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Lions
- The Greatest Dragstrip?
When considering the fact that more than 12-hundred
drag strips have been built in the United States since 1949, perhaps no
single track has ever captured the imagination, created more legendary
figures, or held as many noteworthy events than a stretch of real estate
sitting quietly off the San Diego freeway in Wilmington, California,
just south of Los Angeles. But don't bother to grab your jacket and camera and
set sail for this holy grail of quarter-mile landmarks, as Lions Drag
Strip's 18-year reign ended with "The Last Drag Race" event in
the wee hours of December 2, 1972. a
d v e r t i s e m e n t Given this 30-plus year stretch of cruel time since
the last pair of tire-burners scorched the mystical patch of asphalt
known initially as LADS (Lions Associated Drag Strip), today's fans
might be wondering, who the heck cares?
I have been asking myself precisely that for the
past three decades as I pondered some sort of Lions tribute. Initially,
I thought this was due to its proximity to my childhood home where, as a
wide-eyed kid growing up just a few miles away, I got my start with a
Brownie camera at age 14. But history - and the words and deeds of those who
experienced the "magic" firsthand, teach us that there is a
real and viable basis for placing Lions at the literal top of the list. After spending 30-plus years as a drag racing
photojournalist and more recently as a freelance TV motorsports producer
for niche shows on ESPN2 and Speed Vision, I settled on doing an
in-depth video documentary. These past two years, while gathering
materials and research, have become an eye-opening journey into a past
filled with marvelous stories, gripping film and photographic depictions
and heartfelt recollections which, for the sake of argument, explains
Lions' major role in shaping the sport from near infancy to the format
of 320 mile-per-hour rear-engined missiles witnessed today. When it initially came to making a decision to
either do the project or walk away, a phone call was placed to one of
the sport's most revered figures, C.J. Hart, known to many as
"Pappy", who opened the sport's first commercial dragstrip on
an unused airport landing strip at Santa Ana, Calif., in 1950. He later
managed Lions in the mid to later 1960s. a
d v e r t i s e m e n t The gist of the conversation was that he was in his
90s, his health was in decline, and if I wanted to get any such stories
out of the proverbial horse's mouth, "You better get your butt out
here - and soon," he quipped. Less than two weeks later I showed up with video
equipment at his door, hence the first interview - and literally a
Pandora's box of drag racing lore was opened.
Subsequent cross-country trips netted interviews
with such pioneers and notables as Fritz Voigt, Art Chrisman, Gene
Adams, Don Garlits, Tom McEwen, Don Prudhomme, Tommy Ivo, Chris
Karamesines, Connie Swingle, Roy "Goob" Tuller, Roland Leong,
George Bolthoff, Ed Lenarth, Sush Matsubara, Bill Schultz, Paula Murphy,
Don and John Ewald, Gerry Glenn, Joe Koenig and speed merchants Joe
Reath, Ed Iskenderian, Chet Herbert, chief starter Larry Sutton,
promoter Doug Kruse, photographers Steve Reyes and Jim Kelly and writers
Ralph Guldahl, Dave Wallace and Don Prieto, plus C.J. Hart's son and
Lions announcer, Jerry, likewise announcer and part-time starter, Tim
Kraushaar, Drag News gossip columnist Suzy (Kelly) Beebe and artist, Tom
Hunnicutt, to name a few. Others who graciously allowed our cameras into
their homes were early track photographers Roy Robinson and Don Hale. And then there was Judy Thompson, who recounted her
early years as a young girl infatuated with a quick tempered and hot
rod-afflicted young man who would become the proverbial "speed
king" of the industry, her husband - and Lions' first general
manager, the late Mickey Thompson. At her home we also spoke with the
track's original "hot" and "stock" car tech
directors, Roy Swanson and Ray Halladay, respectively. But let's backtrack one moment, because how the
track came about is quite important. In the time period immediately
following World War II, the day's youth had a lot of energy, a dollar in
their pocket, an excess of sedans and roadsters to tinker with (thanks
to a bevy of newsstand magazines later on such as Hot Rod), plus an
infant industry capable of producing go-faster, do-it-yourself bolt-on
parts, much of it from innovative and inquisitive thinkers with backyard
and garage industries born from knowledge gained in area aerospace and
metalworks.
Due to Southern California's year-round mild
climate, youthful hot rod activity was a constant, and initially street
and purpose-built racers converged on several dry lake beds such as
nearby El Mirage and Muroc. The plentiful and unused concrete runways of
airstrips newly abandoned by the military provided equally tempting
locations for airing out one's hot iron. The need for such locations
came at a price, however, as illegal street racing and highway incidents
and deaths climbed in alarming proportions by the late-1940s, long
before freeways were built. The local police, including Los Angeles police
officer Gordon Browning and specifically Long Beach's Bob Cabot, who
along with the Associated Car Club of Long Beach, made it their business
to convince area car club members to direct their energies toward safer,
supervised activities. A Long Beach judge also became alarmed at the
newspaper headlines and court cases involving street racing and he got
behind a movement to build a local dragstrip. The local Lions Club was
informed, and altogether nine Lions chapters from the Los Angeles harbor
area got involved, a piece of land was secured, bonds were sold to
create working capital, and in the summer of 1955 work began on the
construction of one of the sport's first purpose-built facilities.
Thompson was hired as its sole paid employee. Amazingly, Thompson at the time had just built the
sport's first "slingshot" dragster, while he simultaneously
operated a muffler shop, worked at the Los Angeles Times as a pressman,
and was about to take on a job of immense proportions as the dragstrip
facility kingpin.
The track opened on October 9, 1955 - and so too
did a great number of tales. Take for instance an 11 year-old kid who on
that day was looking for lizards on some property near his home in west
Long Beach when he heard a huge roar of sound. He walked toward the
noise, parted some scrub brush and there he was near the finish line
turnoff of an enormous new drag racing facility. Frank Fedak literally
became a kid who pressed his face against the Cyclone fence for a closer
look at the smoke-belching cars at the starting line. Within several
years he became a regular competitor - and winner in the elite Top Fuel
and Junior Fuel divisions. Before that his family moved to nearby Garden
Grove, and at 14 he introduced his next-door neighbor to the sport, a
kid named John Mulligan (later of Tp Fuel Beebe & Mulligan fame). At the start the cars were mostly dry lakes racers,
but quarter-mile specific machines soon became the norm. And Lions'
location in the literal center of civilization and later on conveniently
at the south Alameda off-ramp of the newly-built 405 (San Diego)
freeway, was the place to witness big league racing every Saturday
evening for the hot cars, and again on Sundays during stock and bracket
racing day. Much innovation and bravado was displayed in the
early going, with initial sanction through the National Hot Rod
Association (NHRA), which was itself formed "as a social club"
some five years prior. Through Thompson's efforts it was the first track
to utilize an electronic starting system instead of a flagman, for
example. Later it would become one of the first to place electronic
monitoring equipment at specific intervals along the track for
incremental times, incorporate concrete starting line pads, roller
starters replaced unsafe push starts due to a frightening dragster
accident in the mid-1960s and is a track where the advertising of major
match races was born and flourished. It was also the second dragstrip to
draw crowds from Saturday night racing "under the lights"
(Saugus was the first), and as luck would also have it, Lions was
located just a couple of city blocks from where the sport's first
"weekly bible" was published - Drag News. a
d v e r t i s e m e n t After a year-and-a-half of successful operation, on
February 3, 1957 a stunning series of runs by nitro-burning dragster
pilot Emory Cook's San Diego-based machine netted a best of 166.97 mph,
resulting in seven area dragstrips voting to place a total ban on fuel
competition. The infamous "fuel ban" initially hit Lions and
area racers hard, but resulted in some of the most innovative and
exciting times in the sport's history. It also spawned the successful
creation of an alternative event - the U.S. Fuel and Gas Championships
at Bakersfield (a three hour drive north), and when NHRA adopted the
gas-only limitations for all of their sanctioned tracks, including it's
handful of national events, the result was the elevation of a rival
organization who indeed placed a premium on nitro-burning machines as
major drawing cards, hence the emergence of the American Hot Rod
Association (AHRA) with the likes of Don Garlits, Setto Postoian and
Chris Karamesines, among others. Because a single-engine, gas-burning powerplant
could only produce so much horsepower, inventive racers started to
employ two engines; some placed inline like Lefty "Allen"
Mudersbach, Glen Stokey, (John) Peters & (Nye) Frank (whose Quincy
Auto rail was later known as the "Freight Train") and Chet
Herbert's next-door neighbor, Zane Shubert. Others were side-by-side
sensations including Tommy Ivo's, Howard Johansen's "Twin
Bear", (Jim) Nelson & (Dode) Martin's "Two Thing",
Thompson and Voigt's "Monster", (Don) Hampton & Dye's
"Too Bad", plus consistent early winner "Jazzy Jim"
Nelson's twin-Merc with a Fiat body. The envelope was finally reached
when former child actor Ivo tried a four-engine creation called
"Showboat", which was relegated to exhibition runs when it
spooked NHRA officials.
The mid-1950s also witnessed the last days of the
flathead, as Chrysler, Olds and Chevrolet V8 engines became the norm,
and these were soon being topped with superchargers for greater power.
With most of these racers building their own machines from the ground up
(including Jerry Baltes' dragster frame built using his daughter's swing
set), some like the locally-based "Bustle Bomb" came with an
engine in the front, and one in the rear. Art Arfons towed in from Ohio
with his Allison aircraft-powered behemoth which utilized one of the
sport's first parachutes. Another rear-engine oddity housing a blown
Chrysler initially built by Paul Nicolini and later campaigned by Chuck
Jones and Joe Mailliard, became known as the "Sidewinder" and
from 1959 was driven solidly by a gas station operator from the area,
Jack Chrisman (Art's uncle), who later drove a series of other cars to
great success, including single and dual-engined dragsters for Mickey
Thompson, plus an all steel-bodied Mercury Comet with a blown,
nitro-burning engine in 1964 that became one of the sport's first funny
cars. All of this innovation, lack of adequate safety and
the sheer numbers of cars that congregated at Lions (because it's
proximity to the ocean meant incredible air and power-producing
capabilities), came at a price. In fact, by the time Lions reached the
mid-1960s, it had claimed more lives than in all previous years of the
Indianapolis 500. When it closed, more than 18 are known to have
perished there, some famous and others anonymous.
Names that have long since faded from the headlines
included such notables as Leonard Harris, nephew of Ansen Wheel and
speed shop founder, Lou Senter, who won more than a dozen straight top
eliminators with engine master Gene Adams and chassis builder Ronnie
Scrima, plus Mickey Brown, the first man to top 150 on gasoline; both
died there while testing cars for fellow racers. Joe "The Jet"
Jackson lost his life while also trying out a car for another team.
Jackson literally lived out of his push-car - ironically a hearse, after
having moved from Maine to California during the winter months with his
red top fuel dragster in search of drag racing paydirt that never came.
Dave Gendian was the first, and others like Pete Petrie, Harrell Amyx
and Boyd Pennington joined a growing toll on the sport's pioneering dark
side. Other incidents were less tragic and have become
the basis for time-tested lore. Current NHRA official starter Rick
Stewart crashed at speed in the mid-1960s, and when he asked a nurse at
the hospital why the world was on fire, she told him he had suffered a
head injury. Stewart reportedly asked again why the world appeared on
fire while looking through the window, and she responded, oh yeah, the
Watts Riots just started. a
d v e r t i s e m e n t Zane Shubert once made a pass there in a twin
front-engine machine in which his feet resided under the rear-end, and
when someone negated to properly fasten his restraining belts, he was
thrown out of the cockpit after deployment of the parachute; he managed
to hold onto the steering wheel with his face was pressed next to the
back engine's magnetos, while looking rearward toward the starting line
through his legs! Long Beach resident Gary "Rocket Man"
Gabelich once crashed in the fog, and wasn't found for the longest time.
And when they finally reached his dragster upside-down and under a
fence, his first question was "Did I win?" Glen Stokey also
went through the infamous Willow Street barrier with a dragster, and the
first person on the scene was an elderly man, who saw the blossoming
parachute and rollcage bolt from the sky and asked safety personnel,
"When did they start dropping these out of airplanes?"
Engle Cams general manager Don Moody likewise had a
terrible-looking accident at speed in Dave Zeuschel's fueler one night,
and when the dust settled, after taking out many feet of recently
installed plywood fencing, he was found sitting on the track with
nothing but a shell of the seat between his rear and the asphalt - with
literally no injuries. And in the funny car days of the early 1970s, the
Beaver Brothers had quite a scare the night their "L.A.
Hooker" machine had the throttle stick just as two crewmen lowered
the body - and went on one heck of a ride until half-track, where the
two crewmen fell off, got up and walked away lucky. The tale was told by
owner Gene Beaver's nephew - a kid who got his start in the sport with
his mom's car at Lions, John Force. Perhaps my favorite was a contest between Bill
Maverick's "Little Red Wagon" and Chuck Poole's "Chuck
Wagon" wheelstanders. In their final round with the scored tied,
Maverick shocked the crowd when he set his front end down in the actual
sand trap without too much damage and just a few yards from the property
fence, and was feeling pretty good about his pending victory. But Poole
would have none of it, and when he became disoriented from the fog past
the finish line, he drove, wheels-up, past Maverick, through an opening
in the fence, down an access road, out the gate, and crashed upside-down
into the adjoining property - the winner! In those days there was sheer power in numbers, and
following the lifting of the fuel ban in 1962 the numbers of fuelers in
the southern California area grew to nearly one hundred. While you now
have to wait all year for a sizable drag racing national event show in
your "market", it was not unusual in the mid-1960s to witness
more than 60 top fuel cars on a given weekend at Lions. Some events like
the Mickey Thompson 200 Mile-Per-Hour Club Meet had 64-car fields!
Toss in a match race with the blown, gas-burning
Willys of "Big John" Mazmanian versus "Stone, Woods &
(Doug) Cook" during what became the infamous "cam grinder
wars," long lines of blown AA/Fuel and gas Altereds, AA/Gas
Supercharged Anglias and Austins, wheel-stander and jet car oddities,
(injected) junior fuel dragsters (started at Lions by Hart), top gas
dragsters and later nitro funny cars - and even an injected funny car
class and every sort of two-wheeler imaginable, and you get some sense
of what made this place so special in terms of depth. Oh, did I mention
that in the early years they used to run the stock cars four at a time,
because there were so many! Another facet of the track was it's unique layout,
with pit-side grandstands so close to the racing surface that dragster
pilots who were push-started from the finish line toward the starting
line said that the fans leaning over the fence could practically slaps
hands as they drove past prior to a run. Also, the finish line "on
deck" road was near another set of large grandstands, allowing
spectators the opportunity to converse at the fence with racers while
awaiting the call to suit up. It was not unusual to see little kids
chatting with big name drivers in their firesuits just prior to their
flame-throwing, on-track excursions.
Likewise, the physical layout was built to where
the enormous pits funneled to conclusion under the timing tower behind
the starting line like a sieve, and as a spectator you could stand there
and literally rub elbows with engine builders Keith Black, Sid Waterman,
Ed Pink and Dave Zeuschel, plus Isky, Leonard Van Luven, Bruce Crower,
Dean Moon, Donovan and writers Guldahl, Prieto, Wallace and Terry Cook
as they and the drivers and car owners exchanged barbs, ideas and
laughter - then watched as metallic-suited men climbed into machines so
volatile and dangerous that some never made it home alive. From a perspective of ambience, the huge petroleum
refineries to the west, which were always burning off excess fuel with
large feathers of flame and smoke, plus a mass of tall electric
powerline towers just to the east gave the place a feeling of enormous
power and provided an eerie backdrop. Toss in the smell of hot dogs,
tamales with chili, your hand wrapped around the latest copy of Drag
News, souvenir booths sometimes manned by a guy who would airbrush you a
Rat Fink t-shirt - named Ed "Daddy" Roth, plus a wad of
napkins needed to wipe the dew from your seat as the night air grew
thick, and you get some idea of what a typical night was like at Lions -
for 18 years! In its mid-to-latter stages the dragster boys put
up a valiant series of political stands with big United Drag Racers
Association (UDRA) meets; coupled with area meetings and boycotts
designed to force NHRA to pay more monetary rewards and resolve safety
and licensing issues; some worked and other attempts failed. By the
mid-1960s the diggers were then slighted as the southeastern FX/AFX and
funny car craze took stage with a literal stranglehold, then top fuelers
made a comeback with a couple of epic "dragster-only" PDA
meets run impeccably by fabricator Doug Kruse. Eventually both classes
lived side-by-side until the end.
Just before the axe fell, Lions was the setting for
one of the most dramatic series of runs in the sport's history, when Don
Garlits, the front-engine dragster "king", came to the line in
the finals on March 8, 1970 during a meet under the track's then-AHRA
sanction (and management of C.J. Hart). At the flash of green the
transmission exploded in his "Wynn's Charger" and cut the car
completely in half from his feet forward. Garlits was sent tumbling just
past the staring line, minus a portion of his right foot above the arch.
In addition, a spectator tragically lost an arm in the incident. Garlits returned to the racetrack early the
following year to officially debut a machine that placed the engine
safely behind the driver, and with a slower steering ratio which
alleviated the problems faced by many of the sport's earlier
back-motored machine. His final round showing and realized success (as
he went on to win the NHRA Winternationals and Bakersfield March Meet in
subsequent weeks) started a land-rush movement which made the
front-engine "slingshot" obsolete within a year. Amazingly, after its first pass at Lions, while
sitting on the return road, a new funny car driven by John Collins
crashed, and the complete running engine made a beeline for Garlits and
the new dragster. It bounced straight up in the air, glanced off the
cowling on one side of the dragster, then kept on rolling. Both Garlits
and crew chief Tommy T.C. Lemons commented that, had that engine hit the
dragster any harder, because of their heavy race schedule (and with
another front-engine car ready to go), they may have never rebuilt that
rear-engine car. The remaining season-and-a-half witnessed Steve
Evans as its third manager, who gave the track a fresh new look and a
major NHRA season-opener (while returning to NHRA sanction) with the
Grand Premier, plus an adjacent motocross motorcycle track was built to
increase income. But with Wednesday night grudge racing, Friday
motorcycles, Saturday and Sunday drag racing, it was becoming a further
nuisance to nearby homeowners. Shortly thereafter when the
next-door-neighbor "Lone Star Mothers" (who were widows or
wives of military men living in large housing complexes) pressured local
officials to revoke the track's lease with the Los Angeles Harbor
Commission, he became the reluctant architect of an epic, "The Last
Drag Race", which fittingly pitted Tom McEwen against Don Prudhomme
in the funny car final. The last two cars to officially grace the Lions
surface occurred between eventual winner Carl Olson and Jeb Allen; both
were kids who literally grew up there and later became top fuel stars.
Well, the above paragraph is partially correct, and
points to more of the colorful commentary and laughter I hope everyone -
young and old, will derive from the video, dubbed "Lions - The
Greatest Dragstrip". Off-the-record the final pass was made sometime
later before sun-up by the track's official starter, Larry Sutton and
his assistant, Bill Keys - and it was accomplished while they were being
towed down-track by a rather intoxicated individual driving a station
wagon while standing inside a wooden outhouse. Realizing their
predicament at speed well into the run (especially considering the size
of the crowd that day and the contents of the "hold"), the
rope was nervously cut, the outhouse then smacked a guardrail, spun a
few times - and Sutton and Keys emerged from their confines right at the
finish line alive and "in-the-lights". If you think that's an isolated case, there's a
whole bunch more to be found on the video, scheduled for release to the
general public by late-2004. To date more than 52 individuals were
interviewed on-camera and a huge amount of never before seen 8-mm home
movie and 16-mm film, plus close to a thousand still photos including
the work of Reyes, Kelly and Don Varian (thanks to Dick Towers/Match
Race Madness) Robinson, Hale, Jere Alhadeff, Norm Grudem, Doug Hayes,
Alan Earman and Mickey McIver, plus the Don Garlits Museum of Drag
Racing and NHRA Motorsports Museum, for example, have been acquired.
There's even a 8-mm film which surfaced within the past two years of the
infamous Garlits front-engine accident that you must see to believe. A separate trip to Colorado last summer likewise
allowed access to a private individual's film collection, who had
footage of the track being built from "day one", plus the
original film reels from KTTV (Los Angeles), of a 90-minute
black-and-white "live" television broadcast from Lions in
September 1961. Included on this are interviews with the likes of Jack
Chrisman, Gary Cagle, Stokey, Prudhomme, McEwen, Dode Martin, Ronnie
Hampshire, Bob Muravez, Mudersbach, plus the show was even emceed
by track manager Mickey Thompson, himself. Other snippet items of interest include an audio
taped interview with "Wild Willie" Borsch, conducted in 1988
before the legendary AA/Fuel Altered pilot's untimely passing. Also, the
current property owners allowed our cameras onto the facility, which
provides an interesting before-and-after perspective, including panorama
views from the rooftop of their multistory office tower. As a final thought, consider the plight of Mickey
Williams, a weekly bracket racer who lived for the excitement of
Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons when he competed with his Bracket
3 machine at Lions, until being drafted in late-1968. After only a
couple of months in the jungles of Viet Nam, near the DMZ, with only his
purple Lions jacket tucked along for luck, a rocket-propelled grenade
shattered his tank; Williams lucked out, but three companions were
killed instantly. He was somehow rescued and patched back together with
more than 12-hundred stitches.
All he wanted in life, at that point, was to retain a pulse - and witness the sights, sounds and smells of Lions one more time. After many operations and months of painful recovery, he was returned to his home near Long Beach and soon thereafter loaded into an awaiting car and driven to a piece of property officially listed at the corner of 223rd and Alameda. As he caught a glimpse of the starting line sign and those immense grandstands, a smile no doubt returned to his face, as he officially came "home". Lions was like that to a lot of other people, from
the hardest of the hardcore racers and even to the casual spectators.
Times were different back then, and what this video will convey is the
sense of history and significance, with a tinge of reverence, and a
large dose of visual smoke and thunder. It was life at it's best; a quarter-mile at a time.
Perhaps the grandest ever in the theater of drag racing. And Lions was the front row seat. Don Gillespie would love to hear your input and if
you have anything you would like to add to his documentary, his email
address is dgillespie02@hotmail.com
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PUBLISHER'S MEMORIES - When we found out that Don Gillespie was
making a video of the legendary Lion's Dragway, we knew immediately that
we wanted to help push it any way we could. Don so kindly volunteered
his time and efforts to share the experiences that he's encountered
while producing an incredible video documentary. He's yet to finish the
product, but it promises to be a hit. (Originally published in April
2004).
© Competitionplus 2004