Recently, while proofreading Playing Cards of the Apaches: A Study in Cultural Adaptation, by Virginia and Harold Wayland, and Alan Ferg, I was struck by this passage, a quotation from playing-card scholar Sylvia Mann: “I happen to collect playing-cards as my way into history.”
Intrigued, I consulted Mann’s book, All Cards on the Table, in which she writes that “a true collector, whatever the object of his particular interest, be it children’s comics or gold snuff boxes, touches a live element of history....I have acquired, through application and countless reference works and the talents of other collectors, some knowledge about a lot of subjects hitherto outside my interests.”
In the case of Playing Cards of the Apaches, my own “way into history”—horses—has come in handy. In the book, the provenance of each pack of cards is traced in minute detail, whether the pack belonged to a captured Apache girl, or a U.S. Army soldier, or even Vincent Price.
When I proofread the pages devoted to a pack owned by Elias J. Baldwin, he was mentioned simply as the donor of a pack of cards—and not, as I knew from my crazy patchwork way of assimilating history through horses, as “Lucky” Baldwin, who constructed the first iteration of the racetrack now known as Santa Anita Park, where Seabiscuit won the Big ‘Cap in 1940.
Lucky was also the father of Anita Baldwin, whose Arabian stallion, *Ibn Mahruss, sired El Jafil, purchased as a herd sire by General Levi Manning, former mayor of Tucson, where I live. Hearing this, the junior author (Ferg) kindly agreed to add some further biographical information about Baldwin.
Given Baldwin's interest in gambling, it’s not a surprise that he owned a pack of Apache cards; aside from their use in gambling, he may also have appreciated them for their depictions of caballos, ridden by jaunty caballeros.
I don’t consider myself a collector of horses (though some of my friends might disagree), but, like Mann, my interest in equines has led me to learn about (and what is perhaps more frightening, to retain knowledge of) subjects that seem, at first glance, to have no connection to horses, including: genealogy (horse and human); textiles; W. K. Kellogg; the King Ranch; Jostens class rings; General Patton; Bromo-Seltzer; the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts; singer John Davidson; the Battle of the Little Big Horn; Catalina Island; the Polish language; Calumet baking soda; the paintings of Degas, Munnings, and Stubbs; Theosophy; and the architecture of Richard Neutra, Philip Webb, and Walter Gropius.
As Dorothy Parker noted, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
