Celebrating the Man O’ War Centennial, Part 2: Arizona’s Own C. W. “Doc” Pardee—Plus Tom Mix, Gallant Fox, and a Handy Guy Named Sande

By Tobi Lopez Taylor

An Arizona Horse History Project Essay

This essay is part of the ongoing Arizona Horse History Project series, which also includes posts on Penny Chenery and Secretariat, Hank the Cowdog, Man O’ War’s son By Hisself, General Jonathan Burton, and Frank Brophy. 

In 1975, I was a horse-crazy kid growing up in suburban Phoenix, who spent more time reading about horses—like Man O’ War, The Black, Flame, and Sham—than riding them. Therefore, I leapt at any chance to sit on my cousin’s gelding, Passum, who was boarded at a facility in south Phoenix owned by a horseman named Rob Traylor. During my occasional rides, I enjoyed pretending that this sorrel Quarter horse bore a resemblance to my hero, Secretariat.

One afternoon, Rob and I were in his tack room. He was looking for the latest issue of the Blood-Horse, a weekly magazine that he’d often pass on to me. (While my classmates were devouring Tiger Beat and 16 Magazine, I was committing the pages of the Blood-Horse to memory; twenty-five years later, I found myself writing articles for this periodical I’d treasured so long.) As he continued to search his desk, Rob caught me staring at a framed black-and-white photo on the wall, its glass dusty and cracked. “Know who that is?”

I thought for a moment. “The horse looks like a C. W. Anderson drawing of Man O’ War. But who’s the old guy sitting on him?”

For some reason, this struck Rob as funny. When he stopped guffawing, he answered, “It is Man O’ War, and that old guy was a friend of mine—one of Arizona’s greatest horsemen, Doc Pardee. If you don’t know his name, you ought to. He died a couple of months ago.”

In this post, I’ll explain why everybody ought to know Doc Pardee’s name—as well as those of Big Red’s four jockeys, one of whom, Hall of Fame inductee Earl Sande, also has an Arizona connection. Tom Mix, Samuel Riddle, William Woodward Sr., Philip K. Wrigley, Damon Runyon, and others will make cameos here, too.

Let’s begin with the jockeys. During his twenty-one starts, over two seasons of racing, four talented athletes had the privilege of riding Man O’ War to victory.

The racing career of Chicago native Johnny Loftus was a study in contrasts: Although he has the distinction of being the first jockey to win the U.S. Triple Crown, aboard Sir Barton, and also rode Man O’ War to nine wins in 1919, he is perhaps best known as Big Red’s rider during his only loss, to Upset, in the Sanford Memorial Stakes. As Jennifer Kelly wrote, Loftus’s “legacy became forever tied to the misfortunes that resulted in Big Red’s only loss. He mysteriously lost his jockey’s license the following year and was never able to regain it; he applied for a trainer’s license, though, and was granted that immediately. He stayed in the game as long as he could, training stakes winners for prominent owners, but, when he had a streak of bad luck, he gave up the racing game for something far calmer and less risky: carpentry. He died in 1976, far away from the bugle’s call and the tiny square of leather that had been his office for so long.” Loftus was inducted into the National Racing Hall of Fame in 1959.

After Loftus lost his jockey’s license, Clarence Kummer, the son of a horseshoer, took over the ride on Big Red for most of the 1920 season. This native of Jamaica, New York, was known to be strong, smart, and courageous. Kummer was in the irons for several of Man O’ War’s notable victories, including the Dwyer Stakes, in which Big Red was sorely tested by doughty John P. Grier; the chestnut champion’s 100-length trouncing of Hoodwink in the Lawrence Realization Stakes; and Big Red’s final performance, a seven-length win over Sir Barton. Kummer—who had also ridden Sir Barton to victory in 1920—retired from racing in the late ʼ20s when his body could no longer withstand the punishing regimen he maintained to keep his weight down. He died in 1930 and was named a member of the National Racing Hall of Fame in 1972.

Andy Schuttinger, from Brooklyn, rode Man O’ War once, to a win in the Travers Stakes. He was substituting for Kummer, who was convalescing from a broken shoulder incurred when a filly he was riding, Costly Colours, fell on him. Schuttinger had a good career as a jockey; in addition to his win on Big Red, he was aboard Exterminator when “the Galloping Hat Rack” won the Saratoga Cup, and he was the regular jockey for Roamer, a Hall of Fame inductee. Schuttinger made a successful transition from jockey to trainer, conditioning stakes winners like Sun Beau and Pilate. He died in 1971.

Earl Sande, a native of Groton, South Dakota, rode Man O’ War once, winning the Miller Stakes during Kummer’s convalescence. Years later, Sande—who had ridden a host of other great horses, including Sir Barton, Gallant Fox, and Zev—maintained that Big Red was still the greatest horse he ever rode. He also did well with Man O’ War’s offspring, racking up stakes wins on Bateau, Crusader, Edith Cavell, Dress Parade, Mars, and Taps. He’s also known for training Stagehand, who prevailed over Man O’ War’s grandson Seabiscuit in the 1938 Santa Anita Handicap.

Earl Sande on Man O’ War.

When Sande was a child, his family relocated to American Falls, Idaho. As Richard J. Maturi wrote in his biography of the jockey, “At age nine, Sande acquired his first horse, trading three 5 dollar gold pieces, four ducks and a bicycle for the filly. The strawberry-colored horse could run like wind. Sande named her Babe. The two engage in impromptu races against dogs and horses of other area kids. At age fourteen, the lanky, freckle-faced Sande weighed only seventy pounds. On July 14, 1914, Earl rode in his first official horse race during the American Falls Fourth of July celebration activities….[When local racehorse trainer] Burr Scott  announced to the spectators that he needed a rider. Sande jumped at the opportunity and bounded out of the crowd. He rode the horse, Guise, to victory. Sande won a $10 purse. Scott rewarded the youngster with a silver dollar for his skill.”

Scott saw Sande’s potential and encouraged the boy to accompany him, on what he called the “outlaw circuit,” as Scott and his horses traveled by train to tracks in Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Earl won so many races at these bush tracks that he was nicknamed the “Idaho Hot Potato.” By 1916, Scott, who felt that he had no more to teach Sande, got him an apprenticeship with his old friend Cecil W. “Doc” Pardee, of Prescott, Arizona. This proved to be a major turning point in Sande’s budding career. As soon as Earl was settled in, Pardee wrote a letter to the teenager’s mother back in Idaho: “Earl is being well looked after. I have him in my own special care and Earl is not exposed to the temptations that so often beset jockeys. My wife, Edith May, is looking after his feeding and he won’t go wanting in that department. Earl is a fine lad.”

Pardee, born in Kansas in 1885, was eight years old when he competed in his first horse race and established his own livery stable in Oklahoma at the ripe old age of fourteen. Despite his moniker, he never did become a veterinarian; he took a couple of vet-school classes and then began doctoring horses. A retrospective of his life that appeared in the July 14, 1968 issue of the Arizona Republic noted that he’d had “a varied career as rodeo performer, announcer and director, wild west show promoter, movie cowboy, wrangler, and racehorse breeder and trainer that has given him a saddlebag of fond memories.”

Pardee’s movie career came about thanks to his friend, movie star Tom Mix. In 1912, the two became acquainted in Dewey, Oklahoma, when Doc won the World’s Championship Bronco Busting competition. Pardee is said to have played a bit part in a film featuring Mix that was shot near Pawnee, Oklahoma. The next year, in need of money, Pardee traveled to Prescott, where he appeared in at least one more Mix film, The Sheep Runners (1914). An article about Mix’s activities in Prescott appeared in a Daily Courier article dated September 8, 2013:

“In late 1913, Tom Mix was sent to California, where he was made head of his own Selig [a.k.a. Selig Polyscope, an early film studio] satellite unit based at the Bachmann Studio in Glendale, not far from downtown Los Angeles. Mix remained with Selig until late 1916 before signing with the Fox Film Corporation. After seven years in the picture business, Tom became an “overnight sensation” at Fox. With stardom came clout, and Tom returned to supervise the Northern Arizona Fair rodeo with Prescott local Lester Ruffner in 1918, 1919, and more significantly attended Prescott's Frontier Days in 1920, where he shot scenes for The Texan….Mix made 85 pictures for Fox between 1917 and 1928, returning to Prescott several more times, notably in 1922 for his film Romance Land. Unfortunately, most of Tom’s Fox films are now “lost” due to nitrate decomposition, and a disastrous 1937 Fox vault fire. But, almost miraculously, The Texan, with its images of Prescott's Frontier Days, survives at the Danish Film Institute.”

Pardee and Mix remained friends for the remainder of Mix’s life, which was cut short in 1940 when the cowboy star died in a car crash on a highway north of Tucson, Arizona. In addition to his bit-part work in films with Mix, Doc also appeared in The Gentleman from Arizona (1939), The Vanishing American (1925)—filmed in Arizona’s Monument Valley—and Wild Horse Mesa (1925), the latter two based on novels by Zane Grey.

Within a few months of his arrival in Prescott, Earl Sande competed in his first horse race under Pardee’s tutelage. At the 1916 Prescott Rodeo—the oldest annual event of its kind in the United States—Pardee won the World’s Champion Bronco Busting medal, and Sande won a race on Doc’s gelding, Tick Tack, whose previous owner had used him to pull a milk wagon. Doc and Earl also performed on horseback for spectators at the Castle Hot Springs Resort, where notables like Zane Grey and the Rockefeller family stayed.

Over the next year or so, Pardee and Sande ran Tick Tack and Doc’s other horse, Vanity Fair, on the Arizona county fair circuit. At a meet in Springerville, Sande won an astonishing twenty-three races—twenty-one match races and two purse races—in one day. Soon afterward, Doc informed the young man that it was time for him to move up to the big time. Putting Sande aboard a train to New Orleans, he handed Sande a letter of recommendation to Doc’s friend Joe Goodman, a trainer at the Fair Grounds track. Sande’s first official race took place in New Orleans on January 5, 1918; he finished second. By the end of the year, the horses he’d ridden had won 158 races and $138,872. Within two years he would be sitting on the likes of Man O’ War and Sir Barton, but his most famous achievement was far in the future, and he owed it, in part, to his association with Pardee and to the construction of a new Arizona landmark.

In 1929, a new resort, the Arizona Biltmore, opened to great fanfare in Phoenix. Designed by Albert Chase McArthur, in (contentious) consultation with Frank Lloyd Wright, the property was constructed of Biltmore block, “a variation on a textile block first used by Wright to construct private homes. The pre-cast blocks were made from desert sand on-site and created in 34 different geometric patterns inspired by the trunk of a palm tree.” The next year, the Biltmore was purchased by Chicagoan William Wrigley, Jr., chewing-gum magnate and Chicago Cubs owner.

The Biltmore established an on-site stable of dude horses for guests, and Pardee—who had moved to Phoenix years earlier—was hired to manage it. In 1932, after William Wrigley’s death, his son Philip inherited the family business and various properties, including the Biltmore. The younger Wrigley was a horse fancier, and for part of each year, Philip would keep his Arabians at the resort’s barn, before transporting them to the family’s El Rancho Escondido, on Catalina Island, off the southern California coast. (In 1955, the Biltmore arena was used to stage Arizona’s first all-Arabian horse competition—forerunner of today’s Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show—and it was underwritten by Philip and Helen Wrigley, along with local breeders Ed and Ruth Tweed, and Fowler and Anne McCormick.)

A view of the Arizona Biltmore Arena, c.1955, showing Ed Tweed’s Arabian stallion

Skorage, ridden by Florence Daugherty.

Among the well-heeled visitors Pardee met during his employment at the Biltmore was William Woodward, Thoroughbred breeder and owner of Belair Stud. In early 1930, while wintering at the resort, Woodward asked Pardee for his opinion about possible jockeys to ride his rising star, the homebred Gallant Fox. Doc didn’t hesitate to name his onetime protégé, even though Sande had been through some hard times over the past few years. These included a serious riding injury, the death of his young wife, a fortune lost in the stock market, retirement from riding, and a lackluster new career as a racehorse trainer. However, Pardee knew Sande still had the ability to bring out the best in a good horse, and he urged Woodward to use him.

When Woodward went home to Maryland, he and his trainer, James “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons, compared notes on whom each man thought should ride Gallant Fox. Both agreed that Kummer and Sande would be suitable. According to Richard J. Maturi, Woodward initially said nothing to Sunny Jim about his conversation with Pardee. Then Fitzsimmons pulled out his work diary, on which he’d written, “Earl Sande, Gallant Fox jockey.” Woodward sent a telegraph to Sande that evening. Within a few months, America had its second Triple Crown winner and Sande’s legendary status had grown larger. One of Earl’s most prominent fans, newspaperman Damon Runyon, of Guys and Dolls fame, wrote reams of doggerel about Sande over the years, including this prescient 1921 piece, which appeared in the New York American:

Maybe there’s better jockeys
Somewhere on land or sea
But gimme a handy guy like Sande
Riding the mount for me.

During his years at the Biltmore, Pardee crossed paths with another important racing personage: Man O’ War’s owner, Samuel Riddle. Doc must have made quite an impression on Riddle, for he was invited not only to see Man O’ War but also to sit on him. In an Arizona Republic interview from November 21, 1966, Pardee recalled, "I had the thrill to be the only man other than the exercisers and jockeys to ride the famous horse. Man O’ War stepped around like he was on springs."

Pardee, who died at age ninety, outlived practically everyone closely connected with Big Red, such as Riddle and his wife, his trainer Louis Feustel, his well-known groom Will Harbut, and all four of his jockeys, including Sande, who passed away in 1968. (Curiously, after the death of his wife Marion Casey Sande in 1927 and his friendly rival Clarence Kummer three years later, Earl married another Marion—Kummer’s widow.)

To the end of his days, Doc was actively involved with horses. In 1967, the American Horse Shows Association named him Senior Horseman of the Year. The following year he was named honorary chairman of the Prescott Frontier Days Rodeo. A July 14, 1968 Arizona Republic story noted that, because of the couple’s age, the event organizers arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Pardee to have box seats overlooking the rodeo arena. But Pardee wasn’t having any of that, replying, “Heck, let’s go all the way. I’ll even ride in the parade you’re gonna have—and ride in the grand entry at the rodeo, too!” And that’s exactly what this Arizona legend did.