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Unlike Man o' War, whose procedure in a race was to start out fast and stay in front to the finish, Cavalcade starts slowly, often finds himself well behind when he comes into the stretch. The phenomenal sprint in the last quarter-mile with which he wins his races he developed in early-morning practice workouts. His jockey's instructions were to "breeze" him for three-quarters of a mile, where another horse from the Sloane stable would be broken in ahead for Cavalcade to pass. If the fresh horse showed signs of outrunning Cavalcade in the workout, he was held back to permit Cavalcade to gain confidence by winning. Cavalcade never jumps the gun at the start of a race, has good manners in the paddock, usually walks to the post with an old bay pony named Dave. He races in size 6 shoes—steel for hard tracks, aluminum for soft ones.
Man o' War was a big horse with bad manners and an appetite so gluttonous that he had to be muzzled to prevent him from gobbling sticks and bits of wire. Cavalcade is smaller (15 hands, 3 in., 1,000 lb.), eats more moderately (nine quarts of rolled oats or wet feed daily, with a mixture of timothy and clover for roughage; four quarts of sliced carrots).
Cavalcade has a dark brown coat which glistens golden in the sun. Medium-sized, slouchy, sleepy-looking, he is distinguished less by his appearance than by his character, breeding and performance. His ancestry is British. His father was Lancegaye who finished second to Coronach in the Derby of 1926. His mother, Hastily, was in foal when she was bought at Newmarket, England, by F. Wallis Armstrong, who brought her to Moorestown, N. J. where Cavalcade was born in March 1931.
Amiable as well as efficient, his trainer, Bob Smith, calls him "the finest, most obliging gentleman that I have ever known." On long trips this by no means handsome aristocrat travels in a car attached to crack trains like the Twentieth Century. He is accompanied by a stablemate, usually a horse named Anarchy whom he likes, by his Negro handler, Johnny Gaines, and his toy poodle. In Chicago, Cavalcade was annoyed by too many callers. Trainer Smith put him in another stall, substituted a horse named Sleuth which visitors, when told it was Cavalcade, freely photographed.
Owner. No less sensational than the career of Cavalcade has been that of his owner, Mrs. Isabel Cleves Dodge Sloane. Her father was John F. Dodge who worked for Henry Ford at $25 a week, later founded, with his brother Horace, the automobile business that was sold for $146,000,000 in 1925. When he died in 1922, John Dodge cut off his son John Duval Dodge with $150 a month for eloping with his highschool sweetheart at 20. To daughter Isabel he left more. Educated at Detroit's Liggett School, she went into the Social Register in 1921 when she married a Manhattan broker named George Sloane. They were separated in 1928, divorced in 1929.