June 8 - The Ten Monkey Derby

Dog racing has been around for decades. But why no jockeys?
Safety concerns would be most people's answer, and they would have a good point. The few attempts to outfit various breeds of dogs with saddles have all ended in humiliation at best, and maiming (and even death) at worst. The 1920s and 1930s in particular are littered with stories of midgets and children trampled by English sheepdogs and rottweilers--greyhounds were always too slender--that didn't take to their saddles.
In time, the dog racing industry accepted that riderless dogs was the way to go, and for many years that was that--until eccentric Michigan-based dog racing magnate "Doghouse" Bradford Holcomb came up with the idea of monkey jockeys in the early 1950s.
As is the case with most revolutions in dog racing, monkey jockeys were an accident. Doghouse Holcomb, owner and manager of Dexter Lake, Michigan's Dexter Downs Racetrack dressed his pet capuchin monkey Talo like a cowboy (complete with boots and spurs) and tied him to the back of a greyhound to promote the rodeo that Dexter Downs was going to be hosting in a few weeks. His plan was to lead Talo and the dog down the homestretch prior to each night's main event accompanied by various monkey-themed announcements touting the rodeo (i.e. "Quit monkeying around and get your tickets for the Dexter Downs Rodeo today!" ; "You're gonna go bananas at the Dexter Downs Rodeo!" and "The Dexter Downs Rodeo is the hottest ticket in town--and that ain't no monkey business!").
Everything was going great until Talo started shooting the cap guns they'd given him. This spooked the greyhound he was riding on, causing him to take off and tear around the track with the now panicked Talo firing off more and more caps, which only served to make the dog run faster.
Well, the crowd loved it.
So much so that the following weekend, Doghouse Holcomb secured the "temporary release" of three more monkeys from the zoo, dressed them all up like bellhops, and hosted the first ever Monkey Derby. This was followed a week later by the first ever All Monkey Steeple Chase for which Doghouse Holcomb played up the steeple theme by dressing two of the monkeys in tuxedos (aka monkey suits) and two in wedding dresses.
It was huge.
A week later, Doghouse Holcomb got his hands on six more monkeys for a total of ten that would race every Saturday night. He named the weekly monkey race the Ten Monkey Derby and made all of his employees say it so that it sounded like the Kentucky Derby.
The audiences must have liked the name because attendance grew every week.
Each Saturday there was a different theme with different costumes: Cops and robbers. Cowboys and Indians. Hobos. Clowns. One week the monkeys were decked out like outlaw bikers. Another week, at the height of the Sputnik era, two of the monkeys were dressed like Soviet cosmonauts, and the other eight in cowboy costumes. (Originally, they were going to be dressed like American astronauts, but the Dexter Downs staff couldn't tell the difference between the cosmonauts and the astronauts, so they figured cowboys was the most obviously American option after astronauts, so that's what they went with.)
To promote the weekly event, Doghouse hired Jimmy Leslie, Dexter Lake's town drunk to wear a gorilla costume and pass out monkey race flyers every Friday afternoon. Every weekend a different high school marching band from the area would play the national anthem at the beginning of the evening and Aba Daba Honeymoon before the Ten Monkey Derby.
The Detroit TV stations all did news segments on it. There was talk about the race going national.
But the deal fell through when on one rainy Saturday night there was a collision in the home stretch that sent two greyhounds and three monkeys to the vet. Many of the children in attendance that night were nearly traumatized by the sight, and their parents were mortified. Who knew monkey racing could be so dangerous?
Although the animals eventually recovered, the Ten Monkey Derby never really did, at least not legitimately. Interest in the race waned, and after a few more weeks of diminishing returns, Doghouse pulled the plug, sending the Dexter Lake monkey racing scene underground.
Now, more than 50 years later, Dexter Downs is run by Doghouse's grandson, Bradford the third. Every few years, there is talk of bringing the Ten Monkey Derby back, but that's all it is, just talk. Something like the Ten Monkey Derby could never fly now. It was a product of its era, the late 1950s, when Dexter Lake needed a hero, and a monkey on a greyhound answered the call.