#20 – From Cinema to Stables: A Retired Film Critic’s Heartwarming Horse Rescue with Michael Blowen

Ryan Doolittle [00:01:38]:
Hes formed friendships with celebrities like Albert Brooks and Angie Dickinson.

Michael Blowen [00:01:43]:
What?

Ryan Doolittle [00:01:44]:
Every morning, he wakes up with a heart full of gratitude, ready to feed former Kentucky Derby winners. The thrill of it still gives him chills. And this whole thing started because Michael, as a fan of horse racing, just wanted to improve his gambling skills. But whoops, he fell in love with horses and has dedicated his life to improving their lives. Hey, I think you should listen to Michael. It just might improve your life. I mean, hey, it worked for the horses. Do you ever wonder who you’ll be and what you’ll do after your career is over? Wouldn’t it be nice to hear stories from people who figured it out, who are thriving in retirement? I’m Ryan Doolittle.

Ryan Doolittle [00:02:26]:
After working with the retire sooner team for years and researching and writing about how they structure their lifestyles, I know there’s more to be learned, so I’m going straight to the source and taking you with me. My mission with the Happiest Retirees podcast is to inspire 1 million families to find happiness in retirement, I want to learn how to live an exceptional life from people who do it every day. Let’s get started. Okay, Michael, maybe we’ll get right into it. To get things started, you were a former filmmaker, which I just found out. I knew you were a film critic for the Boston Globe, but what I wanted to know was how you got from that to becoming, you know, a Kentucky horse whisperer, for a better lack of a better term.

Michael Blowen [00:03:13]:
Yeah, better horse listener. They don’t, no matter how loud my volume is when I talk to the horses, they very seldom pay any attention to me. So I just listen to them and do whatever they want. I’m hoping that I’m understanding their language. So how did I get here? That’s a very, very long story, but it’s kind of interesting, I guess. Anyway, I’ve always been attracted to older people and older things. Older. I never even.

Michael Blowen [00:03:43]:
When I was younger, I never even dated anybody younger than me. And years ago, when I was teaching filmmaking at Emerson College, my friend Gary Grossman, who went on to become a producer on Entertainment Tonight and some other programs and started his own production company out in California, years ago, we were hired, both of us were hired, to teach a filmmaking class at Boston University in their summer program. And it was six weeks, five days a week, 3 hours a day. And one day I said to Gary, I said, gary, you know, I’m going to tell you something. I can tell these students everything I know about movie making in 45 minutes. What are we going to do for the rest of the summer? So, Gary, that was a dilemma. The other thing was, I think there were only, like, six students that signed up for the course, and I couldn’t understand why they signed up for it anyway. But anyway, they did.

Ryan Doolittle [00:04:43]:
Really?

Michael Blowen [00:04:43]:
Yeah. You know, I knew even that at that younger age, that I knew that there’s a better. There would be a better way to do it. And if we did do it in a better way, we might attract more than six students. So one day we were talking. We started talking about a friend of ours named Deke Roselle, who used to be a critic at one of the alternative weeklies in Boston, and he’d just taken a job as the promotions and marketing director for the directors Guild of America. And I don’t know, I’d like to take credit for coming up with this idea, but I’m not sure that I did. I’m old now.

Michael Blowen [00:05:20]:
I can’t remember everything. But one of us said, wouldn’t it be interesting to find an old director and have them come and team teach the course with us. And so we persuaded the head of the summer school to allow us to go to California, go to Hollywood, and talked to some of these all directors to see if we could convince one of them to come to Boston and teach this course. Well, the amazing thing was that all of the directors that we spoke to were retired. However, they weren’t doing anything. I was thinking, they’re not doing anything. I mean, these people created some of the greatest movies ever.

Ryan Doolittle [00:05:56]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:05:57]:
So we started doing our interviews, and we interviewed an all star team of great Hollywood directors, and virtually every one of them wanted to do it. I think only two of them said that they didn’t want to do it, but the rest of them said yes. And it was so popular that we divided it up. So it was a six week course, and these are the directors that we got. The first week was taught by Edward Dimitrik, who did the Cain mutiny murder, my sweet Raintree County. I mean, just some great movies. The second week was taught by Rubon Momullian. Rubon Momoulian was a great theater director and a great movie director.

Michael Blowen [00:06:38]:
He directed the first color film, Becky Sharp. Oh, and he directed almost all of Eugene O’Neill’s plays on Broadway.

Ryan Doolittle [00:06:48]:
Wow.

Michael Blowen [00:06:48]:
The third week was taught by King Vidor, who directed his first movie, I believe, in 19 9018, and directed his last movie in 1959, duel on the sun. Yeah, the big parade. And he’s just an amazing director. And again, nobody’s paying any attention to him. And King Vidor had such a good time that he, he stayed over in team taught the last week with Frank Capra. Oh, so that was it. Now the good news is this. It went from having six students to, like, 250.

Michael Blowen [00:07:28]:
We had to have it in the auditorium, and we didn’t have to do anything except say thank you and introduce them and show a couple of the movies. And, and that was it. And it was a, it was a great experience. And that’s pretty much what I do here with the. Oh, yeah, with the horses.

Ryan Doolittle [00:07:44]:
So it’s the same muscle you’re flexing, just in a different industry.

Michael Blowen [00:07:49]:
Yes. They’re the same stars, and people aren’t coming here to see me, and they weren’t signing up for that course to listen to me tell them what I knew in 15 minutes, they’re coming here to see these horses. And then I figured out, well, if I let the horses do all the work and let the other people that work here do all the work, I could have a great time just hanging out and that’s pretty much what I do have.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:11]:
Any of the former thoroughbreds walked up to you and said, I’m ready for my close up, Mister DeMille.

Michael Blowen [00:08:16]:
Pretty much.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:17]:
Okay.

Michael Blowen [00:08:19]:
We have a horse here named Silver Charm, who is in the hall of Fame. He won the Kentucky Derby in 1997. He won the Preakness. He lost the Belmont by a foot and a half to a horse. We also have retired here named touch gold. So they have their own rivalry, but he loves it when the people come, he’ll put his head on their shoulder and get pictures taken.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:40]:
Really?

Michael Blowen [00:08:41]:
Yeah. He doesn’t like two things. He doesn’t like to get petted.

Ryan Doolittle [00:08:44]:
Oh, okay.

Michael Blowen [00:08:45]:
And he didn’t like the cars at night. We’re about, I don’t know, 200 yards from the highway. He didn’t like the lights at night. So if you let these horses tell you what they want and you treat them with the kind of respect that the elderly deserve, now that I’m an elderly, I really believe that things work out pretty well.

Ryan Doolittle [00:09:07]:
That’s interesting, because I’ve heard you like to be petted, so you’re different from.

Michael Blowen [00:09:12]:
I do. I do. I like to be petted. And people do. Are very nice to me now. They’re very nice.

Ryan Doolittle [00:09:18]:
The thoroughbred retirement facility that you founded is called old friends. It’s in Georgetown, Kentucky, and it put a new face on thoroughbred aftercare. I don’t know what Thoroughbred aftercare used to be like, or maybe still is for a lot of horses, but do you want to talk a little bit about how you changed the game, how you’ve enhanced caring for these horses?

Michael Blowen [00:09:43]:
Sure. Well, I recognize I came at this whole thing because I’m a fan of racing. I wasn’t a breeder. I wasn’t a jockey. I wasn’t an owner. I didn’t run a racetrack. I’ll go back even further. When I was working at the Boston Globe, I’d never been to a race in my life.

Michael Blowen [00:10:02]:
But I had an editor there named Robert Taylor, who was the book critic and arts editor. He was a genius at fixing my copy. He would take a review that would probably get a c minus if the teacher was feeling generous and make it into an a minus in two minutes. Oh, my God. He would just move. He’d take a word out. He’d move a paragraph. He’d switch a sentence around.

Michael Blowen [00:10:29]:
He’d just manipulate things like he was working on a Rubik’s cube. And he would literally. I was astonished. And I said, boy, I might have a career doing this if I pay attention to this guy. And one day he called me up and he said, a friend of mine who’s the foreign correspondent for Time magazine and I are going to Suffolk Downs, the racetrack. Do you want to go? It was a Sunday afternoon. I said, yeah, I would have gone anywhere with this guy. And we went, and I fell in love with it.

Michael Blowen [00:10:57]:
I liked the gambling part of it. I liked reading the racing form and handicapping the races. I knew nothing about horses except I was afraid of them. But I really liked the drinking, and I really liked the gambling part of it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:11:09]:
Okay, fair enough.

Michael Blowen [00:11:13]:
And then years later, years later, we used to have a basketball team at the Globe. We’d play on lunch hour and stuff, and gradually, each one of us broke down and couldn’t do it anymore. By that time, I was very interested in horse racing as a sport, and I was interested in learning more about it. So I convinced my buddies to buy a horse. We all chipped in, I don’t know, $500 a. We bought a horse. And in order to keep an eye on things, I started working at the track in the morning, and it was like I had this secret identity. It was like I get up at 530, I’d be at the track by 637 o’clock.

Michael Blowen [00:11:54]:
I’d stay there until 830, doing, you know, picking up stalls and just walking the horses around. And then I’d get on the subway and I’d get to the globe, and I’d be to the globe. By 930, I’d be cleaned up and everything else. And by 10:00 I was at my desk, so. And that’s the way it went. And it went from me being terrified of these horses because they were so big, and they knew I knew nothing about what I was telling.

Ryan Doolittle [00:12:18]:
The horses could tell?

Michael Blowen [00:12:19]:
Oh, yeah, they can tell. They can tell if you’re afraid of them. They can tell if they should be afraid of you. We’ve had horses here that haven’t seen their grooms in seven, eight, nine years. And that groom will show up and they’ll hear that groom’s voice, and they’ll come screaming down the, down the hill, running, screaming at them and jumping up and down to see them. Really? Yeah. They have amazing memories. Oh, wow, that’s amazing memories.

Michael Blowen [00:12:43]:
And they’re all, and they’re all old, but they. They still have a lot to offer. So as time went on, I realized that when these horses couldn’t make money anymore, that their lives were in danger because they’re gelding, so they can’t breed or they’re not good enough to be sold again, or they’ve got ankle problems and things like that. And so at the end of the day, Suffolk Downs isn’t Saratoga Springs, and it’s not Keeneland, and it’s not the Kentucky Derby. It was pretty much low rent. It doesn’t even exist anymore. It went out of business. But in those days, they were getting horses from these bigger tracks that could no longer compete at that level, and it was going down through the minor leagues.

Michael Blowen [00:13:30]:
And at the end of the day, they used to say things like, I’d say, what happened to that horse? And they’d say to me, well, oh, that horse. They found a nice home for him at a riding academy in Maine. And I went, huh, that’s nice. And I thought about that for a few months, and then I kept saying, wait a minute. I’ve been to Maine a whole bunch of times, and I’ve never seen one riding academy. I don’t think this is exactly what’s going on. And I found out there, you know, a lot of them were just going to slaughterhouses, really? And that was. Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:13:59]:
And I was. In the meantime, I’m falling in love with the horses.

Ryan Doolittle [00:14:03]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:14:04]:
So I really. I thought I would. The whole idea was for me to improve my gambling. And that was the whole impetus. Yes, that was the whole impetus. That was it. And gradually, I just started falling in love with the horses, and then I didn’t really. I still.

Michael Blowen [00:14:20]:
I still gamble. I still do all this stuff, but that’s not my primary interest now, is I really begun to appreciate what amazing animals they are and what amazing companions they are and how valuable they are. Yeah, that’s what happened. I mean, literally, my wife was a columnist at the Boston Globe. Diane White, she was much better writer than me. She was very, very popular, and she won all kinds of awards. I didn’t win any awards. I knew one year, though, they had to name me best movie critic.

Michael Blowen [00:14:49]:
They had to give it to me because I was really the only one left.

Ryan Doolittle [00:14:54]:
You bided your time until you had to get the award.

Michael Blowen [00:14:57]:
Yeah, but they. So every year, Boston magazine does this thing, best of Boston and best restaurant, best food, best this, best that, and they do a media section. And my wife, Diane, won the best columnist award, like, five years in a row. Wow. And her name’s Diane White. And so I. I couldn’t wait. I came back from Saratoga from the race meet, spent a week up there having a great vacation, actually made a little bit of money and went to the Harvard Square newsstand and picked up Boston magazine, best of Boston.

Michael Blowen [00:15:27]:
I’m going, oh, it’s got to be me this year. And I go there, it says, and I’ll still remember this as a headline. It says, diane White is snow White, and all the other columnists are dwarfs, especially her husband, Dopey. So that’ll give you an idea. That’ll give you an idea. So again, I said, well, maybe I should find something else to do. I keep changing jobs.

Ryan Doolittle [00:15:54]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:15:55]:
But anyway, it was, it was very painful then, but now it’s funny.

Ryan Doolittle [00:16:00]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:16:00]:
That’s another great thing about being old. A lot of things that you think were important or painful, it makes no difference now.

Ryan Doolittle [00:16:07]:
Right. You know, I just heard Jerry Seinfeld just gave a commencement address for Duke University, and he was telling the graduates, if the one thing I can tell you is do not lose your sense of humor, because not enough of life makes sense for you to get through it without a sense of humor.

Michael Blowen [00:16:28]:
My wife and I both share that. Share that. Yeah. And we’ve been married, I think, 42 years, I think. Yeah. 42.

Ryan Doolittle [00:16:35]:
42. Congratulations.

Michael Blowen [00:16:37]:
Yeah. Wow. I was talking to your producer Marissa about this. You know Mo Raqa.

Ryan Doolittle [00:16:44]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:16:45]:
Yeah. So Mo came here with a Sunday morning show that Jane Polly does. Oh, CB’s Sunday morning. They did a really nice piece on the farm, and he’s got a book coming out, and you might want to talk to him about this book because it’s called rocagenarians. And it’s all about, it’s all about little pieces about people who started doing interesting things when they’re far beyond the age when far beyond the age that people usually do it. And he told me that I’m somewhere between Estelle Getty and in the book that my little section of somewhere between and the guy who came up with the Thesaurus Roget. Yes. But, and I think that’s one of the things that everybody that he talks to about this elderly thing.

Michael Blowen [00:17:31]:
They have to have a sense of humor.

Ryan Doolittle [00:17:33]:
Estelle Getty played the grandma on the Golden Girls, correct?

Michael Blowen [00:17:39]:
One of them’s mother. Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:17:40]:
Yeah. She was Sophia, I think. Yes. Okay. Yeah. I think she played the grandmother, but she was younger than Bea Arthur. I think.

Michael Blowen [00:17:51]:
I think that’s it, too. I think that’s exactly right. I think she was be played Bea Arthur’s mother.

Ryan Doolittle [00:17:56]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:17:56]:
And she was younger than Bea Arthur. Yes, I think you’re exactly right.

Ryan Doolittle [00:18:00]:
And she was also in stop or my mom will shoot with Sylvester Stallone. I remember that.

Michael Blowen [00:18:06]:
There you go.

Ryan Doolittle [00:18:07]:
Yeah. I’m surprised I didn’t win any oscars? No, that wasn’t.

Michael Blowen [00:18:13]:
By that time, he wasn’t reviewing movies. I’m a recovering movie critic. One movie at a time, you know?

Ryan Doolittle [00:18:19]:
Yeah, exactly. Now you can just try to enjoy them without being so analytical. Or is that. Is it too late? That’s baked in.

Michael Blowen [00:18:27]:
It’s too late because, you know, they turn you into something that nobody else is. Because you’re obligated to see every movie.

Ryan Doolittle [00:18:34]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:18:34]:
And so eventually everything. It becomes a cliche.

Ryan Doolittle [00:18:39]:
Yeah. Because you’ve seen it all.

Michael Blowen [00:18:40]:
You’ve seen it all. You’ve seen everything. And every once in a while, Stanley Kubrick would come out with a movie or, you know, somebody makes a movie that would surprise you and then you become a little perverse. Because sometimes some movie that was just different. It wasn’t any good.

Ryan Doolittle [00:18:55]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:18:55]:
But it was just so different. But everybody would. All these critics, myself included, would go crazy over these movies because at least they were different.

Ryan Doolittle [00:19:02]:
Right?

Michael Blowen [00:19:03]:
I remember. I remember seeing a movie. I’ll never forget this. I had one of those network moments because I actually got up at a screening. We were. They were screening a movie called Date with an angel.

Ryan Doolittle [00:19:13]:
Okay.

Michael Blowen [00:19:14]:
One of the absolutely worst movies ever made. And it was. It was the first american movie for a very good french actress named Emmanuel Bart. And she had made Madonna, the spring, and these really nice movies in France. And she came to the United States and they give her this part. And the part is, she plays an angel. Honest to God. This is true.

Michael Blowen [00:19:34]:
You can look it up. You can watch this movie if you can bear it. And she played an angel who injured her wing and fell into a swimming pool in Beverly Hills.

Ryan Doolittle [00:19:43]:
Okay.

Michael Blowen [00:19:46]:
And I got up at the screening and I turned to the other critics there and they go, how can you stand it anymore? I said, how can you stand it? How could you endure this? And I went into the paper that afternoon and I said to the editor at the time, I said, look, I’ll do anything. I’ll cover the Ice Capades. I don’t care what, but I can’t do this anymore. You got six months. We gotta find somebody else in here and do this because I can’t go anymore.

Ryan Doolittle [00:20:12]:
Right.

Michael Blowen [00:20:13]:
And then they gave me a great job too, because I got to. I was. I was the first reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper that had my full time beat, was covering stand up comedy.

Ryan Doolittle [00:20:25]:
Really?

Michael Blowen [00:20:26]:
Yeah. And that was fabulous. I did that for a couple of years and it was just great because nobody else was doing it. And these comics would let you, you know, you could talk you could spend a lot of time with them, and they’d give me their home numbers if I needed a quote or anything. And I got to be familiar with a really, really a lot of them, and really, as a group, really liked them a tremendous amount.

Ryan Doolittle [00:20:48]:
So you’d go watch the shows and review them like you would a movie.

Michael Blowen [00:20:53]:
Yes.

Ryan Doolittle [00:20:54]:
And, okay, I don’t know what year this was, but a lot of people came out of the Boston comedy scene huge. Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:21:02]:
You know, I remember one night I got a call from a guy named Bill Blumenlark, who owned a, a couple of comedy, comedy clubs, including the comedy connection. And he said, you might want to come over here. I got something interesting going on, but I can’t tell you what it is. And it was like, he called me at like midnight or maybe just before midnight, and he said, yeah, starting at 02:00 in the morning. And I went over, I met him at the comedy club, and there’s maybe a dozen people there, and in walk chris rock.

Ryan Doolittle [00:21:31]:
Really?

Michael Blowen [00:21:32]:
Yeah. And he was trying material out, and I’ve never seen anything like this before. He had one story. It probably took up 90 seconds or two minutes of his act that he worked on for 3 hours. And it was like listening to a musician play certain notes. Higher or lower. More volume, less volume. Emphasis here, emphasis there.

Michael Blowen [00:21:55]:
And he recorded it all. And it was very interesting. And some of the guys that have passed away now, like Richard, jenny, and some of the really experimental guys, I mean, I was there when a lot of these, a lot of the guys started out, like Stephen Wright, who I still think is one of the funniest people I’ve ever. Oh, yeah, some of the old ones, like Henny Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield, and people like that would give me their home numbers and say, just call me anytime. So it wasn’t like the movie business, where everybody was after the same people that tell the same stories. It was just all these great comedians and great performers. And I got to do that for a few years. It was really, really, really a really good job.

Michael Blowen [00:22:38]:
I used to think, how did they do the same jokes all the time? And I’d go and hear the same jokes and the same routines year after year after year for quite a while. And I still thought they were funny and I still laughed, even though I knew what was coming. And now when I do tours at the farm, when people come to the farm and I start telling the same stories about these horses, it’s like having a whole new audience, and you don’t care about telling the same stories every night, because the fans that come and the fans of the horses that come, they’ve never heard those stories before, and you’re completely rejuvenated because of their enthusiasm.

Ryan Doolittle [00:23:10]:
So it’s. It’s a similar type of vibe, same people. You, you. It’s like you’re seeing the horse for the first time, in a way.

Michael Blowen [00:23:18]:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But the elderly thing to say, here’s the thing that. Here’s the thing that I really like being old. And when kids come here with their parents on a tour, I tell them, you know, I bet your parents tell you, you know, this is the best part of your life. You know, you’re seven years old or whatever. You are eight years old, and you got your whole life in front of you, all your dreams ahead of you.

Michael Blowen [00:23:40]:
This is the best part of your life. I said, that’s totally not true. That is completely wrong. Parents are looking at me, go, look. They tell you when to get up, when to go to bed. They tell you what to wear, what to read. They tell you to go to school. Don’t go to school, eat this, don’t eat that.

Michael Blowen [00:23:56]:
They give you orders. Everybody gives you orders because you’re a kid. So you got to take orders from everybody all day long. You don’t get to think for yourself or do what you really want. I said, but when you get to be my age, nobody cares anymore. The people that are giving you orders have already pre deceased you. I said, I can see the finish line. You know, it’s like the horses, you know, the exciting part of the race is when they’re coming down the stretch towards the finish line, you’re going to find out whether you’re going to cash your bet.

Michael Blowen [00:24:24]:
It’s exciting. You know, nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen, but once you pass the finish line, it’s over, and you can’t go back up the stretch and try again. You know, this is it. So we all have our expiration date, and I can see my expiration date kind of in the, you know, it’s getting a little closer and there’s the finish line, and I figure I got to get everything done as fast as I can because one day I’m not going to be able to do it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:24:51]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:24:51]:
And so it’s that extra motivation. It’s. It’s renewed enthusiasm for life. I mean, I just adore being 77 years old. I think it’s a great thing to be. I’m very fortunate that I lived this long, and I’m very grateful for it. But I want to have, I just want to have more fun. And you can get rid of all the extraneous things now.

Michael Blowen [00:25:10]:
You know, a cousin dies, I’m not going to get in an airplane and drive all the guy and just, you know, just not that interested in that. I can and I’m old and so I’m excused, right?

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:20]:
No one, no one feels, no one cares.

Michael Blowen [00:25:23]:
They don’t care. One of the great things about nobody caring about it is that they don’t care about it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:29]:
Well, this sounds like it’d be a great stand up bit, but it’s also a good line.

Michael Blowen [00:25:33]:
Working on it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:25:34]:
Yeah. I’ve never heard anyone put it this way. This. This makes me more excited about getting older rather than dreading it’s the best. Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:25:44]:
They don’t expect anything anymore. Why aren’t people happy? People aren’t happy because their expectations are all up. I tell that to the kids, too. The parents never come back. I told him, I say, look, I bet your parents tell you, reach for the stars, go for the glory, all that business. I go, that’s totally not true. If you wake up in the morning and you’re not happy, it’s your fault. Because what do you expect? Your expectations are out of whack.

Michael Blowen [00:26:07]:
So every morning when you get up and you’re not happy, just shave off some of your expectations and see what happens the next day. And if you’re still unhappy, shave them off and pretty soon you get them low enough. Yeah. You wake up in the morning and you’re overjoyed just to wake up.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:23]:
If your expectation is just to wake up, everything else is a bonus.

Michael Blowen [00:26:28]:
And then you can start from there.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:30]:
Oh, my gosh. I think you might be a genius, Michael.

Michael Blowen [00:26:34]:
Well, I know that being old and being around these horses has been the greatest thing that could ever happen to me. I tell people, look, I must be the luckiest person in the world because I’m the only person with silver charm in his backyard. And I wake up every morning and I see that horse and I get the chills.

Ryan Doolittle [00:26:50]:
Really? Every morning.

Michael Blowen [00:26:51]:
I remember one time. Yeah. Every morning I give him, I give him his little cookie crowns from misses pastures and we have this little routine we go through and he’s, he pretends he’s glad to see me. I mean, it’s really nice.

Ryan Doolittle [00:27:04]:
So you still live on the. I wasn’t sure. Because you retired, you know, a few months.

Michael Blowen [00:27:10]:
Yeah, well, retired’s an odd word, too. I mean, what is that? I mean, I don’t even know what that is? No, I still live on the farm. I still do whatever we did. Whatever we do. But my wife and I started this with a couple of horses and a golf, an old broken down golf cart. We did everything ourselves, took care of the horses, you know, did everything. And now it’s grown to such a degree that it’s a multimillion dollar business, and it needed a CEO. And I finally got a friend of mine named John, John Nicholson, who used to run the Kentucky horse park to come and run old friends.

Michael Blowen [00:27:44]:
And he’s running, like, a business. He’s running it really smart. It’s improved immensely since he took over. And I just have to. I just have to kind of goof off and play with the horses and do a few tours once in a while and try and still earn my keep.

Ryan Doolittle [00:27:57]:
Right. So you demoted yourself, and it was the best decision you ever made.

Michael Blowen [00:28:02]:
Expectations.

Ryan Doolittle [00:28:04]:
Yeah, I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Michael Blowen [00:28:09]:
Who cares about titles, right?

Ryan Doolittle [00:28:12]:
So you still get to get all the benefits of hanging out with the horses and everything you loved about it.

Michael Blowen [00:28:18]:
Yes. Yeah, I do everything, and I stay out of John’s way as much as I can. I empty. And the other thing I learned about leadership is do the jobs nobody else wants. So I still empty the garbage. You know, I still clean out the cat boxes. We also have nine retired cats here. Really? I do all those jobs that.

Michael Blowen [00:28:37]:
All those jobs that nobody else wants to do, and then they like you because you’re doing all those stupid jobs they don’t want to do.

Ryan Doolittle [00:28:43]:
I have found some of those jobs the older I’ve gotten. And, you know, I have a really young son. He’s a year and a half. So that you’re always. There’s a lot going on. It’s strange how taking out the trash has become sort of a meditative practice for me.

Michael Blowen [00:28:57]:
That’s true. Yeah, that’s true. It took me a lot longer to figure that out, but. Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I look forward to it. Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:29:05]:
You, without knowing it, taught me the word paddock. I didn’t know that means a small area where horses can be trained. Is that. Am I right about that?

Michael Blowen [00:29:16]:
Yeah, that’s where they live. So we have a small area. We like to have a couple of acres for every horse so they’re not confined and they don’t feel. They get stressful if they’re crowded. That’s why you’ll see when they’re loading horses in into the starting gate first for races, sometimes they get a little anxious and they get a little nervous because it’s confining and they get. Some of them are claustrophobic, so they.

Ryan Doolittle [00:29:39]:
Like to be kind of alone. They don’t want to hang out with the other horses so much.

Michael Blowen [00:29:43]:
No, they do, they do. The stallions. The stallions would probably like to hang around with other horses too. We separate the stallions because they’re argumentative and they want to be the boss and they’re pretty. Some of them can be bullies, so they have their own separate paddocks. The way I like to put it is that they, they like to have neighbors, but they don’t want roommates. And the geldings that neutered male. They can have a herd and they have a herd and the mares all get along.

Michael Blowen [00:30:10]:
They’re in a big herd. So they, the horses are herd animals. Not just the thoroughbreds, but all horses are herd animals. So they like that. They like to be around each other.

Ryan Doolittle [00:30:22]:
That’s fascinating. So the female horses can all be together, which in a way, because we found with some of our retirement statistics that men have a harder time keeping social connections as they get older, but women don’t have a problem with that. I wonder if that’s similar with the horse.

Michael Blowen [00:30:41]:
Could very well be, yeah, I mean, these horses are just, you know, since we’re, we’re one of the only groups that retires them completely. There’s other really good aftercare groups that retrain them and they go on to be event horses. Bruce Springsteen’s daughter, I think, is an event rider. She has some, she has nice horses and stuff, but these other, these horses can learn other things besides racing. And a lot of people are now using them for that purpose. We just retire them. And the reason is because I couldn’t train them to do anything. They trained me to do things and that’s one, one reason we don’t do it.

Michael Blowen [00:31:21]:
And the other reason is that I fall in love with them and I couldn’t stand for them to go someplace else. I mean, I just want to know where they are and I know how to deal with them and I know if they have a problem we can deal with it. And we get all this support now from like the local veterinary hospital, the best vet hospital in the world. We send all our horses over there if they have a problem and we treat them exactly as you would treat a horse who is still making millions of dollars and running in the Kentucky derby.

Ryan Doolittle [00:31:47]:
Do you think any of these horses think that they’re running a school to train you?

Michael Blowen [00:31:52]:
Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure that’s true.

Ryan Doolittle [00:31:54]:
Really? Okay.

Michael Blowen [00:31:55]:
Yeah. I could hear them. I can almost overhear them reading their body language. I thought we told them how to do that last week.

Ryan Doolittle [00:32:05]:
I can’t wait to break Michael.

Michael Blowen [00:32:10]:
I’m in the slow learners group. I mean, that slow learners group. I’m sure they get exasperated with me all the time, saying, he’s been around here for so long, we can’t figure out whether he’s just stupid or he’s just getting older and he can’t remember things.

Ryan Doolittle [00:32:27]:
Should I be mad at him or just feel sorry for him?

Michael Blowen [00:32:30]:
Right, exactly. Exactly. And I think it alternates on a daily basis how each of them feels.

Ryan Doolittle [00:32:39]:
How many total horses do you have right now?

Michael Blowen [00:32:41]:
Well, what we have at this farm, we have 261.

Ryan Doolittle [00:32:46]:
261.

Michael Blowen [00:32:48]:
Wow.

Ryan Doolittle [00:32:48]:
Okay.

Michael Blowen [00:32:49]:
We have a cemetery in the back behind our house, and there’s 90, I think 98 buried there. Now, I told my wife, I said, diane, when I die, get me cremated. Throw my ashes out the back. Just don’t put my lifetime earnings on the sign. All these horses out there that made millions of dollars, and I don’t want to be.

Ryan Doolittle [00:33:11]:
Oh, do they list their lifetime earnings on that?

Michael Blowen [00:33:14]:
I do, yeah. We list their lifetime earnings, their racing record, who originally owned them, what big races they won. So when people come back, they can appreciate them even though they’ve passed.

Ryan Doolittle [00:33:25]:
That is so cool. You’re honoring all their accomplishments. Mm hmm. Wow.

Michael Blowen [00:33:30]:
Yeah. Because that’s what people remember. And so, you know, people will come here that, that on a tour that knew these horses way back when. Some of them are jockeys, some of the jockeys come back, some of the grooms come back, but just fans that have a remarkable stories about how the greatest time I ever had was my father, was the day that he took me to the Derby, and I saw silver charm win the Kentucky Derbys. The greatest day we ever had. And all he cared about was silver charm. And he had pictures of them all over the place. And so its not just me kind of telling stories and our tour guides just telling stories.

Michael Blowen [00:34:03]:
It’s listening to the stories. Not only that from the horse, but listening to stories from the people that come. We’ve had. And these horses have done amazing things for people, just absolutely stunning things.

Ryan Doolittle [00:34:15]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:34:16]:
Not myself included. I mean, I don’t know where I’d be. I’d probably be some drunk in Harvard Square. You know, say I used to be funny, or I used to know some funny people, used to review movies. Well, nobody remembers that. They don’t even remember when newspapers were actually on paper, you know?

Ryan Doolittle [00:34:35]:
Yeah. You’d be walking around, passing out your old reviews.

Michael Blowen [00:34:39]:
Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:34:39]:
Bottle of bourbon.

Michael Blowen [00:34:41]:
I just think what you’re doing about older people and retirement, all this kind of stuff is really, really good, because the best people I ever, I ever knew, that ever. That I ever loved were people that were older. I never even dated anybody younger than me.

Ryan Doolittle [00:34:55]:
Really?

Michael Blowen [00:34:56]:
Yeah. You know, I just thought of this. There was a. I remember one day I used to ride my bike from Brookline down the bike path along the Charles river to Emerson College when I was teaching. And one beautiful spring day, I looked over, and there’s this older woman in a lavender dress with a matching hat all dolled up. And the wind came by and took her hat off, and I drove over and I picked up her hat, I brought it to her, and she goes, well, young man, she goes, thank you very much. You must come and have lunch with me. I said, I’d love to, you know.

Michael Blowen [00:35:23]:
Anyway, she gave me the address, but I never did it. And then about six months later, she sees me. Young man, young man. Pulled me over. I thought you were going to come have lunch with me. I said, oh, I’m really sorry. She goes, well, I’m Miss Munsterberg, and Miss Munsterberg, and I want you to come have lunch next Thursday at 12:00 here’s my address. And she gives me.

Michael Blowen [00:35:44]:
Okay. Well, I found out her father was Hugo Munsterberg, and he wrote the first book in America about film as art. Not just as entertainment, but film as art. And she would tell. We started having lunch every, every month because she’d tell me these great stories. She goes, well, I remember Ts Eliot. He came to lunch one day, he came to dinner a couple of times, and, you know, he had the worst breath. You would find out things that nobody else would know because I couldn’t stand him.

Michael Blowen [00:36:14]:
He didn’t brush his teeth, and my father liked him. And so he came to the house, and, you know, William James came over, and she would tell me all these stories about these philosophers and these. These poets that, you know, you never dreamed you’d ever hear any stories about them. And. And she would tell me these stories, and we got to be really, really good friends.

Ryan Doolittle [00:36:34]:
Oh, my gosh.

Michael Blowen [00:36:35]:
Yeah. Another old person with great stories.

Ryan Doolittle [00:36:39]:
I never even thought about if Ts Eliot had good breath or not. But now, I.

Michael Blowen [00:36:45]:
They never taught you that in college?

Ryan Doolittle [00:36:48]:
No.

Michael Blowen [00:36:48]:
Like, which poets had the best breath, right?

Ryan Doolittle [00:36:52]:
Hey, there’s an article that we could write.

Michael Blowen [00:36:55]:
That’s it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:36:57]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:36:59]:
Being old, I mean, being old is. Is the greatest. It’s the greatest. I mean, people should look forward to it. They’re going, oh, my God, I’m getting all my ache, I guess. Oh, yeah, big deal. So what, the reason you ache is because you can still move. That’s the way it is.

Michael Blowen [00:37:13]:
I mean, it’s, you know, you have to put up with a few minor things, but, God, you know, so many of my friends have passed away, and people I really liked have passed away. And I’m fortunate enough to still hang in there and wake up every day and just have fun.

Ryan Doolittle [00:37:27]:
Yeah. Michael, at what age did you realize you loved being older? Were you older yet, or you realized this early on that you wanted to be?

Michael Blowen [00:37:39]:
No, I didn’t realize it until I was old. I didn’t realize it probably till I was. I don’t know, till after I retired, for sure. And we’ve been here for 20 years. I’d say about 15 years ago I realized, wait a minute, I can’t play basketball anymore. I can’t do this anymore, but I can’t play tennis anymore. Well, I couldn’t play the way I wanted to, and so that was a little depressing. When I had to, I had to make that adjustment that I was limited physically.

Ryan Doolittle [00:38:05]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:38:06]:
But then once I made that adjustment, I said, well, let me look around here. Yeah, these horses are broken down, too, and they’re old and they’re doing pretty good. So I think I’ll take a page out of their book. But how many people. I mean, people come here every day and they tell me what a good job I’m doing. I mean, who in America gets that? Like, nobody.

Ryan Doolittle [00:38:24]:
Nobody.

Michael Blowen [00:38:25]:
Nobody gets it. Nobody. Nobody. And I’m thinking, even if they’re wrong, I really don’t care. It’s so nice.

Ryan Doolittle [00:38:32]:
It still feels probably are wrong.

Michael Blowen [00:38:37]:
They’re wrong, but. But I still appreciate it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:38:41]:
So you’d say that the toughest challenge was. Was just the physical adjustment, but mentally and emotionally, it’s been all uphill or. Yeah, all upside, I think.

Michael Blowen [00:38:51]:
I think that’s the perfect way to put it. I think so. I think the physical part was difficult, but the mental part is okay. Well, I no longer. I never needed much money, so I didn’t worry about, you know, getting a lot of money. I just needed enough money to get beer and go to the track and pay my bills. That’s basically it. And so I knew I could get by on, you know, not.

Michael Blowen [00:39:16]:
I didn’t need a lot of material things. And it clears your mind up because if you’re always worried about that stuff, then you don’t have room to think about other things or to feel other things and appreciate the people that you still have that are your friends that are still alive. And I have a lot of friends, of course, that are younger than me. In fact, most of them are. But even some of the older ones that I’ve been friends with for a long, long time. I just think you get to appreciate things a little bit more. And I don’t mean that in a cliched way. I mean it in a pretty profound way.

Michael Blowen [00:39:48]:
I think that. That, you know, the. You know, it’s funny. My sister, when we grew up, my sister was beautiful. My sister was gorgeous, and she won beauty contests. She finished second in the Miss Connecticut pageant. Wow. She got better grades than me.

Michael Blowen [00:40:06]:
My father even said, she drives a nail better than you.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:10]:
Oh, really?

Michael Blowen [00:40:11]:
Yeah.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:12]:
So she did everything better.

Michael Blowen [00:40:13]:
I tell that to the kids, too. I bet. I said, I bet your parents tell you they like you both the same. That’s totally not true. I said, they don’t like you both the same. And then I tell a story about my sister, but that said, my sister got older, and she has a tough time going that she’s old now and she’s not as pretty as she used to be, and this, that and the other thing. And I’m still really good friends with Angie Dickinson, who just turned really 90. Yeah, 92.

Michael Blowen [00:40:42]:
She came and stayed with us at the farm.

Ryan Doolittle [00:40:45]:
Oh, my God.

Michael Blowen [00:40:45]:
And she was here for, like, three days. And the third day she was here before she came down for breakfast. I have a little miniature horse named little Silver Charm, who’s my pet, and he comes in the house. So that morning, I decided I’ll bring him in the house. So I brought him in the house, and I left. So about 15 minutes later, the phone rings and see Andrew. She goes, Michael. Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:41:09]:
There’s a horse in your living room. I said, yeah. So he comes in every morning and watches Al Roker do the weather. Then he goes. Then he goes back out. She goes, you are. You are crazy. I said, yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:41:21]:
So anyway, she’s been a great friend. She’d been a great friend of ours. And her ex husband, Burt Bacharach, retired to race horse does. There’s a lot of celebrities that I knew before that I now know in a totally different context.

Ryan Doolittle [00:41:35]:
How does that happen? How do you end up being friends with all these celebrities?

Michael Blowen [00:41:40]:
Well, the movie thing started it. I mean, Angie’s. Angie’s. Talk about old age. So Angie, years ago, I forget what year it was now. It was a long time ago. Angie was. Frank Sinatra was going on his final tour, okay.

Michael Blowen [00:41:56]:
And he was playing locally. And they hired Angie Dickinson to go around, do interviews because Frank wasn’t doing interviews. And this was at a time at the, at the globe when I’d given up the movie thing, and they would send me on these assignments. And so they asked me if I wanted to go have a drink with Angie Dickens. I said, I will. And we really hit it off. I mean, it was really, we really, really hit it off. And I realized that she was very funny.

Michael Blowen [00:42:21]:
It’s too bad she never did comedy, because she’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life. Oh, she’s been. So we got to be friends. And she wanted to come here to see the farm. She wanted to come here to see Zenyatta, the great racehorse. Zenyatta was retired here, and it coincided, they were having the world convention of police women at, uh, in Lexington. And so we made arrangements for her to talk to the police women because a lot of these women from all over the world became police women because Angie’s tv show police. Really? Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:42:58]:
And so, you know, and she was older then. I mean, she was, she was in, she was probably, when she first came here, I think probably 75. And I realized that she’d gone through another version of it because she got, you know, she, she was obviously a movie star because she was so gorgeous, and she, you know, like my sister, that they have to make adjust adjustments when they, when they get older. And she was doing pretty well for herself, and now she’s 92 years old, and she’s still gone.

Ryan Doolittle [00:43:26]:
Yeah. I would imagine being that beautiful, like you say, with your sister, too. It’s, it is an adjustment because you’re used to that, being part of, or you may associate that as part of your worth or something.

Michael Blowen [00:43:37]:
Yeah, I mean, when you get your, you know, I would know it because it’s not the case with me, but when your identity comes with that, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. You know, I tell the kids, too, you know, things when I reflect back, which I don’t do too often, but when I reflect back on my childhood, I realized that the sooner, you know, things that were just seemed devastating when I was younger were tremendous assets when I got older. Oh, like, for example, I love playing baseball. I really wanted to be a professional baseball player, but I wasnt good enough. But I was on this baseball team. We had four little league teams that all filtered into one Bay Bruth league team. And I just barely made the roster as an alternate. Now, as an alternate, you’re not allowed to play.

Michael Blowen [00:44:24]:
You’re only. I don’t know what you’re allowed to do. Go to practice and things like that. You don’t even get a uniform. You get a hat. And I was like a sophomore in high school when I played on this team. All my friends got the uniforms. All my friends got this.

Michael Blowen [00:44:39]:
They all got to play. And I was the doofus sitting on the end of the bench in a t shirt and dungarees and a hat.

Ryan Doolittle [00:44:45]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:44:46]:
And to make matters worse, and the girls would come to the games to see their boyfriends go, but nobody came. No girlfriend came to watch me. Nobody wants to date the doofus. Right? So one of my primary job, aside from pitching batting practice, was at the middle of the third inning. My job was to take my hat and go into the stands and beg for nickels so we could get Coca Cola after the game. So I’m up there with my hat in my hand, asking for money while everybody else is playing baseball and got the uniforms and all that kind of stuff, which at the time, obviously was humiliating. Devastating, whatever you want to describe it, it was. Wasn’t a very good thing.

Ryan Doolittle [00:45:29]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:45:30]:
However, when I started off friends and I had to raise money, I realized that’s all I’m doing. I’m going into the stands with that hat, and I don’t care. I’ll ask anybody anything because I’ve already been so humiliated. I’m not worried anymore. What are they going to say? No.

Ryan Doolittle [00:45:46]:
Right? Yeah. Michael, I see why everyone wants to be your friend. This is. You are a joy.

Michael Blowen [00:45:53]:
Well, that’s the other thing. You condense your whole life into an hour. You know, you’re bound to come up with something.

Ryan Doolittle [00:45:59]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:46:00]:
Interesting, right?

Ryan Doolittle [00:46:02]:
Well, you have more than.

Michael Blowen [00:46:03]:
I’ve been here for 77 years. You think I haven’t come up with something?

Ryan Doolittle [00:46:11]:
It sounds like your retirement. I don’t know. Did you, when you started this, did you consider that retiring? Because that’s when you stopped doing the film critic job. Or was this still like when I left the globe?

Michael Blowen [00:46:24]:
I thought. Yeah. I said to Diane, I said, look, our parents have died. Our son lives in Australia. Let’s take a shot at this. She says, I’ve never even been to Kentucky. And I said, I know, but it’s going to be okay. And if we don’t like it after a year, so what? We’ll get in the car and we’ll drive back.

Michael Blowen [00:46:45]:
We’ll just try it. And they offer, see, what happened was they’d offered me a job as the operations director for another really good group called the Thoroughbred Retirement foundation.

Ryan Doolittle [00:46:55]:
Okay.

Michael Blowen [00:46:56]:
And, and I thought that if I was going to do that job, I didn’t want to stay in Boston and try and do it and open up another office. I wanted to go to Kentucky, where the action is and really get to the bottom of this. And so I said to Diane, I said, so, you know, let’s try this, and if we don’t like it, we’ll just come back. So she goes, well, let me think about it. So about 20 minutes later, she goes back. She goes, okay, I’ll go with you, but only under one condition. I said, okay, what’s that? And she goes, that when I leave you, you won’t come looking for me. She’s still here.

Ryan Doolittle [00:47:34]:
She stuck around.

Michael Blowen [00:47:35]:
And then we, that’s how we ended. That’s how we ended up in Kentucky, and I, and we become a huge tourist attraction. So Tripadvisor. No, Expedia named us the best tourism attraction in Kentucky in the whole state. In the whole state. Wow.

Ryan Doolittle [00:47:51]:
Wait, that means you literally, you beat out the Kentucky Derby. Yeah. Wow.

Michael Blowen [00:47:57]:
Yeah. There must have been somebody on duty that was addled or something, but they, they did a story on, if you go to each state, what’s the one place you have to visit beyond anything else? And it was, and it was us.

Ryan Doolittle [00:48:13]:
Oh, my.

Michael Blowen [00:48:14]:
That was really, I was really great, you know, and then we’ve had so much, you know, the Washington posted a three page story on us in the Derby, and one of our horses, Alphabet soup, and the whole story of old friends was on the COVID of Smithsonian magazine. And, you know, Mo Rocca came here with Cb’s Sunday morning, and we’ve been getting a lot of attention, a lot of publicity because these horses are the, are the stars.

Ryan Doolittle [00:48:41]:
Yeah.

Michael Blowen [00:48:41]:
And, and they really like to come see them, and they don’t care how old they are anymore.

Ryan Doolittle [00:48:46]:
If someone wanted to donate, you know, say someone’s listening, they want to donate. What’s the best way for them to do that?

Michael Blowen [00:48:52]:
Well, they can go on our website, which is old friends equine. Www.oldfriendsequan.org. it has to be old friendsequine because old friends is a dating site for older people.

Ryan Doolittle [00:49:06]:
Oh, okay.

Michael Blowen [00:49:07]:
At least it was when we tried to get it.

Ryan Doolittle [00:49:10]:
Maybe they could hit up both websites.

Michael Blowen [00:49:13]:
There’s an idea.

Ryan Doolittle [00:49:14]:
Well, thank you so much for joining us on the happiest retirees podcast. I can truly say you are a very happy retiree. And maybe retiree is the wrong word, but you’re definitely happy.

Michael Blowen [00:49:25]:
Whatever it is, I’m overjoyed. Yeah.