A St. Petersburg man had a part in one of the most historic events in sports.
By BRANT JAMES
Published July 20, 2003
The champion presented himself in a most humble manner.
Charles Schick wasn't impressed.
"Those two horses stepped off the rail car together," Schick said, smiling as he recalled a memory still fresh after 69 years. "It was Seabiscuit and Grog, brothers.
"One of them looked like he'd just walked off Fifth Avenue. The other one looked like he just walked out of a swamp. And don't you know, Seabiscuit looked like the one from the swamp."
Schick was an 18-year-old exercise boy in the fall of 1934, an eager kid from 117th Street in Richmond Hill, Queens who wrangled his mother's permission to work his mornings in the rough hewn barns of Belmont Park, Aqueduct and Jamaica Race Track.
After a few months apprenticing as stable boy, doing the unglamorous chores of a laborious trade, he had found work with one of the more prestigious trainers in horse racing history, James "Sunny Jim" Fitzsimmons.
A year of walking horses, filling water buckets and hay racks earned Schick the trust of Fitzsimmons and a promotion to exercise rider for the Wheatley Stables wing of the trainer's expansive operation. Schick soon was deemed trustworthy enough to begin "breaking" some of the expensive stock owner Gladys Phipps sent to the trainer.
This one, though, he didn't look like much.
"You would have never known that horse would do anything," he said.
Nearly 70 years later, Schick, 86, is a retired horse trainer and Air France employee living in St. Petersburg, surrounded by a wife and three daughters who bubble over his anonymous part in horse racing history.
It's a story that has received renewed attention since the release of Laura Hillenbrand's bestseller, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, last year. The movie adaptation opens Friday.
But Schick's chapter has been lost, blurred by time. Most of his contemporaries, those high-strung kids working horses and raising Cain, have since passed. Only a few faded newspaper clippings mention his name.
Schick's part in the early training of Seabiscuit is notable enough. He was, after all, the first to handle the future legend, taught him to accept a bit, bridle and saddle when he stepped off the rail car that morning at Aqueduct.
But Schick also crossed paths with the foil of the Seabiscuit story. A year after breaking Seabiscuit, laid off from the Fitzsimmons barn and looking for work, Schick took a job working for Glenn Riddle Farm and trainer George Conway.
He was soon sent to a sprawling training farm on the rural Eastern shore of Maryland, and one sunny morning, an arrogant black yearling strode off the rail car and was directed to his hand.
War Admiral made a more regal entrance.
"You could just see the class in that horse," Schick said. "Right away."
Within a 12-month span, Schick's hands had set in motion a shock wave that would engulf a nation.
Horse racing was not merely sport during the 1930s. It was passion. It was obsession.
A nation growing into a collection of metropolises still had firm footing in its agrarian past. Many Americans had grown up on a farm, had relatives there or at least had enough opportunity to visit the countryside so the subtle connection of man and animal meant something.
Horse racing was a chance for the underdog to triumph, proof that hard work and dedication, ordained with a little luck, made all things attainable. These were tenets held dear by a nation slogging through the Great Depression.
By the fall of 1938, when Seabiscuit beat War Admiral in a Pimlico Special match race that was one of the most anticipated sporting events ever, a nation had become rapt by the story of the beaten-up, broken-down Seabiscuit, a retread, an odd-looking, smallish colt who seemed to win and win again despite his shortcomings.
Newspapers were filled with stories proclaiming the virtues of both horses. Fans wore buttons with pictures of their favorite. It was manic.
Rich and powerful men such as Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt angled and cajoled to stage the race at their track, smelling the anticipation and profits.
After two abortive attempts to stage the head-to-head battle between the West Coast's standard-bearer from California and the 1937 Triple Crown winner, Vanderbilt finally convinced War Admiral's owner, Sam Riddle, and Seabiscuit's owner, Charles Howard, to stage a winner-take-all spectacle on Nov. 1 at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore.
War Admiral was deemed a 1-4 favorite, Seabiscuit 11-5.
More than 40-million listened to the race live on radio as Seabiscuit and jockey George Woolf darted to the front in the walkup start, stunning War Admiral and rider Charley Kurtsinger.
Woolf, breaking from the outside, shot to the rail, immediately taking advantage of Seabiscuit's ability to accelerate through the turns. Kurtsinger tried to make a run but hunkered down to stalk his rival over the rest of the 1 3/16 miles.
Seabiscuit edged his head in front with a mile gone, improved the lead to a half-length, and just past mid stretch, the mighty War Admiral relented.
After a year of national anticipation and debate, Seabiscuit was 4 lengths better. The champion. The 1938 horse of the year. Part of history.
Schick didn't believe he would go down in history with Seabiscuit. But in the fall of 1934, he was pretty sure they were going to their deaths together at a young age.
Fitzsimmons had packed Schick, Seabiscuit, a few other horses and groom "Slim" Pierce into one rail car for a long, bumpy train ride from Aqueduct to Hialeah Race Course in Miami for the winter meet.
Then the weather got mean.
"I guess when we hit Florida and got close to Miami, we must have gotten into a hurricane," Schick said. "The winds started lashing the car. All of a sudden, through one of the doors, the water is coming in. Water is coming up, and first thing I know, it's up above our knees.
"We pulled into the siding where they would unload the horses, out in back of the track. And all of a sudden, the noise abated and the brakeman opened the door. And all the water ran out. I had to laugh. It was clear outside."
Miami was a whole new world. Schick had never seen a palm tree, couldn't believe the warmth of the sun at this time of year. Times were getting better. At least more interesting.
In his spare time, he and his fellow horsemen frolicked on the beach at the end of 79th Street. The movies were cheap. Bean soup was a nickel, and they were practically giving away cups of coffee.
"Charlie and the boys and all those guys who were with Fitzsimmons got to be pretty good friends," said Carl Hanford, who worked with Schick in the early '30s and later trained horse of the year Kelso during the 1960s. "Charlie was a great guy and a top exercise rider."
Schick, nicknamed "Charlie Chick" on the backside, purchased a driver's license for 50 cents and learned to maneuver on a buddy's Plymouth Club Coup on afternoons in Hialeah.
His rides aboard Seabiscuit continued to be less eventful.
"A friend of mine used to get on Grog, and I used to be on Seabiscuit," Schick said. "And I would be (smacking him). He was a good-natured horse, nothing wrong with him. Although he tried to dump me a couple of times. But he didn't act like he cared about anything. We did that for quite a while, and we started working him up to a quarter of a mile.
"I couldn't even get close to Grog."
Seabiscuit failed to win all five times he raced in Miami - finishing second once - before Fitzsimmons had him shipped back north for the spring.
Schick piled into the Club Coup and steered north toward destiny.
It wasn't unusual for exercise riders and hands to be laid off as stables dispersed their horses for racing. One of the younger men in Fitzsimmons' operation, Schick was skilled but unemployed early in 1935.
He and friend Joe DeMane stalked the Belmont Park backside until they happened into Glenn Riddle Stable, owned by Sam Riddle, the storied owner who campaigned Man o' War 15 years earlier.
"For a couple of weeks, we galloped horses for them," Schick said. "Then they said, "You willing to go down to the farm in Maryland and break yearlings?' And I said, "Yes."'
Glenn Riddle Farm poured more than 1,500 acres of lush green pasture, cooled by salty breezes puffing off the Atlantic Ocean a few miles away.
Mornings were filled with breaking horses and galloping yearlings, weekends with trips to a budding new resort a few miles away called Ocean City, where Schick and DeMane watched dance marathons and walked the short boardwalk.
It was a time of $60-a-month wages, room and board. No more $5 a week, no more sleeping in stalls. It, Schick said, "was beautiful."
The day when Riddle's yearlings came from the breeding farm in Kentucky to the training center was one of great local interest in little Worcester County. The curious would gather along the railroad siding off Holly Grove Road to watch men such as Schick lead yearlings off the train and down a sandy path to the farm.
War Admiral was one of three horses Schick was assigned. The tempestuous youngster soon proved full of the vinegar that helped him win the 1937 Triple Crown.
"One morning, we went a quarter of a mile with him and another horse," Schick said. "I had to laugh. Anything they hooked up with War Admiral, I couldn't hold him. He would beat them by 2 or 3 lengths, and I would be standing straight up in the saddle, going "Whoaaa!"'
Romance and nostalgia make for elegant prose, but Schick defies some of the Seabiscuit mystique. He followed the careers of both horses but no more than an average fan when they all went on new paths after the summer of 1935.
The perfect ending to an afternoon of stories in Schick's neat dining room, old pictures spread on the table, would be an assertion he knew Seabiscuit would become a hero, would beat War Admiral when they met on Nov. 1, 1938. That he would capture a generation's imagination and be named the 1938 horse of the year.
A horseman's plain truth ruins the romance.
"I had to kind of favor War Admiral," said Schick, who listened to the race in a bar in New York. "You had to favor him. That horse there, his temperament, everything, he was a thoroughbred from the word "go,' from the day he was foaled I suppose.
"(Seabiscuit) was a little different. You liked Seabiscuit for his temperament because he was so lackadaisical, like he didn't care if tomorrow came or not."
But he respected him.
"It's remarkable the horse stood up the way he did," Schick said. "He must have been built like the Rock of Gibraltar. It was odd-looking the way he galloped. When you come to think of it, that horse was tremendous."
As for himself, Schick is much more humble.
"Well, I wouldn't say that actually I was that important," he said. "But all I know is I broke Seabiscuit and I broke War Admiral, and they went on from there."
