's the pull of the long shot, the Exterminator legend. "Go ahead," Garrett McDaniel said that day in his kitchen, and I lifted the binoculars. For a moment, everything seemed possible, because I was seeing the world through Uncle Henry's eyes.