Plain Aristocrat

(See front cover)

P:Colonel Edward Riley Bradley's Bazaar came into the stretch a length ahead of the field in the Saranac Handicap. With a ghostlike rush, Jockey Wayne Wright brought Kievex up on the outside of the track, beat Bazaar to the wire by a head. Three days later, Colonel Bradley was consoled when Boxthorn won the Saratoga Special.

P:Last summer Elizabeth J. West, 18-year-old daughter of Mrs. James Madison Austin, who owns the Catawba Farm, got one of Wise Counsellor's colts as a present from her mother. She named him Supreme Court, helped to break and train him. Last week, Daughter Elizabeth's stable won its first race when Supreme Court nosed out Polly Hundred in the Saratoga Sales Stakes.

P:Governor Lehman saw Jockeys Don Meade and Silvio Coucci each win three races in one afternoon. Jockey Coucci's mounts were Fidelis, Deduce and General Farley, named for the Postmaster General who arrived later in the week.

P:At a track notorious for reversals of form, six races on one afternoon's program were won by the favorites: Maine Chance, Spoilt Beauty, My Boss, Torfrida, New Pin and Ouragan.

Such events as these at Saratoga Springs, N. Y. last week made most of the conversation in the lobbies of the town's heroically hideous mid-Victorian hotels, full for the first time since 1929.

Games of roulette, crap, faro and birdcage at elaborate nightclubs tinkled pleasantly without interruption from the law. The William K. Vanderbilts came and went in their private car. The yearling sales, held every evening for a fortnight, began in a small, brightly-lighted outdoor arena across the road from the racetrack. The liveliest U. S. racing season in 20 years was nearing its peak.

This week will be held the 65th running of the $25,000 Travers Stakes, oldest horse-race in the U. S. When the Saratoga meeting opened, it looked as if the Travers would bring together Mrs. Isabel Dodge Sloane's 3-year-old champion Cavalcade and Joseph E. Widener's Peace Chance, winner of the Belmont Stakes. These horses have not met since the Kentucky Derby. Last fortnight Peace Chance was withdrawn because of a wrenched knee. Last week Cavalcade was disappointingly scratched also, when his trainer decided a bruise on his right front foot would not heal in time to permit him to run. This left the race open to such candidates as Morton L. Schwartz's Observant and Cornelius Vanderbilt (''Sonny") Whitney's Roustabout.

After the Travers, Saratoga race-goers will have two more weeks in which to enjoy the contest for riding honors between two crack jockeys, 19-year-old Coucci, contract rider for Mrs. Payne Whitney, and Meade who rides for Colonel Bradley. Feature stake races for 2-year-olds in the last two weeks of the meet will be the Sanford, the Grand Union Hotel and the Hopeful. In these are entered Boxthorn and Balladier who have this year helped to make Colonel Bradley the leading owner at the track. They will run against Mrs. Payne Whitney's Plat Eye and "Sonny" Whitney's Today. The meet will close on Sept. 1 with the famed Saratoga Cup, for 3-year-olds and up, in which Cavalcade may be well enough to run. Mr. Whitney's 6-year-old Equipoise, who has earnings of $333,960 to his credit, is eligible for the race but will be pointed instead for the $100,000 race to be run at Santa Anita Park in California next winter.

Cavalcade. In 1920 Samuel D. Riddle's Man o' War retired after winning 20 races in 21 starts. So great was the prowess of Man o' War that he remains today the outstanding U. S. racehorse with which all others must, sooner or later, be compared. In 1930 some thought that Gallant Fox might get into his class. In 1931 it was Twenty Grand that the dopesters were hopefully watching. But wise-acres long ago agreed that neither was the equal of the 17-year-old who last week was sunning himself on the Riddle farm near Lexington, Ky., while Paramount angled for his services in a racehorse film based on a story by Sportswriter Damon Runyon.

This year the racehorse whose name is most frequently bracketed with that of Man o' War is Mrs. Sloane's Cavalcade. The only race Cavalcade has lost this year is the Preakness, in which he was a close second to his stablemate, High Quest. He has won the Shenandoah Purse, Chesapeake Stakes, Kentucky Derby, American Derby, Detroit Derby and Arlington Classic, against the best horses of his age in the country. At the Saratoga yearling sales in 1932, Cavalcade cost his owner $1,200. He is now insured at $200,000, valued at $500,000. His winnings total $126,965. Far below Sun Beau's world record of $376,744 (for five seasons), they are comparable because his prizes were diminished by Depression. If Cavalcade wins the Saratoga Cup, he will be well on his way to equalling Man o' War's record. If he also wins--as horsemen last week considered him likely to do--a proposed international race against Windsor Lad, winner of the English Derby, and Admiral Drake, winner of the Grand Prix, he may well join Man o' War as the model for great U. S. racehorses of the future.

Unlike Man o' War, whose procedure in a race was to start out fast and stay in front to the finish, Cavalcade starts slowly, often finds himself well behind when he comes into the stretch. The phenomenal sprint in the last quarter-mile with which he wins his races he developed in early-morning practice workouts. His jockey's instructions were to "breeze" him for three-quarters of a mile, where another horse from the Sloane stable would be broken in ahead for Cavalcade to pass. If the fresh horse showed signs of outrunning Cavalcade in the workout, he was held back to permit Cavalcade to gain confidence by winning. Cavalcade never jumps the gun at the start of a race, has good manners in the paddock, usually walks to the post with an old bay pony named Dave. He races in size 6 shoes--steel for hard tracks, aluminum for soft ones.

Man o' War was a big horse with bad manners and an appetite so gluttonous that he had to be muzzled to prevent him from gobbling sticks and bits of wire. Cavalcade is smaller (15 hands, 3 in., 1,000 lb.), eats more moderately (nine quarts of rolled oats or wet feed daily, with a mixture of timothy and clover for roughage; four quarts of sliced carrots).

Cavalcade has a dark brown coat which glistens golden in the sun. Medium-sized, slouchy, sleepy-looking, he is distinguished less by his appearance than by his character, breeding and performance. His ancestry is British. His father was Lancegaye who finished second to Coronach in the Derby of 1926. His mother, Hastily, was in foal when she was bought at Newmarket, England, by F. Wallis Armstrong, who brought her to Moorestown, N. J. where Cavalcade was born in March 1931.

Amiable as well as efficient, his trainer, Bob Smith, calls him "the finest, most obliging gentleman that I have ever known." On long trips this by no means handsome aristocrat travels in a car attached to crack trains like the Twentieth Century. He is accompanied by a stablemate, usually a horse named Anarchy whom he likes, by his Negro handler, Johnny Gaines, and his toy poodle. In Chicago, Cavalcade was annoyed by too many callers. Trainer Smith put him in another stall, substituted a horse named Sleuth which visitors, when told it was Cavalcade, freely photographed.

Owner. No less sensational than the career of Cavalcade has been that of his owner, Mrs. Isabel Cleves Dodge Sloane. Her father was John F. Dodge who worked for Henry Ford at $25 a week, later founded, with his brother Horace, the automobile business that was sold for $146,000,000 in 1925. When he died in 1922, John Dodge cut off his son John Duval Dodge with $150 a month for eloping with his highschool sweetheart at 20. To daughter Isabel he left more. Educated at Detroit's Liggett School, she went into the Social Register in 1921 when she married a Manhattan broker named George Sloane. They were separated in 1928, divorced in 1929.

In the list of U. S. socialites whose names figure constantly on the sports pages, Mrs. Sloane's began to appear two years ago after she had hired Trainer Bob Smith to run her racing stable for her. Since then, the stable has grown to contain 86 horses worth $1,200.000. This year it has won almost every important race on the U. S. turf. Sloane victories this year began when Time Clock won the Florida Derby ($10,075). High Quest won the Wood Memorial and the Preakness ($29,165) before he wrenched his foot and was retired for the season. Okapi won the Toboggan Handicap ($3,250). Time Clock cost $700, High Quest $3,500, Okapi $6,500.

Fond of golf, tennis, salmon fishing, grouse shooting, Mrs. Sloane has homes in Locust Valley and on Park Avenue, a stud farm at Upperville, Va. If her ambitions are social, she conceals them from reporters. In Detroit, a newshawk called to ask what she would wear to the races next day. Said her hostess' butler: ''Mrs. Sloane wishes me to say to the person calling 'who the hell cares'." Last week, recovered from pneumonia which she caught returning from Chicago where she had watched Cavalcade win the Arlington Classic, she went to Saratoga in a private car, opened her 30-room "cottage" on North Broadway.

Trainer. When Mrs. Sloane selected Robert Augustus Smith to train her horses, he refused to accept a contract. His counter proposal: "If you get tired of me, give me ten minute's notice. If I want to leave, I'll give you 90 days."

Florid, portly, 65, Trainer Smith exercised horses for August Belmont when he was 11, tried being a jockey until he was badly hurt, became a bookmaker, owned a stable of his own which he sold in 1923 for $50,000. He is responsible for the way Cavalcade was schooled. For No. 1 Sloane jockey this year he chose aging Mack Garner, whose feeling for a horse's speed is so acute that he can time a workout to within 1/2 of a second. He admires his employer because she gives him a free hand.

Trainer Smith does not like expensive horses, but he may soon acquire some. When he picked Time Clock, High Quest and Cavalcade off the Saratoga auction block, because he liked their "action, speed and disposition," no one paid much attention to his bids. Last week, whenever Bob Smith glanced at a horse in the long double row of stalls behind the auction block, its price began to gallop.

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