Dead Racehorse Revives Dying Town

The local newspaper headline seemed a little alarmist: “Seabiscuit Fever Grips City.”

But here in the state’s economically depressed northern hill country, the heat of attention can be a good thing.

Mostly abandoned by the timber industry, forsaken by the railroads and ignored by tourists who speed through town on U.S. Highway 101, Willits is hoping to cash in on America’s revived love affair with a dead horse.

The famous thoroughbred, Seabiscuit, spent his final years in stud on a nearby ranch and was buried there after his death in 1947.

This connection won Willits the right Saturday to host the “hometown” premiere of the Universal film, starring Tobey Maguire and Jeff Bridges, based on the best-selling book “Seabiscuit -- An American Legend” by Laura Hillenbrand. The much-promoted film will make its debut nationally Friday.

“Anything that will get people to town is a good thing,” said head-shop proprietor Dave Schnur, 33. Schnur, whose store includes a tattoo and body piercing parlor, admits he knows almost nothing about the gutsy stallion who defeated War Admiral in a match race and recovered from serious injury to win the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap while a nation listened on the radio.

But Schnur and other businessmen along the downtrodden main drag here see economic opportunity in the people bearing $75 tickets, who stood in lines stretching more than a block in front of the Art Deco-era Noyo Theater on Commercial Street, temporarily renamed Seabiscuit Drive by the mayor.

Ron Moorhead, a freelance automotive writer who serves on the Willits Chamber of Commerce, said the attention could not come at a better time.

“The logging and fishing industries went away,” said Moorhead, who has been interviewed in recent days by several national newspapers and networks. “Seabiscuit has brought interest, spirit and pride to the town again.”

Several local stores now offer Seabiscuit souvenirs, including pins ($6), mugs ($48), totes ($10) and aprons ($20). Local artists have adopted Seabiscuit themes. Two local vintners offer Seabiscuit labels on their merlots and chardonnays. The town feed store recently had a promotion offering Seabiscuit caps and T-shirts to those who purchased two tubes of equine worm medicine.

Two hours north of San Francisco, Willits is home to about 5,000 people. There are a few remaining horse ranches, one working lumber mill and an increasing number of retirees drawn by low real estate prices.

Laura Finatean, 40, flew in from Los Angeles to attend the premiere with her father, who lives near Sacramento. Emerging bleary-eyed from the theater, the mother of two who helps manage a family contracting business in Glendale, said it had been well worth the trip.

“Loved it. Cried through about half of it,” Finatean said.

“I think the book and movie answer a yearning in this country for the personal qualities of integrity and inner strength shown by Seabiscuit and everyone around him,” said her father, Duane Toutjian, 68, a graphic artist from Placerville.

Earlier in the day, the father and daughter were among more than 200 visitors on a guided tour of Ridgewood Ranch, 10 miles south of Willits, where Seabiscuit retired.

Leading the tour was Tracy Livingston, 60, a leader in Christ’s Church of the Golden Rule, which owns the old ranch. During Seabiscuit’s time it was owned by Charles S. Howard, the wealthy California auto dealer who is played by Bridges in the film.

Howard died in 1950, three years after his beloved horse. The Howard family sold the ranch to two Oregon lumbermen, who sold it to the church in 1962. Livingston said about 35 members of the church still live on the remaining 5,000 acres of a ranch that once stretched miles down the Redwood Highway.

Since the publication of Hillenbrand’s book, the Church of the Golden Rule has conducted tours for more than 2,000 visitors to the ranch. On Saturday, churchwomen served homemade apple juice and horse-head-shaped gingerbread cookies to the groups of visitors, who paid $25 each for the tour.

Livingston said the church has plans, in cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce, to restore the Seabiscuit stallion barn.

The elegant Howard horseshoe-shaped ranch home remains mostly intact, including a room decorated with a musical clef sign where Howard’s friend Bing Crosby used to stay when he visited.

Money from the tours, Livingston said, supports the restoration or local charities. He said he views the Seabiscuit fascination as a positive moral step.

“Like now,” Livingston said, “Seabiscuit lived in uncertain times. People are really longing for another hero other than a $100-million basketball player or football player.”

Among the several hundred people who descended on Willits on Saturday were local folk old enough to remember the great stallion and Howard family members who came back to visit the old homestead.

Lee Persico, 67, a rancher and real estate salesman, recalls sitting on Seabiscuit when he was 6 or 7 years old. “To me,” said Persico, “he was just a horse.”

But the Seabiscuit phenomenon, he said, has brought cohesion to a town that has been historically divided between old-line ranching families and counterculture migrants and marijuana growers who began arriving in the 1960s.

Janis Howard, 45, is the great-granddaughter of Charles Howard. A security and police dog trainer in Northern California, she said she came to the ranch and movie premiere to help heal family wounds caused when the ranch was first sold. Saturday was her first visit to the property. She brought along three antique saddles from the Howard family collection.

“Most of us were kind of upset that it was sold,” she said. “This visit has been good for me, because I can look at it now in a new, positive light.”