It all started in the late summer of 1975. At the time a bunch of us were hanging out at the local White Castle in Bridgeview, Illinois, and sometimes there would be as many as 500 cars jammed into the parking lot on a weekend and about 300 a night during the week. Needless to say, the situation eventually got out of hand, which led the management to take drastic measures. One night they hooked one of our cars and said if we didn’t leave for good they would tow away all the cars on the lot! We got the message.

Just three blocks south of the White Castle there was a place called the Bridgeview Drive Inn, which had recently been bought and renamed Dukes Drive Inn. This guy Duke Ziegler just wanted it to be a plain old drive-in restaurant that served Italian sausage and roast beef sandwiches and had no hot rodders hanging around. Well, some of the guys in our group went to school with Duke's son Wayne, and we soon found out that Duke was a "gearhead" himself and a hot rod lover at heart. In fact, he owned a string of Corvettes! The bottom line was that before long Duke’s Drive Inn became our new home.

Everything went fine for the first year or so because we promised Duke we would police the lot and keep it clean, which we did. There were so many guys hanging around there at the time who had fast cars that we made up jackets that read: Dukes Drive Inn - Home of The Fastest street cars - 81st & Harlem – Bridgeview. In those days we had at least 20 cars that ran 11-seconds or quicker in the quarter-mile.

Of course, this was the heyday of street racing, and our favorite places to race were either 183rd and Ridgeland, which is now the back entrance for the Tweeter Center, or Sauk Trail & Ridgeland, which is now a country club. We also ran at 159th & Bell Road, a place that looked very similar to Paradise Road, where they raced the yellow deuce coupe and black ‘55 Chevy in the American Graffiti movie. It was very dark and flat, with corn fields on both sides. You could see if a car was coming for miles. Today it’s the entrance to a shopping mall.

Another popular spot was locally famous 107th street, were there would be racing four or five nights a week. This was a very narrow street with a lake on one side and big trees on the other, so you better keep it straight, otherwise (ouch)! One year they were working on the west end of the street, which was about a mile and a half away, so they closed the street off for traffic. It was like US 30 [drag strip] out there. They had 25 to 30 races a week out there until the construction was finished. Boy - what a great summer that was.

Within two years the drag racing and car magazines got wind of what was going on at Dukes. CARS Magazine was the first to recognize Dukes in the media, featuring the restaurant, the people and their cars in the November, 1977, Issue.

Once it became known that we had some of the fastest street cars in the country congregating at Dukes, it wasn’t long before cars were coming out of the woodwork. Guys were hauling in cars from all over, trying to get us to race them. Naturally, we didn’t want to be shown up, so we usually obliged. We won most of the time, too. We found out later that some of the guys that beat us had nitrous oxide systems hidden in their cars. That was before it was even heard of in drag racing!

a d v e r t i s e m e n t

Click to visit our sponsor's website

By now more magazines heard what was going on at Dukes, and the next to feature us was Car Craft, which did a piece titled "They only come out at night." Then Hot Rod jumped on the band wagon with their "Crusin’ USA" series. After that came numerous newspaper articles and even a cover photo on a JC Whitney catalog. CARS magazine came back after 3 years and did another major article. We even got TV coverage when Bob Wallace from Channel 2 Chicago came out and filmed Dukes for a "2 on 2" special which featured all of our cars.

Cruising at Dukes became so legendary that everyone wanted to take part in the action. On any given night you might see an awesome street race, get your car shot for a magazine, share bench racing stories with the top guns or even see a buck-naked midget standing up through the sun roof of a van circling around Dukes with roman candles in both hands.

The one thing you didn’t want to do was shoot dice or pitch quarters with the guys, though, because you would leave broke! One night a guy was pitching quarters with the regulars in the back, and before long he lost all his money. Around 5:30 in the morning he left, but he was back a few minutes later with a wrinkled twenty dollar bill in his hand. Minutes after throwing it down he was broke again. There were lots of ways to be humbled when you hung out at Dukes!

a d v e r t i s e m e n t

Click to visit our sponsor's website

It wasn’t all about the cars – it was about the magic that Dukes created. Dukes Drive Inn was our Tubbys, like in the movie, and the things all the guys did over the years would make even the Hollywood Knights jealous.