This is no laughing matter to me. They say that when your memory starts to fade, due to aging, it’s the “retrieval” system that is to blame. It’s not that you can’t remember things as much as your brain looses the ability to recall where the information is stored. This is truer, apparently, with the “newer” memories. For the most part, our “older” memories are not only still intact but the brain’s retrieval system can still find the “old stuff”.

So, before I forget what this article is all about, I’m going to jot down some personal memories I have regarding drag racing “back when”. This article is written for me, from my own memories, so you are going to have to bare with me a little.

My dad was a “car guy”. He liked cars. Not that he worked on them, other than the usual wash and wax, and he had no real interest in racing, but he just liked cars. He took me to all the auto shows in Los Angeles and I remember going with him to the dealerships to see the new cars every year when they came out.

I don’t remember when I first became interested in race cars. Probably sometime before or during Jr. High School. I know that I went to some of the old dry lakes races at El Mirage and Muroc Dry Lakes with some other kids (and their dads). This had to be about 1951 or 1952. I was 13 years old in 1952. Hot rodding really started on the dry lakes beds in Southern California.

I remember going to my first drag race like it was yesterday. It was at the old Saugus drag strip (opened in 1951) north of L.A. My dad took me (he got tired of me pestering him to take me there and so he finally he did). This was about 1954 just prior to my first year of High School. Saugus was out in the boondocks. I remember that the top speed that day was 113 MPH, by a 1934 Ford fender-less coupe. In those days, there were no ET clocks. The only report by the announcer in the “tower” (the back of a flat bed truck) was the top speed. Of course, the winner was still determined by who crossed the finish line first, and at some early tracks, and I think that Saugus was one of them, they used a gas station hose (remember the hoses that rang a bell when you drove over them to alert the attendant?), one in each lane, to tell who won if it was real close. (I realize that some of you won’t have a clue as to what I’m talking about, sorry.)

Anyway, when I turned 16 and started High School, I got a car. Yippee. A 1940 Ford coupe (Deluxe) with a “3/4” flat head (Edelbrock heads) and 3-duces on top (and eventually a 303” Oldsmobile). There was a drag strip in Orange County that people were talking about. It was located at a little airport in Santa Ana (now called John Wayne Airport). It was a long drive from where I lived in Hollywood down to Santa Ana and there were no freeways like there are today.

Santa Ana Dragstrip opened in 1950 and had races every weekend. If you were a drag racer, you were at Santa Ana. This place was run by a guy named C.J. “Pappy” Hart. C.J.’s wife Peggy was even a drag racer back then, had a ’33 Willys coupe. I’m going to list some of the drag racers that were Santa Ana regulars. I’m sure that most of you never heard of the majority of these people, but so what? These are the guys that started the sport and all of these names first began their “drag racing careers” in the 1950’s.

I remember Art Chrisman in the #25 digger. This was the car with a grille in the front that looked a little like a sprint car (driver sat in front of the rear end) and had a small fuel tank in the back. Like many early dragster in those days, it was originally built for the dry lakes. It had a flat head when I first saw it and then they changed to the Ardun OHV conversion. This car is now either at NHRA headquarters in Glendora or at the NHRA museum in Pomona.

Another Santa Ana regular was Joaquin Arnett. He raced several different flat head dragsters over the years and was part of the famed “Bean Bandits” club, out of San Diego, I think.

Another pioneer was Jim “Jazzy” Nelson. Jim’s flat head digger was some kind of coupe, a Fiat I think. Jim was one of the first to experiment with nitro methane as I recall. Top Eliminator in those days was usually between the 8 fastest cars, which might include dragsters, roadsters or coupes. Jim’s coupe could hold it’s own against any dragster.

Ernie Hashim was out of the Bakersfield area and was a hard runner. Ernie started M&H tires and was the West Coast M&H distributor. You had to drive up to his shop in Bakersfield (over the Ridge Route; the Interstate didn’t exist) to pick up your drag slicks.

Other racers that ran at Santa Ana included Mickey Thompson, with one of the first “sling shot” dragsters, (in which the driver sat behind the rear end housing), Ed Losinski (a full bodied car), and Calvin Rice (first running with a flat head and then later, a 331” Chrysler hemi). Calvin was the winner of the very first NHRA “National” event, which started in Great Bend Kansas, and because of rain, finished up in Arizona. I think that this was 1955. There was only one NHRA National event each year in those days, until the Winternationals was introduced at Pomona in 1961.

Another Santa Ana regular was Lloyd Scott and the “Bustle Bomb”. The BB had a Cadillac and an Olds engine, one in the front and one in the back. The front engine had a transmission and the other was high gear only. This car is now in the Don Garlits Museum in Ocala, FL.

One of the most well known early diggers was the “Glass Slipper”. I can’t remember who the driver was but the Slipper had a cool body with an enclosed cockpit.

As time went on and new tracks sprang up in Southern California, new cars sprang up too. Pomona opened in 1951, Fontana in 1952, Colton in 1956, San Gabriel in 1956, Irwindale in 1957 and Riverside in 1959.

San Fernando drag strip opened in 1955 in the valley (lovingly called “The Pond”) and was popular, as was the new track in Long Beach. The Long Beach track (also opening in 1955) was sponsored by the local Lions Club. Lions Associated Drag Strip (LADS). I remember seeing Art Arfons (all the way from Akron, Ohio) running at Long Beach with his Allison aircraft engine car. This had to be in 1955 or 1956. (Ten years later I’m at the Salt Flats in Utah watching Art break the Land Speed Record with his Green Monster jet car, while I was working with Craig Breedlove).

Art Chrisman and his brother Lloyd, along with Frank Cannon, built a new supercharged dragster to replace the old #25, and called the new car, “Hustler”. This was probably about 1958. In those days, most of the supercharged cars had the blowers mounted in front of the engines, with the supercharger driven directly off the front of the crankshaft.

Tom (it was Tommy in those days) Ivo had a neat T-bucket roadster, with a 322” Buick engine in it. He went 117 MPH with it at San Fernando, and it was a street machine. Tom had money (he was on the “My Little Margie” TV show), and soon enough, he had a Kent Fuller dragster chassis. His “nail head” Buick was installed (injected on gasoline) and it ran great. Eventually Tom installed a 6-71 blower on the Buick and then built a twin Buick powered gas dragster (first 8-second gas dragster), and finally (if some is good, more is better) a 4-engine Buick dragster. The 4-engine dragster (the Showboat) got him on the cover of Hot Rod magazine, and when the TV producers saw a photo of that car, they told Tommy it was either “acting or racing, but not both”. Tommy told them where they could stuff the TV show (and the show was cancelled soon after anyway).

You could see TV Tommy most every Saturday at “The Beach” and Sunday at “The Pond”. Tom was (and still is) a member of the Road Kings out of Burbank, a car club that was founded in 1952. Some of their members include Kenny Safford (a member of the Sour Sisters team), Bob Muravez (alias Floyd Lippencott Jr.) who drove the Freight Train and a car I was a part owner in, the Pulsator, Tony Nancy (who had an upholstery shop and ran a flat head roadster back then, the #22 Jr.), Don “The Beachcomber” Johnson, Harry Hibler (San Fernando drag strip manager) and a young kid who hung out with Ivo, Don Prudhomme. The first time Prudhomme ever went down a drag strip was in Ivo’s single engine Buick digger (at Carlsbad in 1959). Tommy was testing his new twin Buick that day and asked Prudhomme if he wanted to try out the single engine digger. The rest is history. Prudhomme worked at a body shop at the time, as an auto painter.

Another unique dragster running at our local tracks was the “Sidewinder”. This had a blown hemi mounted sideways behind the driver and just in front of the rear end. It used a chain drive like a motorcycle. Jack Chrisman (another one of the Chrisman brothers) was the driver and won a lot of races with that thing. He would have won the NHRA Nationals one year with the “Sidewinder” accept the rear axle broke in the finals and he had to settle for runner-up. Who knows how many other “sidewinder” designs would have been built had he won?

Southern California attracted racers from other areas too. I remember a neat digger called the “Top Banana” racing locally. This car was from up north, in the San Francisco area, and driven by Hank Vincent. In the bay area, there were two drag strips. One was Fremont and the other was Half Moon Bay. I remember going to races at Lions on Saturday night, then driving all night to San Francisco so we could go to Fremont on Sunday. I recall that Half Moon Bay, which was right on the coast, would fog over in the evening. Sometimes it became so foggy that you couldn’t see the finish line. Didn’t stop the racers though. They had to have people at the far end to tell you who won. Hank had a fatal crash at Fremont in the Banana, sometime in 1958 or 1959.

The “best of the best” raced at Lions on Saturday night. Racers came from all over the United States to run at Lions. You name them, and they raced at “The Beach”. Racing at Lions was a little tricky. Long Beach is also right near the ocean and as the evening wore on, the dew or moisture from the ocean would settle on the track surface. Since the final rounds weren’t usually run until about 10:00 PM, it wasn’t uncommon to have a slippery track for the finals. “Dual in the Dew” was a phrase that was heard a lot when the final round came up.

There was one racer that knew how to race on that surface and his name was Leonard Harris.

Leonard’s dragster (supercharged Olds powered) was tuned by Gene Adams, about the best engine guy there was at the time. To show you just how good Leonard was behind the wheel of a dragster, he won 11 or 12 Saturdays IN A ROW at Lions. And this was with 32-car fields. Leonard was “the best”, the best that I ever saw (Garlits is the 2nd best). Leonard went on to win the NHRA Nationals too (1960 I think).

Leonard’s drag racing career was cut short in 1961. One night at Lions, Leonard was trying to help some other racer, whose dragster wasn’t handling quite right. Leonard offered to take a lap in the car, to see if he could figure out what was wrong. Unfortunately, Leonard went off the side of the track (no guard rails back then) and flipped, and “the best that ever was”, was no more.

Here are a few other names I remember seeing at Lions (and other local tracks) in the 1950’s. Don Yates, Lefty Mudersbauch (dual engine Chevy’s and for a while even a three engine digger) Tony Waters (out of Bakersfield with a really quick roadster), John Bradley (Mr. Flat Head), Mickey Brown (a great racer who was fatally injured at Lions. Mickey drove for my dragster partner, Nye Frank), Bill Martin (small block Chevy “giant killer”, beat Don Garlits one night) and Ed Garlits (anybody remember Don’s brother? I do.)

Names, names, I could fill this page with dragster driver names from my past.

Then there was Bakersfield. Bakersfield is about 120 miles north of L.A. Drag racing began in Bakersfield at an old airport track called Minter Field. Soon, a new track was constructed next to a quarry, just north of Bakersfield, at Famosa, located not too many miles east of where James Dean died in his Porsche Spider (September 30, 1955), and on the same two-lane highway. The Famosa track became famous because of a local hot rod club in the Bakersfield area, known as “The Smokers”. You have to remember that in the mid to late 1950’s, NHRA had outlawed nitro methane as a fuel. It was gasoline only, even at NHRA’s big event.

The Smokers had an idea. Why not hold an event in Bakersfield at Famosa, and invite the nitro cars to compete? This was in 1959 and the meet was called the “Fuel & Gas Championships”, or for short, “the Smokers meet”, or shorter still, “the March meet” (held the first weekend in March).

This race drew “everybody who was anybody” from around the country. It was going to be a “big money” race. How much money? $100 for the Top Fuel winner and $100 for the Top Gas category. Not $100 in cash, either. This was a $100 savings bond.

Everybody was there. Don Garlits showed up from Seffner (or was it Tampa?), Florida. Don’s car (Swamp Rat #1) was already getting plenty of press. This was 1959 and Don’s Chrysler hemi was still un-supercharged back then, and was running 8 Stromberg carburetors on nitro. There were about 100 fuel cars trying to make the field (64 car field I think).

I remember that Ivo was the winner in the Top Gas category and Art Chrisman’s Hustler took Top Fuel.

The “March meet” was “where it was at”. If you had a dragster, whether you were from Moline, New York, Chicago, Denver, wherever, you had to attend the “March meet”. The fields were at least a 32-car show, sometimes, a 64-car show.

Talk about your drag racing? There was nothing like it in the world. I could fill a book just with stories about the “March meets”.

My only wish is that some of you could “take a trip back in time”, to when drag racing was more about racing the guy in the other lane than how much your car (or the other guys car) weighed, what power adder (if any) the other guy had, how much money was in the purse, what the round money was or what the contingency payouts were. It was the guy in the left lane vs. the guy in the right lane. How far back did they pay? All the way back to runner-up, that was it.

In those bygone days, we had cars with single engines racing dual engines, supercharged cars racing un-supercharged cars, heavy cars racing light weight cars, roadsters racing dragsters, hemi head engines racing wedge head engines. It didn’t matter. It was just the guy in the left lane vs. the guy in the right lane. The racers wanted nothing more than to race.

When did this all change? I guess that my memory is worse than I thought since I can’t quite remember when this change took place.

Today I see a bunch of very sharp guys not wanting to race “unless the money is right”. What the hell has money got to do with drag racing? You either could afford to race or you couldn’t, and even if you couldn’t afford it, you did it anyway (and there were no credit cards back then).

Drag racing was always a rebellious, grass roots sport. Drag racers were the “dirty fingernails guys” in motorsports. No body was in it to “make money”. “Breaking even” was never part of the deal either. There were no “sponsors”. For the most part, racers raced for trophies. Everybody was in it together. Everybody pitched in to help everybody else. If someone’s dragster needed a clutch changed between rounds, the engine was removed and replaced by hand, with all of the competitors pitching in and lifting (one guy per header pipe). Nobody protested anyone else. What was there to protest anyway? Everybody learned from everybody else.

And the pits weren’t crammed with motor homes and tow rigs that cost as much as a house (and are about as big as a house). Dragsters were hauled all around the country on single axle, open trailers. Spare parts and tools that didn’t fit into the back end of a station wagon, never made it to the track. And a tool box was something that you could carry around with one hand (“real” tool boxes don’t have drawers).

Actually, you didn’t need that much stuff to carry around anyway. To go Top Fuel racing in the 1950’s, all you needed were some basic hand tools, several 5-gallon cans of nitro methane (100% nitro), a few gallons of methanol (to warm up the engine in the pits), a hydrometer (to measure the nitro percentage if you didn’t run it straight out of the can), and some extra spark plugs. If anything bad happened (kaboom), you weren’t going to be able to fix it at the track anyway, and NOBODY carried a spare engine.

I hope that my memory hasn’t deceived me too much, with my recollections above. I still love drag racing, having been around it now for over 50 years. I still love it but it’s not the same. Too bad, because we had a lot of fun back then.