Seabiscuit: An American Legend

safari, Marcela eagerly enlisted in the adventure.⁴² In a world in which women’s roles were still highly traditional, Marcela’s trip was the talk of the town, prompting the San Francisco Examiner to feature daily reports on her exploits in the jungle. She gave them plenty to gawk at. When a lion charged their party, it was Marcela who leveled her gun and cooly shot the animal. And when she found a tiny orphaned baby blue monkey, she smuggled him back to New York in a hatbox. She talked the Waldorf-Astoria into letting her house him in a luxury suite, posed for reporters with “Blooey” and a banana on the Waldorf’s plush settee, then carried him home as a pet.⁴³ She shared Howard’s understanding of the importance of image and cheerfully joined him in the public eye. And like her husband, she had spent much of her life with horses.

In 1934 Charles Howard could look out from his offices and see a city shaped by his vision. The horse-drawn San Francisco he had walked into thirty years before had vanished. Only a few horses clopped down the city’s streets, and they would be gone before the decade was out. Howard was worth millions, lived in supreme luxury, and enjoyed the devotion of friends and the admiration of the public. But he was not content. He was ready to move on.

Howard’s friend George Giannini, owner of a string of fine racehorses, thought he knew where Howard belonged.⁴⁴ Giannini saw Howard rekindling his lost love of horses and thought he should stop dabbling and commit himself fully to Thoroughbred racing. Howard was only lukewarm. He would not enter the business on a large scale, he said, unless he could go first-class, with the very best trainer. The idea was bandied around a bit and apparently dropped.

It took a San Francisco dentist, former pro baseball player and investor named Charles “Doc” Strub to change his mind. Five years earlier, on a Monday afternoon in the fall of 1929, Strub had sat down in his lucky chair at his barber’s and settled in for a shave. He was handed a telephone. Sitting there with his face slathered in shaving cream, Strub learned that the stock market had crashed, and in a single day he had lost everything and fallen into a debt of more than $1 million. Strub put the phone down, stunned. An idea came to him. He had lost his money, but not his connections, nor his eye for opportunity. He would build a racetrack, the finest in the world, and bring horse racing back to California.

His timing turned out to be flawless, for the catastrophe that had struck him that afternoon had plowed under the entire nation. Over the next three years, as the Depression strangled the economy, state governments searched desperately for revenue. Californians hoping to relegalize racing pounced. For the first time in a quarter century, they received an audience. In 1933 California agreed to legalize wagering on two conditions. First, tracks had to use the pari-mutuel wagering machine instead of the bookmakers whose corruption had prompted the betting ban. Second, wagering would be heavily taxed. Racing was reborn.

With a ready plan for a $3-million racing Xanadu, built on the site of the vast Rancho Santa Anita at the apron of the San Gabriel Mountains just outside Los Angeles, all Strub needed was the cash. He couldn’t find a bank to back him, so he went door to door in search of private investors. Strub was turned away from many homes, but when he called on Charles Howard, he was invited in. Howard, his close friend Bing Crosby, and several other wealthy Californians handed Strub a hefty sum to build his Santa Anita Park.

Strub spent the money well. He built a track like none other on earth, a cathedral to the Thoroughbred so resplendent that writer David Alexander described his first sight of it as one of the most stirring visual experiences of his life. Strub’s mountain-flanked racecourse opened on Christmas Day, 1934. It was an immense, immediate success with the public, and in consequence, the state, which raked in millions in new revenue. It was just as popular with horsemen, for Strub had the brilliant idea of inaugurating a signature race for the track, the Santa Anita Handicap, to be held every year in late winter, beginning in 1935.⁴⁶ Unlike the Kentucky Derby, which was limited to three-year-old horses, the handicap would be open to any mature horse, three years old and up. But it was the purse that stopped traffic. In 1934 American marquee races carried a net value to the winner of between $6,000, and, in rare cases, $50,000. In contrast, Strub’s purse was staggering: $100,000, plus a few thousand dollars in entry revenue, to the winner. It was the biggest purse in the world. Offered in a year in which the average per capita income in the United States was $432, Strub’s purse caused a national sensation.⁴⁵ The pot was so distracting that hardly anyone referred to the race by its actual name. The Santa Anita Handicap became, in the parlance of racetrackers, the hundred-grander, or “hunnert- grander.”⁴⁷

Strub had created the race at the perfect moment. States all over the nation were relegalizing racing under the pari-mutuel system, resulting in a 70 percent increase in the number of tracks. Racing was rapidly becoming far and away America’s most heavily attended sport.⁴⁸ From 1934 on, millions of new racing fans turned their eyes to Santa Anita to see who would claim Strub’s pot. The hundred-grander became an overnight classic. Everyone wanted to win it. Including Charles and Marcela Howard.

Perhaps it was Giannini’s urging, perhaps the example of Bing Crosby, who was investing heavily in racehorses, or maybe the spellbinding vision of the track their money had built. Whatever the reason, the Howards, especially Marcela, hung their hearts on winning the big race. In 1935, shortly after San Francisco’s new Bay Meadows Racecourse opened, Howard assembled a group of modestly talented racehorses and hired a crack young trainer named Buster Millerick to condition them. The stable was registered under Marcela’s name. She designed the silks that would become legendary: crimson-and-white cap, white sleeves, and a crimson vest emblazoned with the Ridgewood cattle brand, an H inside a large white triangle. The horses were fairly good, but Howard had his sights on better things. That summer, he and Marcela bought fifteen yearlings at a Saratoga, New York, auction. In keeping with his love of lost causes, Howard bought only the worst-looking horses at the sale, animals who lingered in the ring, attracting few, if any, bids. Millerick was a very good young trainer, but for his new yearlings and the hundred-grander-caliber horses he planned to have soon, Howard wanted the best. In 1935 he went looking for him.

Tom Smith

(AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)

Chapter 2

THE LONE PLAINSMAN

Several hundred miles south of Charles Howard’s estate, an old horseman named Tom Smith was spending 1935 at a Mexican racetrack, living on a cot in a horse stall. He was a stark man, square-built, with a hard mouth. Ever since he had materialized at the track from somewhere on the frontier—no one knew exactly where—none of the racetrackers had known what to make of him.

As a general rule, Smith didn’t talk. He had a habit of walking away when anyone asked him questions, and he avoided social gatherings because people expected him to speak. A journalist who had watched Smith for years described him thus: “He nods hello, shakes hands goodbye, and hasn’t said a hundred words in all.”¹ One man swore that he had seen Smith accidentally chop off his own toe with an axe; the sum of Smith’s response had been to shake the amputated digit out of his boot and say, “My toe.”² The men on the backstretch assumed that anyone who made such a point of saying so little had to have something to hide, something shady or, perhaps, something immodestly valiant. They filled his biographical vacuum with suitably large