He came into racing before the day of the film patrols that record every foot of a race and on tracks where rough riding—sawing off an opponent, fighting your way through jams, leg-locking, and holding saddle cloths—were the style of survival. On the backs of those 1,000-pound animals and in the heat of those races, that temper of his ignited and he was fined or suspended more than thirty times, once for a year. Over his career he himself survived more than forty falls.
"Even when I caddied," he said, "I didn't weigh seventy pounds, and I couldn't carry doubles like the big kids. I had all I could do to lug singles. Racing was the only thing I ever found where I could be a competitor."
A competitor he was, and more than that. He never grew taller than five feet three, and he rode best at 108 pounds, but in what he did he was as big as the other giants of his time—Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Sammy Baugh, Joe Louis, Ben Hogan—and one for all time. He was the first to win five Kentucky Derbies—Bill Hartack would tie him in that—and the only one to win twice the Triple Crown—the Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont. When the best of the ballplayers aspired to make $100,000 a year he was making $150,000 and more.
"I'll get into Miami late Thursday afternoon," I was saying on the phone now. "Let's get together on Friday."
"But how much time will this take?" he said.
It was that way in 1955. We had signed a contract with Look to do two articles, and I tailed him not only during that month at Saratoga but for another month at Belmont and elsewhere on Long Island, where he and his wife, Ruth, and their young daughter and son lived. There was always somebody who had just got into town or someone with whom he had to discuss a business deal, or there was a date that he and his wife had for dinner.
"I'll make it as painless as I can," I said. "How about lunch Friday?"
"Lunch?" he said. "We'll probably be done by two o'clock, and that's too late to play golf. What am I going to do the rest of the afternoon?"
I don't know, Eddie, I was thinking. Read a book, perhaps? No, I don't ever recall you mentioning a book, and with all that nervous energy, reading wouldn't be the answer. I don't know the answer, because I've never been able to put myself in your place.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," I said. "I'll call you on Friday morning."
"Good," he said.
Then he would surprise me. After the articles had been accepted by the magazine, I phoned him one night at his home.
"Eddie, I hate to ask you this," I said, "but the editors at the magazine want to meet you. You don't have to do it, because they've already bought the pieces."
"What the hell," he said. "They're paying that money, so if they want to meet me I'll come over."
We had lunch at Toots Shor's, and while we were having a drink I got him talking again about riding tactics. On that white tablecloth, before the food came, he started moving the silverware around, demonstrating a blind switch—three horses strung out from the rail and his horse pocketed behind—and how you know the capabilities of all of them and at what point one figures to come up empty and leave the opening. I was getting it from the master, and that is the bonus of the business I am in.
When we finished lunch we still had a few minutes to kill before the appointed hour for the hand-shaking, so walking him east toward the Look building on Madison Avenue, I led him south a block to Rockefeller Plaza. It was early November, and down on the ice rink in front of the gilded Prometheus statue the skaters were circling.
"What the hell is that?" he said.
"It's a skating rink," I said.
"How long has that been there?" he said.
"For more than twenty years," I said.
"I never knew this," he said. "I've got to bring the kids over here."
He was a man of the world, but of his own world. It was the world of the race tracks across this country, of jockey rooms and racing's millionaires, of fashionable resorts and eating places, of celebrities and hangers-on, and high stakes races and honors, and oil wells coming in and stocks paying off. It was a world I would never know any more than he would know mine.
He and his wife live now at the Jockey Club on Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami. It is an elegant, white, balconied high-rise with gate house, and if you can pass muster, they will relieve you of a hundred dollars a night.
"Hell, if you're on your own, as I presume you are," he had said on the phone, "I'd stay at the Holiday Inn across the street for thirty a night."
"I'll do that," I said.
At the motel on Friday morning I called his apartment at nine o'clock. His wife said that he had left for Boca Raton, and to check back later. I called at one and left my phone number, at five, at six and from a restaurant at seven.
"I haven't heard from him," his wife said. "I don't know where he is, but I know this. When he gets in we're not going to eat dinner here."
"So when you finally get him on the phone," my good and long time friend Bard Lindeman, who was then the medical writer of the Miami Herald, said at dinner, "straighten him out. Tell him you've come all the way down here, and you've got a job to do and a living to make and . . ."
"Come on, Bard," I said. "You've been in this business of ours long enough to know what the basic relationships really are. The subject doesn't need the writer. The writer needs the subject. Eddie Arcaro never needed me."
"I suppose that's right," he said.
"In fact," I said, "I'll never forget the first time I met him."
It was at the old Aqueduct track before they were to tear it down to build the Big A. It was in the jockey room between races, and changing silks he was washing his face from a pail of water that stood on the wooden bench in front of the row of metal lockers. Cosmopolitan had asked me to do a piece about a day in the life of a jockey from the time he gets up at six o'clock in the morning to work horses until he has ridden his last race of the day. They said they wanted Eddie Arcaro, and I explained it to him. "I don't want it," he said. "It's not for me."
"But it would be good public relations," I said, "not only for you but for racing."
"You mean publicity?" he said, the towel in his hand and his face wet and turning to me. "You know what publicity does for me? It makes an 8-5 shot even money, and when it behaves like an 8-5 shot and I don't bring it in, they boo my butt off."
I understood that. He was so good and so prominent that they believed he could win on almost anything he rode. When he didn't they booed him unmercifully, abused him with filthy language and, in letters, threatened his life and his family. Racing crowds are the most avaricious and vicious of the audiences of sport, and for a while the Pinkertons guarded him at the track and he seriously considered giving up riding.
"I called you last night," he was saying on the phone now, when I finally got him at nine o'clock on Saturday morning. "You weren't in."
"I finally went to dinner."
"I've got it right here," he said. "It's 893-4110, room 419."
"Right. Now when do we meet?"
"Well," he said, "I don't know exactly what you want."
"Come on, Eddie," I said. "I want to ask some questions, and they won't be stupid questions."
"Hell, I know that, Bill," he said. "I mean I have to get my day straightened out, so how long will this take?"
"Let's say an hour."
"Okay," he said, "but let me finish my breakfast and get my day straight, and I'll call you back."
"I'll be waiting by this phone," I said.
I waited, reading the paper and working on and finishing the crossword puzzle, and it was 1955, at Saratoga and Belmont and around Long Island, all over again. When I would finally sit him down, though, in the house he and his wife rented at Saratoga and at their home in Garden City, the flavor and aura of racing would fill the room and my notebooks. I thought of Sherwood Anderson and the way he wrote "I'm a Fool" and the other stories in Horses and Men.
He was born in Cincinnati on February 19, 1916, and started to grow up there and across the Ohio River in
Southgate, Kentucky. He really grew up around the tracks, though, because he quit school when he was thirteen and came to racing by one of those accidents by which most of us come to do what we do.
"There was some fella I caddied for," he was telling once. "I never remember his name, but he was a .good stake. He'd give me $1.25 when them other kids were only getting that to carry doubles, and he had some connection with the race track. He used to kid me about being a jock, and he'd introduce me to his friends as 'my jockey.' He put the bug in my head."
When he threatened to leave home on his own and change his name, his father took him one day to Latonia. There was a porch there off the jockey room, and he said he stood there for two or three hours just watching the jocks in their colors.
"Then when I heard how they traveled," he said, "and the big races they won, I had to have it."
For three months he kept nagging until one morning his father took him back to Latonia. He introduced him to Rome Respess and Roscoe Goose, who trained horses.
"Rome," he said, "was an old, hard, chew-tobaccy guy, and he looked at my hands and feet and said I'd grow too big to be a jockey. Roscoe just said he'd like to have me, but he already had two boys he was starting. Then we went out by the gap at the five-eighths pole and we watched the horses working, and my old man had a hell of a time getting me away. I know that going home I was a really dejected little man."
"Had you ever been around horses before?" I said.
"I'd seen milk-wagon horses," he said.
"I mean race horses," I said. "Standing there by the rail and watching them go by you so big and with the jockeys on them so small, didn't the thought of riding them scare you?"
"Hell, no," he said. "I was so damned elated how fast they went by that I couldn't wait to get up on them."
He would wait for some time. His father got him a job with the stable of T. H. McCaffrey, and each morning he would leave home at six o'clock to take the three trolleys that would get him to Latonia where he would walk hots, rub horses, fill the buckets, and clean tack.
"The first day," he said, "I bought a pair of boots and then my old man sent me over to Cincinnati to have a pair of English whipcord riding pants made. I was the best-dressed kid walking hots you ever saw, and I was in those things from morning till night. Right now I'd be embarrassed to get on a streetcar with boots and riding pants on, but then it was a thrill just copying somebody who could do something."
McCaffrey had two exercise boys, and they showed him how to saddle and knot the reins and set the stirrups and how to tread the saddle, which off the track is called posting. They put him up on the stable pony and he rode that around the stable area, and then Odie Clelland, who had been a rider and trained for McCaffrey, started to make improvements on him. He pulled the stirrups so Eddie said he felt as if he had no perch at all, and he got him off the horse's back so the weight would be on the withers and he would get more purchase. He used to emphasize getting a deep seat, to be low, and he was the first to start him out of a gate, teaching him how to leave his hold long so that, if the horse bobs, you can give with it. Once a filly ran off two miles with him, with Eddie afraid only of what Odie would say.
"That second winter," he said, "Odie took me to Florida, and any time I'd gallop a horse he'd be with me, and we always worked two at a time, head and head. I lived with him and his wife in a cottage they rented, and Odie would bring home jock's boots and pants and I'd try them on at night. McCaffrey wouldn't go for it, though. When we got back to Latonia he told my old man I should go back to school. He said, 'If your boy ever makes a rider, we'll have a snowy day in July.' After I won a couple of Derbies my mother saw him, and she said, 'Well, Mr. McCaffrey, we've been having a lot of snow in July.' "
He hooked up with Paul Youkilus, who had a three-horse stable, and at Bainbridge, Ohio, he rode his first race. He was fifteen, and he had to borrow the equipment from the other riders. He was all over the horse and lost his cap and finished sixth with the tails of his silks hanging out of his pants. He would ride in forty-five races before he would win one.
Youkilus had A. W. Booker training for him, and when they shipped to Agua Caliente in Mexico, Booker's brother and Eddie went along with them. There were a dozen horses from another stable in the horse car, and the railroad allowed one man to take care of three horses. That man was Booker's brother, so Eddie was stowing away.
"In that car," he said, "there must have been six of us who shouldn't have been on, and they had straw piled up and bales of hay, and when you'd feel that train slow down at any time of day or night we'd be in our holes in the hay. The only schedule we had was to feed the horses at five and eleven in the morning and at five or six at night, so we'd just sleep when we were sleepy. We never got out of our clothes, and while we were still in the cold part of the country we'd have the horse blankets over us. It was amazing, too, how everybody kept clean, washing and shaving in a pail.
"Being only fifteen," he said, "I was all ears. The rest of them would sit around and tell stories and reminisce over races, and Booker's brother had me captured. He was kind of an old man, and he'd tell me about great riders and great races, and whether he was conning me or not he sure was entertaining me. When we got to the desert where it was hot, those people had a knack of opening the door a little and setting up the bales of hay for the air to bounce off. I sat there and looked out at that sand and cactus and listened to their talk by the hour.
"At Caliente," he said, "until Booker and his wife got there and we moved in with them, Booker's brother and I lived at the stable. The tack room was fixed up with a couple of cots, and we used to eat at the track kitchen or make our own breakfast or our own stews over the open fires they used for the water boilers. We'd get up at 4:30 or five to water and feed the horses, and I can still remember the smell of that bacon frying and the coffee boiling with the grounds right in the pot."
I can see it all again now, that trip West and the life around the track, and that is what I mean. When I could get him off that merry-go-round that was his life, it made all the tailing, all the waiting worthwhile.
At Caliente, on Eagle Bird, one of the three that Youkilus had, he finally won his first race. It was a long meeting though—107 days that ran right through Christmas and New Years—and he had no money and he was homesick.
"Booker was supposed to pay me," he said, "but he had no money himself. He was a game little guy, though, and he had the grocery and the feed man on the cuff. I used to just look at those mountains and wonder if I'd ever get back over them again, and many a night I used to cry. When Booker got out of there he had to leave Eagle Bird and another horse to cover the feed bills."
"How did you feel about leaving Eagle Bird?" I said.
"I don't suppose anybody ever forgets the horse he broke his maiden on," he said, "so when I hitchhiked out of there for Tanforan I had to be sad about Eagle Bird. They probably raced him around Mexico until he broke down, and then they destroyed him, because he never showed on an American track again. If he had, I'd have known it."
At Caliente he had talked Clarence Davison into taking him. Davison carried between twenty and thirty horses, and Eddie said that it seemed that every time he looked up Davison's colors— yellow with blue hoops on the arms and body—were coming down on top.
"Davison and his wife," he said, "were kind of farmerlike people, with their own sense of humor, and not much of it at that, but I'd never have made it without him. I don't know who elects a guy to meet those kind of people in your fife, and there's been many a time since when I wished I still had them around.
"When I was a kid at home, everybody was sort of a half-baked hoodlum, seeing who could live the fastest. I'd never had anybody boss me before, and with him there was no staying up until twelve. It was a training proposition, and you worked hard. It gave me a sense of responsibility, and there was no lying, no matter how bad it was. Threre was no sulking either, and whenever I'd get depressed I'd have to sit down and talk it out with
Davison to find the meaning. He'd say, 'I'm the one who's puttin' up the money. You got nothin' to lose. If a lot of people around me start sulking I'll start to sulk, and I don't want to.' "
When Eddie first went with him, Davison used to rig reins onto a bucket in the barn, and he would have Eddie sit on a bale of hay, whipping and practicing how to switch the whip while passing the reins from hand to hand at the same time. Eddie said that some of the prominent jocks, and he named them, still couldn't do it without putting the whip in their mouths while they switched the reins.
"In the mornings," he said, "he was very exact about time, and he was the first one to make me time conscious. If he told you to work a mile in forty-one, he didn't want you coming down in forty-two."
That is a minute and forty-one seconds, and what they mean when they say a jockey "has a clock in his head." They used to say and write that about Eddie, and I told him that I couldn't understand how, not only during the morning works but during the heat of a race, he could keep track of the time within a second.
"Night after night," he said, "Davison would sit me down with that stop watch. He'd flip the watch and start talking to me, and then he'd say, 'How much?' "
"But I still don't understand how you can do it," I said.
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 43