By Daniel Dullum
Spectrum staff writer

Sifting though a stack of photographs from his days as a successful jockey, memories of all kinds flash by for 83-year-old Frank Sorci.

“I’m riding Iron Suit there. That’s around 1938, 1940, it was before Pearl Harbor,” Sorci said while waiting for last week’s Tuesday seniors’ dance to start at The Ballroom in Sacramento.

“ Then they took all the racetracks and made [internment] camps out of them for the Japanese. And you couldn’t get no gas either.

“This horse here, we bought from the Parker Ranch, and we couldn’t get him to run,” Sorci continued. “My father-in-law said, ‘Use a hot shot on him in the morning.’ I did, and we got him in at Portland Meadows at midnight. I had the hot shot on me and I used it, but they never caught us! The judge didn’t see [the illegal maneuver]. Jockeys do all those little tricks.”

One horse Sorci had no problem getting to run was Seabiscuit, the nation’s top race horse of 1938 and the subject of author Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling novel and a recently released motion picture. Sorci had the opportunity to work out Seabiscuit and two of his offspring while serving as a resident jockey at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia in 1945.

“It was $300 a month. All I had to do was gallop three horses — two of his colts and him once in a while. On Sundays, I would race in Tijuana,” Sorci remembered. “Then, after a few months, the owners retired Seabiscuit. One day, Charlie Brown [a horse trainer and circus clown] said, ‘Put Frank on the Old Man [Seabiscuit] and let him run a half a mile.’ So I did, and when he pulled up, his ankle was sore. So that’s when they stopped [his racing].

“He wasn’t a good-looking horse. But he was a saddle horse and easy to ride,” he continued. “They kept telling me he was a small horse. He wasn’t that small. He was a normal size horse and you had to push him. In that movie, they said, ‘[Let him see the other horses] eye to eye,’ but the boss said, ‘Let him run like he wanted to.’”

Sorci, a 4-foot-8 jockey who rode 800 winners in 12 years of competition, enjoyed viewing “Seabiscuit” and was already looking forward to seeing it again.

“It was authentic,” Sorci said. “The first part, I didn’t know, because I was in Phoenix when [Seabiscuit] was doing so good.”

Based on the time he spent at Santa Anita Park, Sorci was familiar with both of Seabiscuit’s jockeys — Red Pollard and George Woolf. When injuries sidelined Pollard, Woolf guided Seabiscuit to a four-length victory over Triple Crown winner War Admiral in a highly publicized match race in 1938 that attracted an estimated 100 million radio listeners.

Woolf, who died from injuries suffered in a race at Santa Anita on Jan. 5, 1946, considered Seabiscuit the best horse he ever rode.

Sorci’s fingers are permanently crooked from all those years of pulling the reins of 1,200-pound horses over a half-century ago, but his smile and enthusiasm are contagious. Everybody who enters The Ballroom returns that smile to Sorci, and some are quick to acknowledge his new-found notoriety.

“I’ve seen you before, on TV,” a Ballroom employee said after seeing one of Sorci’s photographs.

Sorci never intended to become a jockey. He initially attended machine shop classes at San Jose Tech, where a teacher told him he was “too small” to work with large machinery and follow his dream to become a tool-and-die maker. He tried his hand at canning fruits and sardines for a brief time before a friend approached him with a job tip more to his liking.

“A guy told me, ‘Why don’t you go over to Santa Anita Park? I’ll get you a job over there,’” Sorci recalled. “So I went to Santa Anita and there was a job for me, just walking horses and cleaning stalls.”

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