Free Native Dancer by John Eisenberg Page A

have cooked and cleaned,
     I would have married her.” Also in 1949, Loser Weeper, a four-year-old chestnut sired by Discovery, won the Metropolitan Handicap.
     Next Move, another filly foaled in 1947, won eleven races and was voted the champion of her class of 1950.
    Suddenly, Vanderbilt was back, his stable’s lean war years a distant memory. The stable soared from thirty-three wins in 1948
     to sixty-eight in 1950 as earnings jumped from $162,000 in 1948 to $584,000, the third-highest total in the nation, in 1950.
     And Vanderbilt had bred the horses winning the big money, restoring his faith in his abilities as a breeder. Still, his ultimate
     goal wasn’t to win races for fillies such as the Demoiselle Stakes and Matron Stakes, lucrative though they were. True greatness
     was conferred in the Triple Crown, and Vanderbilt was continuing to fail there, again not even entering a horse in the Kentucky
     Derby as Calumet Farm’s Ponder won in 1949 and the King Ranch’s Middleground won in 1950.
    Five weeks before Middleground’s victory, Dan W. Scott awoke at 2 A.M. on March 27, 1950, to the sound of a branch scratching
     across his bedroom window—a sign from his night watchman, Lloyd Craig, that another equine life was about to begin. It was
     the prime of the foaling season at Scott’s 280-acre commercial farm, and with no phones or radios available to pass along
     news, Scott had instructed Craig just to awaken him with a branch whenever a mare sank to the ground and began to deliver
     at night.
    The thirty-four-year-old farm owner scrambled out of bed, threw open the second-story window, and peered down at Craig, who
     simply said, “Geisha’s down.” Scott wasn’t surprised. Geisha was long overdue, having been scheduled to deliver her foal by
     Polynesian on February 28. The extended pregnancy wasn’t a concern, though. To the contrary, Scott was pleased. A meticulous
     record keeper, he had noted that eighteen of the twenty-five stakes winners foaled at his farm had come late. A foal’s lungs
     and breathing apparatus developed in the final weeks of the mare’s pregnancy, and Scott suspected that horses who were delivered
     late could breathe better and were better equipped to handle duress on the track.
    Otherwise, there was little reason to expect the foal Geisha was ready to drop into the world to possess uncommon qualities.
     Geisha had won only one of eleven starts in her racing career and birthed a single, unremarkable foal since being retired.
     “Alfred didn’t think that much of Geisha; at the time she was no big deal to Alfred,” Scott recalled. And her foal was part
     of just the second crop that Polynesian. had sired, so it was still too soon to know whether he was a stallion who would pass
     along his greatness.
    Geisha’s foal certainly wasn’t the most anticipated of the twenty-six that would constitute Vanderbilt’s foal crop of 1950.
     Seven of his mares were in foal to Discovery that spring. Good Thing, the dam of Bed o’ Roses, was in foal to Polynesian.
     Other Kentucky sires such as Amphitheater and Questionnaire had been mated with Vanderbilt’s best mares. Maybe one of those
     would develop into the Triple Crown star Vanderbilt wanted.
    A routine delivery unfolded that night in front of Scott, a collegeeducated second-generation farm owner, as comfortable delivering
     a foal as he was dealing with society clients such as the Wanamakers, Whitneys, and Vanderbilts; and Craig, the black night
     watchman Scott would later recall as “someone I treasured, the kind of horseman they don’t make anymore.” In a dark barn behind
     Scott’s house—Scott believed mares were more relaxed giving birth in the dark—a chocolate-brown male emerged in perfect condition
     at 2:10 A.M., the head positioned properly, all limbs functioning.
    The foal blossomed quickly in the coming weeks. Geisha was a strong milk producer. The farm had good grass. Scott turned out
     his horses as the