Mule Races In Rosedale, Mississippi: The Thunder Of Distant Hooves.

Our friend and former mentor Leroy Morganti writes a column that's syndicated in a couple of Delta newspapers, and he recently recalled the Fourth of July mule races at the country club in Rosedale, Mississippi, where he and I grew up.

Nobody thinks much about mules anymore, much less racing them. But in our small city on the riverside of Bolivar County, the Fourth of July mule races were a social occasion and a tradition, even into my lifetime. They officially dated back to the late 1930s, although I suspect that a few races were scattered about for as long as people had been growing cotton in the Delta, and the event simply made a transition in Rosedale to the fancier setting of the club's 9-hole golf course.

Mechanized farming was taking hold, even before World War II, but mules were still a part of the countryside when the second half of the century started, although their numbers were steadily dwindling.

Leroy -- a former university administrator who worked in the news business and even had a stint as a gubernatorial press secretary -- admitted at the start of the piece that he was a bit fuzzy on the details. But he seems to have pretty much captured the essence of the annual event, based on everything I've ever been told by people older than Leroy or me. I was still in diapers at the time. Leroy, though, was just old enough to actually remember being there, smelling the mules, watching people place bets and seeing the dust fly. His grandmother's farm was just south of the golf course.

Leroy recollects that the races ended in 1950, but the last one probably was in 1951 or maybe later.

I say that because my father, Herbert Taylor, played a small role in the races on at least one occasion. He was the pilot who flew Richard Henry over the country club where he dove out of a Stearman biplane and parachuted onto the golf course. It was a big show. For most people in the crowd,  that was the first and maybe the only time they saw anybody do that live. World War II was still fresh in people's minds, and the sight of a former paratrooper landing on the golf course would have captured everyone's imagination.

Since my family didn't appear in Rosedale until the spring of 1951 -- a few months before my birth -- I'm figuring that 1951 was likely the last year.

The races couldn't have gone much past that because hardly any mules would have been left on the area farms and plantations by then. The days of animal traction were about over as that new decade started.

I don't think the mule races ended due to lack of interest. More than likely, it was the lack of mules.

Here's a link to Leroy's column, posted on our high school's alumni web site.

- Owen Taylor