Seabiscuit: An American Legend

named it Seabiscuit.⁴³ Howard printed patriotic messages on all the Seabiscuit Christmas cards and mailed Seabiscuit’s shoes off to bomber pilots as good-luck charms. Two bombers were named for the horse. The navy’s Seabiscuit bomber was painted with the horse’s smoke-breathing likeness.⁴⁴ The air force’s Seabiscuit, which was shot down off the coast of China in 1944, had the horse’s name painted across its nose.⁴⁵

As Seabiscuit aged, Howard faded. His heart began to fail him, and his life slowly contracted. Marcela, who adored him to the last, nursed him through his final years. He showered her in flowers and little love notes, written in a wavering hand. He found one last success on the track, this time with the great Noor, winner of the Santa Anita Handicap and conqueror of Triple Crown winner Citation. “Guess you’ve got another Seabiscuit on your hands,” said a reporter after Noor’s greatest win. Howard, thin and unsteady, straightened up and raised his chin. “Sir,” he said, “there will never be another Seabiscuit.”⁴⁶

When his heart became too frail for him to endure the thrill of seeing his horses run, Howard came to the track anyway, sitting in the parking lot and listening to race calls on the radio in his Buick.⁴⁷ In what is believed to be the last photograph ever taken of him, he was at the racetrack, standing in the winner’s circle. After leaving the track, he would go back to Ridgewood to be near the horses. On beautiful days, he would throw a saddle over Seabiscuit, and together they would walk into the hills to lose themselves in the redwoods.⁴⁸

———

On the morning of May 17, 1947, Marcela met her husband at breakfast and told him his rough little horse was gone, dead of an apparent heart attack at the relatively youthful age of fourteen.⁴⁹ The onetime bicycle repairman, whose own heart would fail him just three years later, was beside himself with grief. “I never dreamed,” he said, “the old boy would go so quickly.”⁵⁰ Someone broke the news to Pollard, who was plugging away on claimers at Suffolk Downs. His mind rolled back over all those years. “It seems only yesterday,” he said.

Howard had the body carried to a secret site on the ranch. After Seabiscuit was buried, the old owner planted an oak sapling over him. Howard, a vigorously public man, made his last gesture to his horse a private one. He told only his sons the location of the grave and let the oak stand as the only marker.⁵¹ Somewhere in the high country that once was Ridgewood, the tree lives on, watching over the bones of Howard’s beloved Seabiscuit.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“NUDE PHOTOS AID SCIENCE”

If you found yourself in a red-light district in the spring of 1951 and you had a spare quarter, you could purchase SIR! A Magazine for Males and read the story behind this cover headline. The magazine was the strangest of hybrids, a girlie gazette straining to pass itself off as a scientific journal. As pornography, it was a crashing failure. The featured model in an article on “Latin Quarter Lovelies” is shown hopping around in nothing but four one-quart-capacity Egyptian fezes—only one of which is on her head—with pasties stuck to the bottoms. The cover story asserts that corpulent people tend to be jolly and helpfully offers shots of nude models as proof. In another piece, “PURE SCIENCE UNCOVERS ANCIENT VICE,” the life’s labors of a University of Chicago classics professor are distilled into a discussion of how “The Antics of the Ancient Greeks Would Make Modern Playboys Drool with Envy.” Somehow the magazine endured, thanks to advertising from “rupture control” companies and a pharmaceutical outlet that sold thirty days’ worth of “genuine Male Sex Hormones” in a plain brown wrapper for $5.

SIR! came to grace my bookshelf after I typed the name George Woolf into an Internet auction search engine and turned up the magazine as a match. I didn’t have much hope for it, but the mystery of how an unpornographic, unscientific jockey landed in a pseudo-scientific porn magazine got the best of me. I shelled out $2.50 and gave SIR! a home. When it arrived, I flipped through and discovered, sandwiched between the trusses and jolly jiggling women, a wealth of tales of the Iceman’s exploits: setting his tack on fire, sleeping on the jocks’ room roof, riding pantsless down a homestretch before a grandstand full of fans. I called Woolf’s old friends and asked them about the stories. They verified all of them and even provided details the magazine had missed. SIR! had merit after all.

Writing this book has been a four-year lesson in how history hides in curious places. I obtained the narrative’s basic framework from the usual suspects—newspapers in the Library of Congress and other archives, official track chart books, racing histories, magazines. But the narrative they offered, though intriguing, was incomplete. The textures of my subjects’ personalities, their complex relationships, motives, fears, thoughts, and secrets, all remained elusive, as did the small but telling details that give historic figures immediacy and resonance in the imagination. My subjects had long since died, but I was convinced that they must have left behind some detritus. I began prowling Internet search engines, memorabilia auctions, and obscure bookstores, writing letters and placing “information wanted” ads, and making hundreds of calls to strangers in hopes that someone or something could illuminate what seemed to be a lost past.

The story wasn’t lost. It was scattered all over North America, tucked in back pockets and bottom drawers. A remarkable quantity of information came from an odd assortment of memorabilia, most purchased, some borrowed from a proselytizing sect of collectors. A few items were bad investments—a disco tribute to Seabiscuit springs to mind—but most yielded something of value, sometimes a note that gave an added dimension to a man, sometimes a forgotten anecdote or a critical explanation. In faded magazines and moldy newspapers I discovered rare photos, long interviews with my subjects, conversations between them, and exhilarating eyewitness accounts of events in their lives. My subjects’ private lives and the world they inhabited unfolded in the pages of almost a dozen forgotten autobiographies of horsemen stretching back to 1913 Kentucky Derby–winning rider Roscoe Goose. On a crackling audiotape I heard George call out to Red from the back of Seabiscuit, standing in the midst of a roaring throng. A 1945 Jockey’s Guild yearbook found in a Virginia bookshop yielded details on Frenchy Hawley and the stomach- turning mechanics of reducing. I unearthed Seabiscuit’s signature board games, pinball machine, wastebasket, postcards, and “endorsement” ads for two beer brands, two lines of Seabiscuit oranges, whiskey, a hotel, a humor magazine, a dry-cleaning service, and ladies’ hats. I was the only bidder in an auction for what turned out to be a rare film of the Seabiscuit–War Admiral match race, one of a half-dozen race films and newsreels I was able to obtain.

My greatest source was living memory. An ad placed in the Daily Racing Form on Breeders’ Cup day yielded a stack of letters. At least ten were written on the backs and in the margins of tip sheets and racing programs. One was composed in crayon on a slip of paper torn into a rough hexagon. Nearly all were penned in the sweeping Victorian script of a lost age. I picked up the phone and started calling these people and the hundred or so potential sources I found through racing contacts. Once or twice, my call wasn’t well received. “How old do you think I am?” snapped an angry octogenarian when asked if he had known any of the Seabiscuit crew (he died of old age a few months later). Some were a little too eager to talk. “You sound like a young girl!” a gravely ninety-something man thundered into the phone. “I