(This week the season's first big horse race--the $50,000 Santa Margarita Handicap--will be run at Santa Anita, California's finest track. The two probable favorites, Bed o' Roses and Next Move, both belong to Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt--ED.)

ALTHOUGH Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt's background is New York and Social Register, he was born in England ("I think mother miscalculated") and he has spent much of his 39 years working, in slacks and sweater, around horses. He lasted through only a year and a half of Yale, and then quit because he thought he knew what he wanted--"Fortunately I was right; I wanted race track."

When he was 21, he took over his mother's Sagamore Stable, a little enthusiastically. At one time, he had 86 horses in training, a group too large to be handled effectively. Now the stable averages about 30 and is far more successful. During the past two years, it has picked up some $900,000 in purses.

When Vanderbilt came into racing, he was determined not to act like a man who was heir to $8,500,000 and a high social background. In this endeavor his appearance was no handicap. A tall, weedy man with the slouchy good looks of a boy down from school, he fitted in easily with the working side of race-track life. He could be found of mornings consorting with exercise boys, grooms, dockers and indescribables around the back stretch of various race tracks. Later, when he got into the management of Baltimore's Pimlico track, he did something that was even worse; he took advice extensively from newspapermen.

It turned out that this was youth and inexperience, as harmless as chickenpox; in his convalescent state he realized that stablemen didn't need company as much as they needed better living accommodations. During the three years he was president of Belmont Park, he fought the favoritism the big stables got, and put in shower rooms and sleeping facilities in the public stables. He still listens to advice, even from newspapermen, but it just goes into the general fund.

Now AS president of the Thoroughbred Racing Associations and a former steward of the Jockey Club, he is, he says with a slight flavor of amusement, "at the policy level." The Jockey Club, a body which deliberates deeply but does not always emerge with deep conclusions, doesn't always know what level he is at. One of his amusements is to slip through the registry a name for a horse which the registrar will later regret. An example of this was False Front. The registrar did not note that the dam was named Superficial.

His approach to racing is basically sane and even serious, but with an upper layer of humor. There was, for instance, the time he sent Rusty Gate out hopelessly for the Saratoga Cup and, instead of riding orders, gave Ted Atkinson a sandwich, a container of milk and a wrist compass, remarking he might be out a long time.

Into one pitfall he never fell. For all his interest in racing and breeding thoroughbreds, he was never a pedigree expert, a profession in which two and two must somehow be brought to equal five. "I breed Discovery to Galley Slave," he says, restating the old maxim: "Breed the best to the best and hope for the best."

He rides what fox hunters call an independent line, meaning that he does not necessarily follow the hounds. If the course he chooses involves the trodden path, so much the better. But if it involves cutting through the underbrush, that's where he goes. At Pimlico, he took the obvious steps of increasing purses and starting a healthy publicity campaign. But he also flouted tradition by scooping the sacred "hilltop" out of the infield, and he cast the deciding vote for the sale of liquor on the grounds. This shock was sharpened a little by the fact that he does not drink. "I haven't any scruples. I just haven't yet. Might start tomorrow. But you'd be surprised how many people remember big drinking parties they've been on with me."

The let's-stick-together attitude of the New York tracks, which gears the speed of all to the slowest, was not for Vanderbilt, and he made the owners of other tracks unhappy, because their purses began to look untenably small against Belmont's. There must have been a slight private sigh of relief when he went into the Navy in the spring of 1942.

He showed the same characteristics there. Prowling behind Japanese lines in the vicious little PT boats was all right. But comparatively safe service in a cruiser in the Aleutians wasn't.

"With the PTs, you ran your own show.

The big-ship Navy's not for me," he said. He got a Silver Star for gallantry in action, which he explains by saying that his commander wanted the outfit to have a good record.

HE DOES serious work without taking it or himself seriously. As T.R.A. president, he set out to visit all the tracks in the association, but he did it with an air of just dropping in. Perhaps an earlier experience was responsible for this diplomatic casualness. In 1941, he went to Lexington with his fine filly Petrify, and noted with pleased surprise a banner strung across Main Street, reading, WELCOME VANDERBILT. "I thought that was real Kentucky hospitality," he says, "until I found out Kentucky was playing Vanderbilt Uni- versity that afternoon." He does not share the complacency with which the Eastern tracks took their leadership, and he innovated freely. The starting gate with closed stalls was a dubious experiment on the West Coast when he heard of it and brought it to Pimlico. Now some form of this gate is standard equipment on all tracks. He introduced the present type of finish camera and the Teletimer to Eastern tracks. Not all his experiments were successful, but his percentage was good. He has a few hobbies--a power cruiser, a little tennis, an interest in the publication of classroom periodicals of the "Young America" series, and he has been known to watch one of his good horses saddled and at the same time hold to his ear a small portable radio which whispered of the doings of the Brooklyn Dodgers--but none of these engage him very deeply. He reads extensively and without much pattern--"about three-fourths new, one-fourth backlog"--and takes interest enough in national politics that he once "put in a hell of a week" for Stassen during the Philadelphia convention.

MUSIC IS another sideline. He plays the organ recognizably, but it's primarily a listening interest. Once he gave CBS Board Chairman William Paley an idea for gingering up a radio show, and as a reward gets all of Columbia's classical and semi-classical record releases. On other occasions, too, he has displayed unsuspected talents. When CBS was stuck for a commentator in its early telecasts of racing, Vanderbilt handled the first few shows capably. "I got a good notice from Crosby," he says. And during an early acquaintance with Ernest Hemingway, he became adept at handling the tablecloth when Hemingway decided to play bullfight. Vanderbilt has achieved an enviable balance between not having enough to do to keep him interested, and having so much to do that it keeps him scrambling. And he has managed what James Branch Cabell points to as the secret of the gallant attitude, "to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug."

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