They Left Garages and Dragged a Sport Off Streets of L.A.

It was in the middle-to-late ‘40s. I was a young reporter on the paper. The city editor handed me the assignment as if it were to be a break-in at the Kremlin. He almost used tongs.

“Now, you got to be careful,” he warned. “These are dangerous gangs and they’re running up and down Sepulveda Boulevard after midnight in souped-up old cars. They call it drag racing. They mark off this one-mile strip, and they’ve caused some fatal accidents.

“The last thing they want to see, next to the cops, is a newspaperman and a photographer. So, take a photographer and go down and get us pictures for Sunday.”

Jim Richardson was all heart, a good, game editor.

I remember going down to the suspect site and cowering in the bushes with the photographer--it may have been Sam Samsone. And I saw my first live in-the-flesh dragstrippers.

They were supposed to be a breed of early-day Hells Angels. Tattoos. Teeth missing. Earrings. Scars on the cheeks. Chains for a belt. Terrorists in junkyard jalopies rescued from four-car pileups at the harbor. Urban guerrillas in midnight suicide pacts.

The first one I saw was a spindly, pimply faced kid with his hair in a ducktail, a cigarette behind his ear and a pack probably rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve.

He didn’t look like a menace to society to me. He looked like what he was--a kid in the throes of his first grand love affair. With a car.

His sweetheart was a collection of spark plugs, hubcaps, chrome block and leaded iron. Mark Antony never looked at Cleopatra the way this kid looked at that hunk of metal and rubber. With the windows out, it looked like a toothless hag to the rest of the automotive world.

Far from threatening to run us down or chase us out of the strip with iron pipes, these quasi-criminals were as eager to have their pictures in the paper as Liz Taylor. They didn’t see themselves as outlaws. They saw themselves as romantic knights of the roaring road, legends of the stripe of an Eddie Rickenbacker or Barney Oldfield.

They posed happily next to their gleaming heaps. They ran starts into the camera. They would have staged a crash if asked.

They were inventing a sport as uniquely American as a turkey shoot and as old as the wheel.

I bring this up because this one-time outlaw game from the straights of Sepulveda is being staged in its modern revival this weekend at the L.A County Fairgrounds in Pomona, where 40,000 people will pay $20 to $29 a head to watch something called the Chief Auto Parts Winternationals.

The sport the kids on the lube racks of Torrance dreamed up all by themselves has become a mul ti-million-dollar fixture on the American sports scene. The races the kids on Sepulveda used to risk their lives running for nothing now are contested for cash and contingency awards totaling $787,750.

The automobile as a sporting vehicle has a checkered past. Stock car racing probably derives from the illegal still operators trying to outrun the revenooers on the hills and flatlands of Carolina and Georgia. And drag racing owes its origination to the scofflaws of the wheel generation that followed good old World War II.

They never dreamed what might come out of their lawbreaking, but one man, Wally Parks, himself an illegal road racer, did.

Wally Parks initially formed an organization called the Southern California Timing Assn., which attempted to codify the rules for the clandestine sport and pull it out of the closet and onto the sports pages.

He had the enthusiastic support of the police agencies, particularly the California Highway Patrol, which had a vested interest in keeping 100-m.p.h. vehicular traffic off the roads, especially that part of it that could outrun their patrol sedans.

Parks put the sport on the dry lake beds of Southern California, particularly on Muroc--until the military and the guys with the right stuff came along. He linked up with an ex-MGM screenwriter, Robert Petersen, who started a string of hot rod and motor magazines and changed the sport’s image from that of a hit-and-run accident going somewhere to happen to that of a respectable fixture in the fabric of world sports.

Detroit was skeptical, but the sport became as staid and permanent a part of the sports calendar as the World Series. The first nationals were staged in a cornfield in Kansas. Admission was free. First prize was a cup. But the enthusiasm was boundless.

The standard distance of a quarter-mile for drag races was not an arbitrary selection--it was accidental. “When we raced on air strips, we found that the distance needed to stop cars with those antiquated braking systems was just over a half-mile,” Parks said. “Therefore, the race had to be terminated at a quarter-mile.

“We put the race in Detroit in 1959 to show the auto industry we were not just a bunch of crazy road bums. I remember one auto exec got up to complain, ‘Can’t you do something about that name ‘Hot Rod?’ It suggests some kind of a weirdo.’ And this auto writer got up and said ‘What would you call it, knitting? You ever see these cars?’ ”

From the two-dozen kids disturbing the pre-dawn sleep of the suburbanites in the postwar ‘40s, hot rod racers have grown to some 40,000 in number. The best are millionaires. Their careers, like Shirley Muldowney’s, are the subject of hit movies.

It’s not a sport that came in from the cold but one that came in off the streets. It wasn’t invented, it just grew. The cars that used to strive to break the 80-m.p.h. barrier now go 260-plus. Parachutes now stop the propulsion that old drum brakes couldn’t halt without the help of a tree.

There’s probably a bunch of old geezers in bifocals and ear batteries somewhere today who once were leather-jacketed car junkies. They only knew they were scaring the neighbors and the drivers coming home from the swing shifts in 1946-48, and didn’t know at all they were inventing a modern sport.