Homework Assignment #20 Favorite Entry-Straight From The Horses Mouth

(This is my original entry, but when I first started I neglected to make paragraphs and as my son pointed out - I could make people blind reading the runon story, so to save your eyesight I'm retyping it hopefully the right way)

Hello, again.  This past year my family underwent a remarkable passage back through time...no we didn't have a time machine....we have a dad who is turning 88 this year.  With his memories took us and horse lovers back to the 1930's and the competition between Seabiscuit & War Admiral.

My dad was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Queens...near Aqueduct Racetrack.  During those years a teenager did what he could to help his family survive, so Dad applied to a stable at the track to clean barns, hot walk..whatever..he really loved horses. 

Turns out he was working for Sonny Fitzsimmons, a really great trainer at that time. One day Dad is told to go meet the horse cars bringing the new stock in to break...he and another guy get four horses off the car...one of them really looks like a wild mustang and is small in comparsion to the others.  Well, Dad gets him to break to the bit and gentle..that horse's name was "Seabiscuit".

He spent almost a year with Seabiscuit, including surviving a really bad trip down to Florida for the winter.   They were locked inside a horse car and it started filling up with water from a bad storm they encountered running through Florida.  My Dad really thought that they were all going to drown.  Dad said when they finally opened the doors and the water drained out, the Florida sun shone through .. he thought he had died and gone to heaven.   It was so beautiful & different from dark, ice cold New York.

This last part would be interesting enough, however, it gets better...times were rough in the 1930's jobs were fought for and what you had yesterday didn't count much towards tommorrow.  In 1935 Dad found himself as low man on the totempole looking at other stables for work.  Well, he applied at a Belmont Stable and was hired on to again break to the bit and gentle more horses.

He was sent down to Maryland working at the Glenn Riddle Farms and given the responsibility ofseveral horses...one of those horses was none other than "War Admiral".

Little did my Dad know what the future would hold for both these horses....that they would both go down in history as two of the world's best.

When Laura Hildenbran's book "Seabiscuit" came out, my sister Barbara thought that there might be "some" interest to someone to interview my Dad and glean some "hands on history" straight from the horses mouth.  So far, Dad's fifteen minutes of fame hasn't stopped.  This past year, he has given several speeches at various libraries...attended by horse lovers...especially the one in Gainesville.  He has been interviewed by radio, TV and various newspapers starting with the St Pete Times and reaching as far as Europe.

Even though he is the age he is...he's loving it.  Since alot of the people that shared his experiences are no longer with us, the memories can sometimes be very bitter-sweet for him to remember.

He was asked how he felt about being the first man to "break" both Seabiscuit and War Admiral...Dad responded.."I was only doing my job"...and the stories he can tell........