Seabiscuit: An American Legend

     Great nonfiction is really hard to find. Off the top of my head, only Bob Greene, Michael Lewis and Laura Hillenbrand leap to mind as favorites in this area. Great biographies are even rarer, but Hillenbrand takes a wonderful story of three wildly-dissimilar men and the horse that intertwines their fates, telling it perfectly in Seabiscuit: An American Legend (New York: Ballantine, 2001). Be prepared for a thorough immersion in the fast-paced, adrenaline-packed world of horse racing.

     It started with the horseless carriage, really. An ambitious bicycle mechanic named Charles Howard began to tinker with these toys of the San Francisco rich whenever they broke down, and from there he talked his way into receiving a dealership. But who wants a motor-car when there are horses that will transport people just fine? That was the thinking, anyway, until the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Howard's machines were pressed into service as ambulances during the aftermath, and everyone began to realize the importance of these machines, and how useful they were for covering large stretches of ground quickly. As a result, more people bought cars, thanks to this growing realization and some snazzy PR by Howard, a born salesman if there ever was one. This made him one of the richest men on the West Coast. Being a rich man, he had dabbled in horse racing, since that's what wealthy people amuse themselves with(plus his friend Bing Crosby pestered him into it). In the mid-twenties his son Frank died in a horrific car wreck, which cooled his interest in cars a great deal. This hobby of horse racing - which he shared with his wife Marcela - was part of what helped him get over his depression. But the early horses were pretty awful. Until, that is, he met an Old West character called Silent Tom Smith.
     Smith was a horse trainer just as the Old West was fading, and then it was discovered that his talents could be used for making racers go faster, too; in addition to breaking mustangs for various cavalry, rodeo or stock outfits. That probably saved his life. The horses he trained were about the level of Howard's - meaning the bottom of the barrel, at claiming races in little out-of-the-way lawless racetracks. Claiming races are where there's a set price set for all horses before the race starts, and only the winner is safe. Anyone else can be bought by anybody. Sort of the pawn shop of the "sport of kings." But his horses started winning, and often. That led to better horses and more wins, which led to his meeting Howard and getting hired.
     Red Pollard was raised on the bush-league tracks, after being abandoned in Wyoming at one at the age of fourteen. He was eccentric for a jockey - he would quote Emerson and Whitman, or read Shakespeare all the time. Yet at the same time, he had an incredible grasp of the profane, so his talk was a weird hybrid of cultivation and vulgarity. So the reporters loved him, of course, because he usually always had a great quote or two they could use. And shortly after he was hired by Howard, a rock blinded him in his right eye, which he kept a secret from everyone, knowing that his jockey license would be suspended if it was known that he had basically zero depth perception.
     Smith had seen this funny-looking horse on the claiming-race circuit and thought he might be something special, considering that Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, one of the foremost trainers in the world at that point, was training him, and that he was a descendant of Man o' War, one of the greatest racehorses in history. But Seasbiscuit(for that was his name) was lazy. So Fitzsimmons gave up on Seabiscuit, who then bounced around near the bottom of the barrel of the East Coast tracks, eventually was picked up by Howard after Smith spotted him again in a claiming race.

     It took several months to get the woefully underfed Seabiscuit into racing shape, both physically and mentally, but in late 1936 he finally began to show the promise of his bloodline. So he was sent off to San Francisco's Bay Meadows track to spend the winter, readying for the richest race in the world, the Los Angeles-area Santa Anita Handicap, which paid the winner $100,000(and this is during the end of the Depression, mind you.) Handicaps are races where the faster horses are assigned more weight to carry, in order to make things fairer, and also to encourage betting. Most of the big races outside of the Triple Crown, like the Breeder's Cup, are handicapped.
     The 1937 edition of "the hundred grander" took place with on February 27 with Seabiscuit pretty much a dark horse, as far the favorites went. He took on the favored contenders Rosemont and Special Agent, sailing into the lead on the backstretch...until he suddenly veered to the left, near the rail, killing his momentum and allowing Rosemont to come up beside him. The rail is the shortest way around the track, but also potentially the slowest, since the ground is usually worse down there. Seabiscuit loved to run along the rail whenever he could. But Rosemont crept up on his right side, leading to a photo finish....with the Howards' horse the second-place finisher. Maybe Pollard couldn't see Rosemont coming; because of his blind eye. But since he couldn't tell anyone that, he was left defenseless against the rousing onslaught of criticism which said he lost the race. That pretty much killed his reputation around the barn, adding to the conditions which made the Howard stable Pollard's only reliable source of rides.
     The press invasion had begun, because America needed a hero, and the media determined that that hero was a scrawny Thoroughbred who got the wrong end of one of the biggest races in the world. While establishing himself as the fastest horse on the West Coast, he became the top American news item of 1937, topping even FDR and Hitler. At the same time, Pollard's reputation was still taking a beating. To fend off the prowling hordes of photographers and reporters, Smith began practicing Seabiscuit in secret, and frequently substituting his nearly-identical brother Grog in photoshoots. War Admiral won the Triple Crown that year, and was by any measure the best horse in the country. But a growing percentage of people thought that Seabiscuit could give him a run for his money. A match race was tried to be agreed upon, but nothing happened due to the East Coast establishment attitude from War Admiral's owner Samuel Riddle. Meanwhile, the weights the handicappers were assigning for Seabiscuit were enormous; putting greater and greater strain on his body. The two titans were scheduled to face off in the Washington Handicap in November at Baltimore's Pimlico racetrack, but it was raining heavily on the day of the race. Seabiscuit was a terrible mud-runner, because he didn't like to get dirty, for one thing, and he couldn't get any traction with the way his short stubby legs galloped. So he was scratched, and War Admiral ran away with the victory. They were also scheduled to run in the Pimlico Special, but it rained again that day, and so Seabiscuit was scratched - again. And War Admiral won - again. But Smith thought he found a way to beat War Admiral, though, if they ever could meet....
     Seabiscuit, you see, hugely enjoyed tormenting whoever he was racing against. He liked to intimidate the other competitors, so much so that it was nearly impossible to find anyone else who was willing to work out with him, except for a filly named Fair Knightess. In the Pimlico Special, another horse had stared War Admiral straight in the eye, which freaked him out considerably.

     In December, the Howard crew headed back home to San Francisco, spending the winter at the Tanforan racetrack. Things didn't go well. On December 7, Pollard was riding the Howards' sprinter Exhibit when the horse swerved suddenly away from something, right into the path of another horse called Half Time, impeding his progress. It was very unlikely that the move was intentional; but perhaps erring on the side of safety, considering that horse racing had a very shaky reputation, the track stewards suspended Pollard for a month. This derailed Seabiscuit's preparation, for Howard said if Pollard wasn't riding him, he wasn't racing. Fair Knightess was also scratched in a Christmas Day race, for good measure. War Admiral was named the 1937 Horse of the Year by the sportswriters. Then Riddle pulled War Admiral out of the Santa Anita, racing him in Miami at Hialeah racetrack instead against significantly weaker competition. So Seabiscuit missed several races waiting for the new year of 1938 to appear, and thus Pollard's suspension to be lifted. In the meantime, everyone went stir-crazy - the reporters, the horse himself, Charles and Marcela, Pollard, Smith... And the hundred-grander kept inching closer and closer without a race, first because the track secretary issued Seabiscuit an astronomical 132-pound impost, which everyone flatly refused to accept. When the secretary finally relented with a 130-impost in the San Carlos Handicap on February 19, he was finally entered and set to run again.
     On the night of February 18, it started raining. So Seabiscuit was AGAIN scratched, but Fair Knightess was left in the field. Pollard was aboard the filly. She was running well - hanging in fourth most of the way - but up ahead of her an infamous horse called He Did sideswiped someone else, leading to a huge traffic jam that Fair Knightess plowed right into, with no way to slow down or swerve out of the way. She went down, with Pollard underneath her. Her hind legs were paralyzed; and Pollard's left side was utterly crushed. Both horse and rider hung uncertainly near death. A jockey named Sonny Workman was hired for ride Seabiscuit for the last prep race, but given conflicting instructions on how to ride him, he finished second in a dead heat at the wire. Smith forced Howard to fire him, which left them again without a jockey for the big race. Until, that is, Red's friend George Woolf (a much better jockey) pulled some strings to get out of his ride, and he explained in detail the way he would ride such a temperamental horse as Seabiscuit was. That convinced everyone; and so Woolf would ride Seabiscuit in the 1938 Santa Anita Handicap.

     It started out dismally. A goon riding a hopeless longshot called Count Atlas repeatedly smashed into Seabiscuit at the opening furlongs, deliberately delaying his progress. Woolf knew the lawless tricks of unscrupulous riders as well as Pollard did; they raced on the same cut-through-a-wheat-field bullrings at the start of their careers. Sometimes, you had to fight back just to survive. This was one of those times. Woolf smacked Count Atlas' rider in the butt with his whip, which gave him a clear hole to advance through. That left Seabiscuit in twelfth, eight lengths back, with a little over half the race to go. The only option was on the outside of the main pack. And the main competition were nearly identical brothers, Stagehand and Sceneshifter. Stagehand was the hotshot three-year-old, the pre-race favorite for the Kentucky Derby. Seabiscuit caught up with Sceneshifter and rocketed past, leading the field, until Stagehand(carrying only 100 pounds, due to a quirk of scheduling) blazed up alongside. The horses hit the finish line together; for the second year in a row, Seabiscuit was in a photo finish for the win. And for the second time, he lost. It took a while to determine that, though - and everyone in the Howard camp was crushed. So was the public, who wanted their hero to triumph.
     Pollard was able to start riding again in May, much to everyone's surprise. After much behind-the-scenes negotiating, a match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral was finally set for Memorial Day at New York's Belmont racetrack. Everyone went crazy with excitement and anticipation, but both horses didn't do very well in practice leading up to the big race.At the last second, Seabiscuit had to be scratched because of soreness in his front tendons, much to Riddle's relief. In June, Pollard was working out a horse as a favor to a friend. The horse went berserk; crashing into a barn and shredding Pollard's leg to the bone.
     In July, with Woolf aboard, Seabiscuit won the Hollywood Park God Cup, defeating Ligaroti, the horse of Charles' friend Bing Crosby and Charles' son, Lin. A match race was arranged between them at San Diego's Del Mar track in August, and the press had a field day with it, promoting all the interesting angles - friends competing against each other, son against father, American horse versus an Argentine; Bing and Lin had even hired Smith's son Jimmy as their trainer. Seabiscuit won - barely - but there was a huge controversy that sprung up after the terrible brawling of Woolf and the other jockey. But that was eventually forgotten a couple months later, when in early October the news broke that the Pimlico Special, on November 1, would be run as the match race between War Admiral and Seabiscuit, for real this time.

     Woolf and Pollard talked strategy in the hospital, while Smith worked to improve Seabiscuit's reaction time out of the start. War Admiral's trainer worked on improving his horse's endurance. A vast, agitated throng swarmed into the track, despite the race date being a Tuesday. This race was being broadcast live across the airwaves by NBC, and almost everyone - including President Roosevelt - was listening intently. Forty million listeners was the estimated audience. The crowd at the track was so tightly-packed that Clem McCarthy, the announcer, couldn't reach the press box. So instead he leaned on a portion of outside railing and called the race from there.
     It was a thrilling race. They dueled neck-and-neck for quite some time before Seabiscuit's intimidation mode kicked in, and he sailed ahead to win by three lengths. The sportwriters finally named Seabiscuit the Horse of the Year.

     In a race at Santa Anita in early 1939, one of the prep races for the hundred-grander, Seabiscuit ruptured a suspensory ligament in his front left leg, putting his career in doubt. The Howards entered another horse from their stable, Kayak, in the Santa Anita Handicap, and the Argentine horse(bought in the same herd as Bing and Lin's Ligaroti) won the race. For most of 1939, Pollard and Seabiscuit recuperated on the Howards' ranch, slowly mending from the injuries to their bodies as the mental scars those injuries brought along were washed away.
     In January 1940, they returned to Santa Anita. The day of the race dawned on March 2, and all the other trainers were hoping that if their horse didn't win, that Seabiscuit would. It came down to Seabiscuit and Kayak; and for the last time, Seabiscuit found that extra reserve of acceleration. They finished one-two, and the public finally got the fairy-tale ending they were hoping for.

     In 1946, Woolf's diabetes caused him to faint in the middle of a race. He was thrown, and died instantly. Three years later, there was a statue of him erected in the Santa Anita infield.
     Smith faded into obscurity, despite winning the Kentiucky Derby in 1947 while working for an eccentric perfume baroness. He suffered a stroke at 78, and died several years afterward.
     Red got married to a nurse named Agnes in the spring of 1939, and he and his wife had several children. He kept riding until 1955, then he worked in various tasks around a track in Rhode Island so he could be near the horses he loved so. He died in 1981, Agnes followed two weeks later.
     Seabiscuit learned how to herd cattle in his retirement, and on May 17, 1947, he died of a heart attack at the age of fourteen. Howard's health was failing by then, he would die of heart failure three years afterward. Several fighter planes were named in Seabiscuit's honor, as was an ambulance for the British Red Cross. In 2003, there would be a movie made about him, with Tobey Maguire as Red Pollard.

     I apologize for the length and detail of this review, but such intricate reporting and thrilling phraseology merited a quick summarization of all the wonderful content in these 400 pages.

#Wesley

Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen

     As a longtime journalist who's written roughly twenty books, Bob Greene knows how to structure a story really well. And World War II had plenty of those to choose from. But not many people know this one; that North Platte, a smallish city in the southwest Nebraska sandhills, operated a canteen for troop trains during the war as a way to keep the soldiers' morale up. Every day. For years. Coffee, fried chicken, sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, cake - all this, with rationing going on. It was a community-wide effort, as people came from a hundred miles around to volunteer. In Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen (New York: William Morrow, 2002), Greene tells us this tale, by inserting himself as a character searching for this history of what once was then, and no now longer can be, in our society of the 21st century.

     He chose that format because he was interested in this concept himself, and wanted answers. So it was reasonable that readers would also be interested. The trains still go through North Platte today - it's the home of the biggest train yard in the country - but passenger trains are a thing of the past. Once the haven of every type of ne'er-do-well imaginable, now the only trace of vice he could find was a bikini contest at a sports bar....that had no entrants. The community was hosting a regional softball tournament at the ball fields north of town, which was a major point of interest. But downtown was deserted, of course - in stark contrast to all the stories gleaned in interviews with those people who helped out with the Canteen in some way or another. Now everyone shops at Wal-Mart, which feels familiar, because we're all used to it. Greene muses on these and other points a good while.
     Back then, though, it all began around 1941-ish with Miss Rae Wilson, who had a brother in the army, Nebraska National Guard, I think it was. Word got passed around somehow that they would be passing through North Platte for a minute, so everyone in town, basically, came out to cheer them on and thank them for serving the country. It was the National Guard, but it was the Kansas National Guard, not Nebraska. Well, no matter, these boys needed good food as much as anyone else. So instead the people gave their cheers and rations to the boys on the train, who quickly left. So Rae wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, suggesting that such a custom might be a good idea to become a permanent thing - their bit of pitching in to the war's success, by raising the morale of the troops. For several years, every day without fail, there were volunteers to meet every troop train, until about eight months after the war ended. Sandwiches of every type imaginable(ham and pheasant were remembered especially fondly), coffee, cake, fried chicken - all freely given. In the interviews, many of the men who had stopped at the Canteen still teared up at the memory, it was so welcome. It got to be one of those subjects of common interest over in Europe, the reception soldiers received in North Platte.
     There was a nice piano over in the corner, so sometimes sailors or soldiers would play it, while others would dance with the teenage girls on the platform. Some of those girls stamped and mailed letters for the boys that wanted to send a word home. There were a lot of people who got married because of the Canteen in one way or another. A boy selling papers once ran into his long-lost cousin there. Some of the men who survived the war moved to North Platte in gratitude.

     None of that would happen today, because it simply couldn't. There aren't really any communities like that any longer, that band together for common projects, unless it's disaster cleanup after a tornado. That mindset, of "keeping up morale," is entirely alien now. It got lost somewhere in history of our society. Single men hauled supplies to the depot. Housewives used their allotments of sugar rations for angel food cakes for the soldiers. Little girls went without the pretty shoes they dreamed of in store windows. None of that would happen today, not for complete strangers you'll never see again. And that's sad, which is where the modern-day part comes back in, to contrast the war years to the new millennium. Provides a lot to think over and about.

#Wesley

What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done by Matt Perman

★★★★★

(2014)

When I started What's Best Next I had never heard of the author, never heard of the book, and had no idea my life was about to be changed.  I simply chose it at random as an audio book to listen to in the car.  I did listen in the car, and the idea of gospel-driven productivity appealed to me so deeply that when the book ended, I immediately started it again.  Then I bought a physical copy of the book and poured over it with a highlighter.

Matt Perman clearly and logically uses scripture to show that

"there is no distinction between learning how to be productive and learning how to live the Christian life altogether, for both are about how we are to live in this world for the glory of God.  The way we go about handling our email, making appointments, running meetings, attending classes, and running the kids to where they need to go are not distinct from the everyday life of sanctification that God calls us to but are themselves a fundamental part of it.  We are to 'be wise' in them just as we are to be wise in the things that directly pertain to salvation; indeed the way we go about them is an expression of our Christlikeness and sanctification."

He explains how productivity is about getting the right things done and how good works are anything you do in faith, even tying your shoes.  I am just going to keep reading and keep listening to this book until these truths have soaked into my soul and start oozing out my actions.

--by Jatina  :)

Yo, Sacramento!

     From the minds behind Yo, Millard Fillmore! (Will Cleveland, Mark Alvarez and Tate Nation) comes the follow-up about state capitals, Yo, Sacramento! (New York: Scholastic,1994).

     Did you know that in the Green Mountains, a gigantic varmint is shaving away ground with his mountain peeler? (Montpelier, Vermont) That the Concorde is sometimes ridden by a nude hamster? (Concord, New Hampshire) Or that the rich lion listens to his collar radio inside his comfy den of fur? (Denver, Colorado) The historical information is right there again on the left-hand pages across from the cartoon, along with important details like state size(by square miles), post office abbreviation, the official bird, tree and flower of each state, as well as the date it entered(or reentered) the Union. And there's nifty trivia in the margins.
     This book also contains helpful quizzes to make sure the information sticks, just like its predecessor. And the states are grouped by region, which is interesting(though confusing, how those regions were decided on). The Jeopardy!-style quiz section is back, in addition to a name-that-state-outline page(which is no problem at all if you read Laurie Keller's Scrambled States of America.)

     This book is hilarious, and incredibly useful. (Seriously, how else would you know that the capital of Kentucky is Frankfort, or the capital of Pennsylvania is Harrisburg?) Check it out ASAP, especially if you have kids.

#Wesley

Yo, Millard Fillmore!

     Written by Will Cleveland and Mark Alvarez, and illustrated by Tate Nation, Yo, Millard Fillmore! (Brookfield, Connecticut: Millbrook Press, 1993) is an instantly-useful and highly entertaining way to memorize, in order, all the presidents from 1 to 42(43, 44 and 45 came after publication) through bizarre images and terrific cartoons.
     Cleveland was on a road trip with his family, the car coated in the heavy silence of boredom, when he suddenly had a great idea: Why not have everybody memorize the presidents? So he checked the list in an encyclopedia(this was before the internet) and over the next couple trips he, his wife and kids came up with entertaining off-the-wall images to make things more bearable. And that's how this book was born.

     We start with a washing machine big enough to wash a ton of clothes. (Washington, of course, but you have to start everything somewhere.) And from there we get escaping mad suns (Madison), a minivan coated with hair (Van Buren), great ants (Grant) coming out of toilets and more. There are helpful quizzes to review your newfound knowledge every five Presidents or so, which solidifies the information while disguising it as a game, which of course is the best method for teaching something so that it'll stick. Skimming the pages, this will take about twenty minutes to finish, and you'd be surprised at how useful it is for knowing the answers to Jeopardy! questions. If you have more than twenty minutes to spend, then there is a short biographical sketch of each President, along with the years he served and his birth-to-death timespan.
     After the cartoons are finished, there's a Jeopardy!-style quiz section to make sure you paid attention to the biographical information, and some memory tricks for remembering years served and which number each guy was. (For every President from John Tyler [10] to William McKinley [25], the last two digits of their term can be figured by multiplying the president's number by four, then adding one.) Then there's a copy of the the oath of office, and the order of succession to the throne after the vice president. (The Secretary of Education is sixteenth in line, which seems pretty far back.)

     It's amazing how often I still use the memory tricks in this book to remember presidents, and capitals, especially(but that post is coming). Read it ASAP, especially if you have kids.

#Wesley

Late Edition: A Love Story

     My most recent read is Late Edition: A Love Story, by Bob Greene (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009). In it he recalls the summers of 1964-68, when he worked at his first newspaper, the Columbus (Ohio) Citizen-Journal, during high school. It really is a love story; because of the excitement he had for working in the same building as all these people doing something as simple, and as local, as producing the local newspaper.

     It started on the day JFK was assassinated. No one quite knew what to do, so it seemed just as natural to write about how his high school class reacted to the news. And then he took it down to the C-J offices and dropped off the story at the city editor's desk. They didn't take that story, but he kept pestering folks, and that led the next summer to his first job with the paper, which was as a copyboy, running errands of all types. Nest summer he found a place in the sports department, with led to further adventures. By then he had started college near Chicago, but came back to Columbus the next summer to work for the city department.

     It was at a special week of extra work for the paper's parent company that he realized there was a wider world out there. That week Greene was asked to serve as a copyboy during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which made lots of news for being very acrimonious. He didn't notice; he was running errands for senators and famous TV broadcasters, so he figured they were all like that. But it was there that he realized that there were bigger places to write than the Citizen-Journal, much as he loved it. So he went to the Chicago Sun-Times, then across town to the Chicago Tribune. And then books came, a column in Esquire magazine, and a freelance spot reporting for ABC News. Computers entered the scene, and then changed the landscape completely. Gone are the Linotype operators, or scissors necessary for physically cutting the copy to rearrange the paragraph structure. There are no more typewriters making that wonderfully noisy clacking noise. And it's rare that people will read an actual newspaper any longer. Which is really sad. But here Greene does a wonderful job of recapturing that world of that newsroom, and the public's attitude and assurance that they would be here forever. There was a romance to that time, like the way he describes assuming that everyone always read at least one paper a day, usually more. It would have been nice to live in that world, I think.

#Wesley