Roscoe Goose - Roscoe Goose and Jimmy Winkfield

Roscoe Goose and Jimmy Winkfield

In his 2004 book Wink: The Incredible Life and Epic Journey of Jimmy Winkfield, author Ed Hotaling wrote of an incident involving Roscoe Goose at one the events leading up to the May 6, 1961 running of the Kentucky Derby. Told to the author by Jimmy Winkfield's son, the story was part of publisher McGraw-Hill's press release and has been repeated in numerous publications. The book recounts what happened when Winkfield, an African-American jockey and two-time winner of the Derby who was inducted in the U.S. Racing Hall of Fame in 2004, was an invited guest at the National Turfwriters Association banquet held at Louisville's historic Brown Hotel. On his arrival, Winkfield and his daughter Liliane were denied entrance through the front door of the still segregated hotel. Decades earlier, prejudice had forced Winkfield out of American racing and he had had to seek work and a new life in Europe. Now, the seventy-nine-year-old Winkfield stood his ground and requested they be allowed in. They were eventually admitted but received the cold shoulder from everyone and were left to sit alone at their table. However, when Roscoe Goose recognized who it was, the white millionaire came over and spent time at their table. Included in Ed Hotaling's book is one of the last public photos ever taken of Jimmy Winkfield showing him and Roscoe Goose sitting together at the ensuing running of the Kentucky Derby.

In 1963, Roscoe Goose was one of the inaugural class of inductees in the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame. He is honored with an engraved bronze plaque on display at the Kentucky Fair & Exposition Center's Freedom Hall in Louisville.

Roscoe Goose died in Louisville, Kentucky in 1971 at the age of eighty. He is buried there in the Cave Hill Cemetery. His brother Carl was also a jockey who won the 1913 Kentucky Oaks but who was killed at age twenty-two in a racing accident on October 15, 1915 at Latonia Race Track.