ARCARO, George Edward ("Eddie")

(b. 19 February 1916 in Cincinnati, Ohio; d. 14 November 1997 in Miami, Florida), hard-riding jockey who rode two thoroughbreds to the Triple Crown and was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 1958.

Arcaro was the son of Pasquale Arcaro, an Italian fruit vendor, and Josephine Giancola. At school his flyweight proportions prevented him from making any headway in traditional athletics. In an April 1956 interview with Look magazine, Arcaro observed, "I remember the only thing I really hungered for as a kid was [to be] the size to play baseball. When the other kids would choose up sides for a game, I was always left over, and I think that's why I went for racing." Arcaro's size made him a promising jockey, and his considerable assets of courage, intelligence, and horse craft saw him emerge as one of the top five U.S. jockeys in the twentieth century. At five feet, two inches tall and 114 pounds he was cast in an ideal mold for a prospective jockey.

Like many jockeys, Arcaro had been around horses from a very young age. He quit the Cincinnati school system at age thirteen and started working at the Latonia Race Track. If it was a good day he could earn fifty cents per ride working as an exercise rider with various racing stables. He was a boy who enjoyed taking risks and had the capacity to recover from major falls and tumbles. He once hit a tree while snow sledding, and "the inside of his right thigh was ripped to the bone and forty stitches were required. After three months the doctor allowed Eddie to get back on his feet. He did not know Arcaro had been walking on his own for a month previous."

Horse racing has always been a highly dangerous sport. Like other great jockeys, Arcaro bounced back from fearful accidents and rode through the pain of injury. For example, in 1933 Arcaro was thrown at Washington Park Raceway in Chicago. After being unconscious for three days, he had to spend three months in the hospital with a fractured skull, a punctured lung, and a broken nose. On another occasion he fell under a horse on a muddy track and would have drowned if not saved by an observant track photographer.

The California trainer Clarence Davidson eventually took Arcaro under his wing and became his mentor. An apocryphal story in the fables of horse racing had Arcaro as an ill-starred rider, having not one victory in 250 starts. In fact, Arcaro rode his first winner after forty-five races; his mount was Eagle Bird and the date was 14 January 1932. At the start of his racing career with Davidson he earned $20 per month as part of a fixed three-year contract. By the time he retired, Arcaro was enjoying the lifestyle of a celebrity millionaire.

Following his training with Davidson, Arcaro joined the more lucrative Calumet Farm syndicate and rode for Warren Wright. Arcaro had an avalanche of victories—132 in the 1933 season—and never eschewed his feisty persona. Throughout his career he was a "scrapping rider" and "as gladiatorial as a hornet." In the 1930s Arcaro graduated from being a nobody to a nonpareil. He went from "nags and bags that were just one step short of pulling milk carts to riding some of the finest thoroughbreds in the game." By the late 1930s Arcaro was the premier jockey for Mrs. Payne Whitney's prestigious Greentree Stable. In 1937 he married a former model, Ruth; they had two children.

In the 1940s Arcaro became the only jockey to ride two thoroughbreds to the Triple Crown: Whirlaway in 1941 and Citation in 1948. Winning the Triple Crown, the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes races all in the same year, is the ultimate achievement in the sport. Arcaro won the Belmont Stakes six times, the Preakness six times, and the Suburban Handicap eight times. He received the Jockey Club Gold Cup on ten occasions and earned numerous Horse of the Year rides, including those on Whirlaway (1941 and 1942), Citation (1948), Nashua (1955), Bold Ruler (1957), Sword Dancer (1959), and Kelso (1960 and 1961).

Toward the end of his racing career, Arcaro authored a colorful biography of his life and times, I Ride to Win (1951). In it, he told of being suspended for a year after driving a Cuban rival jockey into the rail of the racetrack. He also discussed the trials and tribulations of jockeys trying to make weight: "Some riders will all but saw their legs off to get within the … limit." He believed courage and mental toughness had to be shown in race after race, because, "If a jockey showed even the slightest trace of cowardice it could get awfully rough out there."

When Arcaro retired in 1961 he was the top money-winning jockey of his time with $39 million of purse money. He had been the leading money winner in the years 1940, 1942, 1948, 1950, 1952, and 1958. Arcaro combined his successful career as a jockey with an entrepreneurial flair for business. He invested in oil, bought into a number of West Coast eateries, and especially enjoyed owning and managing a wholesale saddlery business. With Johnny Longden and Sam Resnick, he also founded and was the president of the Jockey's Guild. Arcaro liked being a color commentator for televised horse races and unashamedly embraced his roles as a fashion plate and celebrity. Not surprisingly Arcaro's favorite home was situated in Garden City on Long Island, New York, a mere twenty minutes from one of his favorite stomping grounds, Belmont Park.

In The Sports 100 Ranking the Greatest Athletes of All Time (1995), Bert Randolph Sugar listed Arcaro in fifty-sixth place and described him as having the "sensitive touch of a piano player." A good case can be made that in his relatively short career, the man nicknamed "Banana Nose" and "The Master" was the most successful of all jockeys. While his grand total of 4,779 winners was impressive, his ratio of rides-to-stakes monies was epoch shattering. Of his 24,921 races between 1931 and his retirement in 1961, he finished "in the money" (first, second, or third) on more than half of these mounts during a career that went from 1949 until his retirement in 1961.

Arcaro was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 1958. A plaque in the National Museum of Racing's Hall of Fame at Saratoga Springs, New York, wonderfully captures the magic and mastery of this great jockey: "He had great hands and seat, was unexcelled in switching the whip, possessed a sure sense of pace, and for two decades won the important races with casual excellence.… His superb talent was sought for all good ones." Bill Shoemaker, the doyen of U.S. jockeys, said of Arcaro, "He could do everything. The way he rides he looks part of the horse."

Frank J. Cavaioli has written a short profile on Arcaro in the Encyclopedia of Ethnicity and Sports in the United States (2000). There is an extensive narrative on Arcaro in Current Biography (1958), and Current Biography Yearbook (1998) has a concise obituary. Tom Gilcoyne, archival assistant at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, Saratoga Springs, New York, provides a useful Hall of Fame minibiography of Arcaro. Bert Randolph Sugar, The Sports 100 Ranking of Greatest Athletes of All Time (1995), has a lively and detailed summary of Arcaro's life. For a truly memorable social history of racing, see Laura Hillenbrand, Seabisquit: An American Legend (2000), which contains telling fragments about Arcaro. There are nine wonderful black-and-white photographs of Arcaro in Horse Racing: The Golden Age of the Track (2001). An obituary is in the New York Times (15 Nov. 1997).

Scott A. G. M. Crawford