the century, well over three hundred tracks had been operating nationwide; by 1908, only twenty-five remained, and the attrition continued until World War I. In California, the center of top-class western racing, the only track that survived the ban was San Bruno’s Tanforan, which barely scraped by. Many horsemen were forced to abandon the sport and sell off their farms and horses. Most of the rest, especially in the West, retreated to a sort of racing underground, a series of leaky-roof tracks scattered through Canada and the few American states where the sport had not been banned.
For Tijuanans, the racing ban was a godsend. In 1916, shortly after California’s ban on wagering, they opened the Tijuana Racecourse, which immediately became a haven for American stables and racing fans. It was a dilapidated place—one former rider compared it to an outhouse—but like everything else in Tijuana, it was innovative, offering the first primitive movable starting gates and photo finishes. When a departing Hollywood film crew forgot to pack its loudspeaker equipment, racetrackers appropriated the gear, fiddled with it, and soon fashioned the first race-calling public address system. The racing was lawless and wild and the Americans loved it.
Among the Yankees pouring down to the border was Charles Howard. He never explained why he came. Perhaps the place freed him from a straitjacket of grief. By some accounts, his marriage, already ailing before Frankie’s death, was staggering, and maybe he needed to get away. Or it could have been that all that he had worked for mattered less now. The automobile, which had given him great wealth, had stolen something immeasurably more important. His interest in cars, said at least one acquaintance, withered. Howard found himself slipping down the Road to Hell and drifting into that exuberant, swaybacked little town. He avoided the girls and the booze. It was the horses that captured his attention. He tumbled along with the racetrackers, and soon found himself buying a few nondescript Mexican horses and traveling down to attend their races. They were the poorest sort of runners, racing for no more than a handful of pesos, but Howard enjoyed sitting in the stands and cheering them home.
On a summer day in 1929 Howard’s eldest son, Lin, invited his father to the annual Salinas Rodeo. With Lin that day was his wife, Anita, who had talked her older sister Marcela Zabala, a local actress, into joining them for the outing. There in the stands, Charles Howard first set eyes on her dark, wavy hair, straight, slender eyebrows, easy smile. Schooled in a convent and raised on a modest horse ranch just outside of Salinas, where her father was a lawyer, she had once been named Lettuce Queen at the annual Salinas Lettuce Festival.
Charles Howard was bewitched. Not long afterward, Anita gave birth to her first child and asked Marcela to stay with her. Marcela moved into Lin and Anita’s home, where she and Charles saw each other daily. Though a May-December romance must have caused a sensation, Howard fell in love with Marcela and she with him. She was twenty-five and the sister of his son’s wife; he was fifty-two and married. His marriage, wounded by Frankie’s death, collapsed. In the fall of 1932, at a ceremony at Lin’s house, Charles and Marcela were wed.
In Marcela, Howard found his perfect complement. Like him, she was deeply empathic. Suddenly elevated into the world of the rich, she moved with an easy, charming propriety, yet had the rare grace and aplomb to make her frequent departures from convention seem amusing instead of scandalous. She dazzled the society writers. At golf, she packed such a wallop that she swung from the men’s tee. In 1935, when Charles organized a five-month African safari, Marcela eagerly enlisted in the adventure. In a world in which women’s roles were still highly traditional, Marcela’s trip was the talk of the town, prompting the San Francisco Examiner to feature daily reports on her exploits in the jungle. She gave them plenty to gawk at. When a lion charged their party, it was Marcela who leveled her gun and cooly shot the animal. And when she found a tiny orphaned baby blue monkey, she smuggled him back to New York in a hatbox. She talked the Waldorf-Astoria into letting her house him in a luxury suite, posed for reporters with “Blooey” and a banana on the Waldorf’s plush settee, then carried him home as a pet. She shared Howard’s understanding of the importance of image and cheerfully joined him in the public eye. And like her husband, she had spent much of her life with horses.
In 1934 Charles Howard could look out from his offices and see a city shaped by his vision. The horse-drawn San Francisco he had walked into thirty years before had vanished. Only a few horses clopped down the city’s streets, and they would be gone before the decade was out. Howard was worth millions, lived in supreme luxury, and enjoyed the devotion of friends and the admiration of the public. But he was not content. He was ready to move on.
Howard’s friend George Giannini, owner of a string of fine racehorses, thought he knew where Howard belonged. Giannini saw Howard rekindling his lost love of horses and thought he should stop dabbling and commit himself fully to Thoroughbred racing. Howard was only lukewarm. He would not enter the business on a large scale, he said, unless he could go first-class, with the very best trainer. The idea was bandied around a bit and apparently dropped.
It took a San Francisco dentist, former pro baseball player and investor named Charles “Doc” Strub to change his mind. Five years earlier, on a Monday afternoon in the fall of 1929, Strub had sat down in his lucky chair at his barber’s and settled in for a shave. He was handed a telephone. Sitting there with his face slathered in shaving cream, Strub learned that the stock market had crashed, and in a single day he had lost everything and fallen into a debt of more than $1 million. Strub put the phone down, stunned. An idea came to him. He had lost his money, but not his connections, nor his eye for opportunity. He would build a racetrack, the finest in the world, and bring horse racing back to California.
His timing turned out to be flawless, for the catastrophe that had struck him that afternoon had plowed under the entire nation. Over the next three years, as the Depression strangled the economy, state governments searched desperately for revenue. Californians hoping to relegalize racing pounced. For the first time in a quarter century, they received an audience. In 1933 California agreed to legalize wagering on two conditions. First, tracks had to use the pari-mutuel wagering machine instead of the bookmakers whose corruption had prompted the betting ban. Second, wagering would be heavily taxed. Racing was reborn.
With a ready plan for a $3-million racing Xanadu, built on the site of the vast Rancho Santa Anita at the apron of the San Gabriel Mountains just outside Los Angeles, all Strub needed was the cash. He couldn’t find a bank to back him, so he went door to door in search of private investors. Strub was turned away from many homes, but when he called on Charles Howard, he was invited in. Howard, his close friend Bing Crosby, and several other wealthy Californians handed Strub a hefty sum to build his Santa Anita Park.
Strub spent the money well. He built a track like none other on earth, a cathedral to the Thoroughbred so resplendent that writer David Alexander described his first sight of it as one of the most stirring visual experiences of his life. Strub’s mountain-flanked racecourse opened on Christmas Day, 1934. It was an immense, immediate success with the public, and in consequence, the state, which raked in millions in new revenue. It was just as popular with horsemen, for Strub had the brilliant idea of inaugurating a signature race for the track, the Santa Anita Handicap, to be held every year in late winter, beginning in 1935. Unlike the Kentucky Derby, which was limited to three-year-old horses, the handicap would be open to any mature horse, three years old and up. But it was the purse that stopped traffic. In 1934 American marquee races carried a net value to the winner of between $6,000, and, in rare cases, $50,000. In contrast, Strub’s purse was staggering: $100,000, plus a few thousand dollars in entry revenue, to the winner. It was the biggest purse in the world. Offered in a year in which the average per capita income in the United States was $432, Strub’s purse caused a national sensation. The pot was so distracting that hardly anyone referred to the race by its actual name. The Santa Anita Handicap became, in the parlance of racetrackers, the hundred-grander,
