So, when John, a much younger friend of his, mentioned he had been invited to the Derby by a college classmate, recently appointed as the Official Derby Host, Jimmy had urged John to accept – and to ask if he could also bring Jimmy along.

Jimmy was thrilled when John’s friend told them to come ahead. Of course, they should also attend the Oaks, the Derby for fillies and mares held on Friday. So, he sent four free passes for a special section of the Club House right on the finish line reserved for Owners and Trainers and celebrities. Food and drink would be provided. Normally, the admission price each day was $880.

John drove them out to Louisville in a new Bentley he had borrowed from an uncle. They came in by way of West Virginia. They followed the river courses. Then they took the old roads that had been cut through mountains.  It rained heavy every mile of the way.

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When Jimmy was 19, he went to a track and it took him down hard. The problem was he came away thinking he was lucky. He won some money. He got caught up in the crowd roars coming around the turn and all the way down the stretch to the wire. He would be yelling too. But he really couldn’t hear his own voice.

The roar began on the turn, then surged and surged again the last 70 yards to the wire. Jimmy would be yelling hard — caught in the roar and buffeted by it until it disappeared. If Jimmy was still connected in the silent aftermath, he definitely felt like a winner. The chances were good he would also get to cash a ticket.

The deadly part of it was that he was convinced he was lucky. He had soon realized that he was, at best, an average handicapper. But even so, now and again, he would cash a ticket for a huge win. These monstrous payouts were the luck. They were the proof.

Being a lucky man changed everything for Jimmy. It was a force other people felt in him. His clients and his mates at the Agency felt it. Woman felt it. His family felt it. Jimmy felt it more than anyone. He attended the races frequently. Then he bet daily with bookmakers. Even away from it, he felt he was still connected to the roar and still worthy of the proof.

Once he won $15,000 from two other regulars on the finish line at Belmont. They were sure their horse had beaten Jimmy’s in a three-horse blanket finish. Jimmy said it was a 3-way dead heat. That was virtually impossible and so the two regulars bet Jimmy he was wrong. He was right.

Once he shared a cab from Belmont back to the city with a beautiful woman whom he had known for several years as part of the crowd he mixed with at New York tracks. Pat was the mistress of a nasty gangster who loved the horses.

Jimmy was stuck in a rough patch. His wife was unhappy. He was very, very unhappy. Pat asked him in for a drink. They talked for hours. She treated him with such tenderness and compassion that he felt centered again.

The next day an insane drifter followed Pat home to the lobby of her apartment building and cut off Pat’s head with a huge carving knife. Jimmy didn’t hear about it until weeks later. He was in England for a shoot of several new commercials for British Travel.

Jimmy kept on with the horses. His luck rescued him time and again. A bookmaker paid him $63,000 on a three-horse parlay and Jimmy spread the cash out on his bed for his wife to see and count. He told the wife that the money was hers – to do with whatever she felt like. She never again complained about his gambling.

The fact was that even with the $63,000, Jimmy was way down at the track. Way down. But he sure didn’t feel like a loser. He felt lucky. Of course, the bookies knew better.

Jimmy stayed with the horses for years. Then one April morning as he got ready to bet the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct a gentle voice inside of him suggested he take a pass. He did not bet that day. He paid off his bookies. From then on, he played the Triple Crown races and the Breeders Cup contests like a civilian. The fact was he had become a civilian.

One year, he had two long-shot winners in the Derby and the Belmont but he wasn’t tempted. He was a genuine civilian. The lucky pulse inside him was gone – and people close to him like his wife were sad about that. But there was another pulse in its place and Jimmy felt blessed by a miracle.

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They met Jerome Henderson, John’s friend, at a special gate to the Paddock. It was Friday, but the crowd was surging and raucous. Two of Jerome’s assistants, burly men, clearly uncomfortable in ties and coats, guided them through. They took a freight elevator, wended through a huge room jammed with food and liquor supplies and finally, up two flights of back stairs. Then Jerome opened a door and they stepped into the Club House and the celebrity sanctuary.

Jerome soon had to depart to tend to his hosting duties but John and Jimmy were fine on their own. The food was magnificent. They wandered from enclave to enclave and helped themselves. On Friday, Jimmy had three winners including the victor in the Oaks. John cashed a hefty wager on a long-shot that covered all his expenses and then some.

They were handsome men who knew their way around – they blended in easily. Actually, there was a surfeit of beautiful women. The Second and Third wives were easy to identify. So, were the undefeated incumbents.

That night they had an early dinner at Jerome’s house. Pasta and red sauce and tasty shelled shrimp. Over cocktails, Mohamed Ali’s widow greeted Jimmy effusively. She told Jerome that Jimmy had helped Ali sparkle on TV.

Jerry Bailey, retired after years as one of the top jockeys, also gave Jimmy the big hello. “Long time, no see, Jimmy”, he said. “Way too long. I’ll never forget those good times we had on Fire Island.”

On Saturday, John and Jimmy got up early, checked out of their hotel and had a fabulous breakfast at a Waffle House. They drove out to Churchill Downs and were escorted back to the celebrity sanctuary in the Club House.

Once again, the food was amazing. The wives looked better than ever. They went easy on the races. Jimmy told John he was going “all in” on a long shot in the Derby. He was up $1,000 so far and he was going to bet $300 across the board on a 30-1 shot, Country House.

As the minutes blinked down to post time for the Derby, it began to rain hard again. Jimmy and John stood in plastic capes at the rail on the second floor of the Club House. The horses were in the gate.

The crowd began to yell for the race to start. The crowd roar went louder and louder and louder. Jimmy joined in, as loud as he could. He was astonished he was yelling for just a fraction of a second and then the gates sprang open.

Jimmy and John both yelled hard during the race. Their horses had a chance in deep stretch. But Maximum Security galloped to a three-length victory. So Jimmy got second and John third. They were looking at handsome payouts on these long-shots, but Jimmy was grousing.

“The winner was all over the place out there”, he told John. “He banged your horse really hard. But they have never taken down a winner in the Derby and they aren’t about to start now.”

Nearly 20 minutes later, the Stewards took Maximum Security all the way down to 17^thplace and created a huge payout for Jimmy and a very handsome return for John.

The next day, when Jimmy got home, he spread the money out on the bed and his wife counted it twice.

“Let’s go to the Grand Canyon,” she said. “Let’s go in a couple of weeks.”

“Okay,” Jimmy said, “Let’s go for it.”

The Grand Canyon trip was #1 on their bucket list.

“Okay, for sure? What about the Preakness?”

“We’ll watch it on TV”, Jimmy said. He kissed his wife on the lips.

“I’m still a civilian honey. I’m just a lucky civilian.”

Jimmy had been an expert reader since he was only four and a half. His ability was a gift but it was also a curse. He saw a lot. But no one really knew he was watching.

He had seen the first photos of American war dead in Life Magazine. The High Command had decided that the General Public was too insulated from the reality – and so they rescinded the prohibition that forbade the media from showing casualties.

Life Magazine ran a feature showing three GI’s lying dead face down at the shoreline of a small island near New Guinea. The bodies had been partially silted over. There were rents in their clothing where they had been struck by bullets. One of the fallen soldier’s legs was bent at an unnatural angle. Jimmy decided that probably he was dead when he fell and that was why his leg had bent that way.

That night before he went to sleep, Jimmy bent his left leg the same way. He wanted to honor the dead soldier. Jimmy slept with his leg bent that way for years and years. Even when he was in the Marines, when he went to sleep, Jimmy bent his leg that special way.

Jimmy’s Dad was offered a commission in the Marines, but his eyes were way too weak. He trained with the National Guard and did war work for the government as a Dollar-A-Year executive. Jimmy and his Mom were real glad his dad could stay at home.

The Nazis bombed England every day. A lot of people were killed. After a while, the English moved their children to the country away from the bombs.

Jimmy saw a picture from China where scores of mostly women and children were lying there all jumbled up right on the steps of a big building. They had been killed in an air raid It was very scary.

Uncle Jerry, his Mom’s younger brother, enlisted in the Army Air Force. He was very handsome and very kind to Jimmy. They used to take long walks to the lake together. The night before he left for training, Jerry played the piano and sang some of Jimmy’s favorites. The last song he sang was Tit Willow from the Mikado.

Jimmy saw a picture of a Japanese officer with a long sword. He was about to cut off the head of an Australian pilot.

Jimmy saw a picture of a Nazi who had burned up in North Africa when he was only half away out of his tank.

Jimmy saw a picture of an American bomber after it had crashed and burned. You could see the burned up body of an American crewman.

One day, Jimmy saw more than eighty ships at anchor in the Hudson River. They looked sleek and dangerous. They were getting ready for the Invasion.

Mr. Beachcroft, the brother of a neighbor, was in the Merchant Marine. He had just returned from Russia in March. He had been torpedoed twice on the Murmansk Run and had survived 16 days in an open lifeboat in February in the Arctic Sea. He gave Jimmy some interesting trinkets, which Jimmy still has.

Later that spring, Vivian Massey, his Mom’s dearest friend, was killed in an Airline crash. She and her husband were on an airliner that vanished on a flight over the Gulf of Mexico. No trace of the plane was ever found. His mom kept on hoping and praying for quite a while.

On D-Day, General Eisenhower spoke of the invasion as a great crusade. It was a very risky proposition. Ike said that he had confidence the Allies would prevail, but if they didn’t – he would accept the blame.

The allies did establish a beachhead but it came at a frightful cost. The day after the landing Jimmy went with his mother and grandmother to the church for a special service of Thanksgiving. The church was jammed. A lot of people wept.

Jimmy kept on following the war straight through to the end. He knew this War backwards and forwards.

When the old films came on TV during the 75th anniversary of the landings at Normandy on D-Day in 2019, Jimmy O’Hara knew them all by heart. In the first long shot from the beach of the first waves in, two men would be shot just off the water’s edge –- one of these soldiers would get right up and be shot again.

Next, several men would drag a drowning officer out of the water and up on the beach and save him. Right about here, they would cut to scores of American bodies bobbing off shore. There were a lot of dead fish strewn on the beach.

There would be shots of corpsmen working on the wounded on the LST’s ferrying them back out to the Hospital ships. Some of the wounded were dead.

Usually, the next scenes were of a crude wire enclosure crowded with Nazi troops who had surrendered. A few of these soldiers had bandaged wounds. All of the Nazi soldiers appeared to be relatively happy.

Jimmy and his wife and their close friends, Bob and Gay Sinclair, from La Jolla, visited the Normandy beaches 67 years after the landings. Jimmy hired a guide, a former member of the British Special Forces, to take them through.

Afterward, Bob and Jimmy stood at the upper reaches of the cemetery and looked out at the 9,387 graves. Mostly young men. Gone forever.

“We won the battle,” Jimmy said. “We won the war. Why am I overwhelmed by sorrow?”

The guide had a quick retort.

“Tis the true nature of the beast.”

Jimmy couldn’t say he was wrong.