It’s The Spirit

Sometimes, it's all in a name or a date. But in this case, we'd like to look beyond mere words or points in time.

When it comes to this weekend's centennial, we want to focus on its spirit as a lasting legacy, whatever form this third-weekend-in-May tradition in our little town will turn into after marking its first 100 years.

Both the name of the centennial and its origins are a bit controversial. Local historian Jeff Broom has been bemused by the number of references to the Days of Real Sport or what preceded in documented history. Here is what he had to say about it after doing a significant amount of research with fellow Waitsburgers Robbie Johnson and Terry Jacoy:

"If you want to start counting when Waitsburg first had a horse event, it would have to go all the way back to (the town's) Year One because they were common. If you want to count when there was a race of some sort, that's a different year; a sanctioned race takes you to (yet) a different year, the DRS name and committee takes you to another year, and so forth. Some of our early programs that list which year it is imply 1908 or thereabouts as the first year. We know that some years were taken off and in some ways of counting, those years are not counted, but in some ways they are."

Clear as mud, right? Well, there's more:

"The only thing I found that takes you back to 1913 is a piece by Carrie Chicken of the (Walla Walla Union) Bulletin which I found among Bettie Chase's scrapbook items," Broom continued. "In that piece it says that there was a lease signed in that year between the Driving Association and the racetrack and that had become considered the first year of the series. But the DRS' own count, the programs, the days off during war and depression years, and the news articles don't really back this up."

When it comes to the name, things are less complicated, but a bit mixed up for another reason.

According to former Times publisher Tom Baker, early horse racing organizers in Waitsburg drew their inspiration for the "Days of Real Sport" from a Tom Sawyer-like cartoon by that same name in the Spokane Spokesman Review.

There seems to be no disagreement from anyone there. It's more the use of the name for this weekend's festivities. Mayor Walt Gobel ended up calling the centennial "Waitsburg Celebration" because the Waitsburg-based volunteer committee that used to run the pari-mutuel horse races until 2010 claims DRS as the rightful designation for its group and the weekend program that includes such statesanctioned competition. This weekend does not.

But does any of it really matter? Is it really that critical to find the exact origin of a tradition we know has existed in some form or another for about a century and does it really matter exactly what we call it?

To us, it's the spirit of the third weekend in May that matters: Waitsburgers and visitors coming together to celebrate this community's roots. What matters is Waitsburgers' tireless volunteerism and hosting of this occasion when they open their town up to the world as the crossroads it has been since the beginning. What matters is that we display the traditions deeply rooted in local homesteading, ranching and farming history with races, games, vintage cars, music, pageantry, cowboys and cowgirls at the heart of it all.

What matters is that we celebrate who we are at this moment in time while honoring our past and creating new traditions for the future. What matters is that we keep the spirit alive.