From the Shelves of the Paco Library

When I was very young, my parents had a game-chest: a briefcase-type box that contained a game board (checkers or chess on one side, backgammon on the other) decks of cards, a mini-roulette wheel, and a rectangular, green felt cloth, one side of which was for laying bets on the wheel. The other side had a print of a long, oval track for “horse racing”. There were five or six small plastic figures of horses with jockeys hugging their necks, and cards with the names of the most famous race horses. You would line the horses up at the starting line, roll the dice, and advance them, accordingly, along the track.

I suppose the cards with the horses’ names were simply to add some small degree of verisimilitude. All the big names were there: Whirlaway, Man O’ War, War Admiral. I always chose the one that struck me as having the most comical name – Seabiscuit (about which, as they say, more anon).

My experience with real horses has always been mixed. My earliest childhood recollection is of being thrown off a wildly bucking pony (“Gentle as a lamb,” my father’s friend had assured him), that had apparently been stung by a bee or a hornet. I caromed off a tree and hit the ground hard, and remember getting a mouthful of dirt. When I got older, I attended a riding school, and learned to sit a horse more or less properly, and up to maybe ten years ago I would occasionally ride one of my father’s horses when we visited him at his place in the country. He kept a small herd of cattle at the time – mostly for ornamentation – and he had a dappled gray that had been a cutting horse on a real ranch. Dusty had retired, but he kept a hand in, so to speak; every evening, and during the day when a storm approached, Dusty – completely of his own volition - would herd the cattle back in the direction of a large shed at the back of the property, and he always stayed close by them, exercising a sort of proprietary interest. Whenever I climbed up on this horse, it was pretty much strictly as a non-voting passenger; he’d immediately take off for the herd, and my efforts to get him to go in any other direction were met with stolid indifference.

So, as I say, my acquaintance with horses has been somewhat limited, but sufficient to give me a lifelong interest in them, and a keen admiration for the standouts of the species. Which (at long last!) brings me to this week’s Shelves feature. Seabiscuit: An American Legend, by Laura Hillenbrand, one of America’s finest writers on the subject of thoroughbred racing, was the author’s first book, and was, deservedly, an amazing success. It was ranked #1 on the New York Times best seller list for 42 weeks, and was the basis for the movie of the same name released in 2003.

The book reads almost like a novel - a tribute not only to Ms. Hillenbrand’s skill, but to the highly popular subject and his fascinating career. It is a uniquely American story, featuring the overcoming of tremendous obstacles by a group of brilliant, albeit eccentric, characters, not the least colorful of which was Seabiscuit, himself. Although of good stock, he was a comparatively small horse with crooked legs and an unusual gait. His original owners had indifferent success with him, and he eventually wound up in the stables of Charles Howard, an extraordinarily successful automobile salesman. Teaming up with close-mouthed trainer, Tom Smith, and jockeys such as Red Pollard and George Woolf, Seabiscuit began piling up victories and captured the imagination of a country mired in the despair of the Great Depression. Ms. Hillenbrand had me hooked from the preface:

“They had come from nowhere. The horse, a smallish, mud-colored animal with forelegs that didn’t straighten all the way, spent nearly two seasons floundering in the lowest ranks of racing, misunderstood and mishandled. His jockey, Red Pollard, was a tragic-faced young man who had been abandoned as a boy at a makeshift racetrack cut through a Montana hay field. He came to his partnership with Seabiscuit after years as a part-time prizefighter and failing jockey, lugging his saddle through myriad places, getting punched in bloody cow-town boxing rings, sleeping on stall floors. Seabiscuit’s trainer, a mysterious, virtually mute mustang breaker named Tom Smith, was a refugee from the vanishing frontier, bearing with him generations of lost wisdom about the secrets of horses. Seabiscuit’s owner, a broad, beaming former cavalryman named Charles Howard, had begun his career as a bicycle mechanic before parlaying 21 cents into an automotive empire.”

They were an almost magical combination of partners, and their determination led to a string of improbable victories, including the match race with War Admiral (arguably the greatest horse race in history; incidentally, you can see it on YouTube).

This is an excellent slice of Americana by an author who is an expert in her subject and a fine prose writer, to boot.