A 21-Year Race Meets a Dead End

Terminal Island’s sky is a blue-brown pastel, and Terminal Island’s air is rich with the shimmery smell of oil. Here is where Los Angeles’ heavy lifting gets done, on ships and bridges and barges, with cranes and winches, in storage yards and holding tanks.

Terminal Island is Big Willie Robinson’s kind of place: For him, too, no weight is too big, no task too formidable, from charming the civic courtiers Downtown to taking on a Super Grand Slam breakfast at midday. Three of everything--pancakes, sausage, eggs--disappears as he eats and talks and burrows into bags of press clippings and letters of support for what he calls God’s racetrack.

Big Willie is not one of those oxymoron nicknames, for he is unarguably large, 6-foot-6, 300 pounds of Vietnam vet, the sixth-place finisher for Mr. America in 1976. For 21 years, he has pursued the dream of the Brotherhood Raceway in the dogged fashion that Pat Buchanan pursues either the presidency or the President. Big Willie has the advantage of creating his own presidency--of the nonprofit National and International Brotherhood of Street Racers--and his own constituency, which is just about every bouncing and scraping low-rider, every A-fuel dragster who ever hit the local asphalt.

If there’s any place a drag strip can work, Terminal Island must be it. No tender bungalows to offend, no playgrounds, a noise-zoning that quarter-sticks of dynamite couldn’t shatter. And there’s the federal prison, which Big Willie will indicate with his candelabrum-sized hand and tell some mouthy kid, “You act up, that’s where you’ll end up.”

Terminal Island is on nobody’s gang turf, and when the raceway drew thousands every weekend for much of those 21 years, the gangbangers and dragsters--Latino, black, Asian, white--were as polite as daddies in the maternity ward, admiring each other’s four-wheeled babies. Race for peace. Off the streets and onto the asphalt. If you’re draggin’, you can’t be bangin’.

Big Willie tolerated no booze, no drugs. When he talks of keeping gangbangers off the streets, he also speaks with derision of midnight basketball and such costly hand-holding programs; the Brotherhood Raceway never cost the city a dime.

The raceway ran its last race on Oct. 21. The engines hadn’t cooled when Big Willie began taking on all comers to bring the track back.

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There is no war like a turf war among official grown-ups. The big presence and matching ego that made the drag strip run smoothly bumps the walls in the smaller confines of city government. Willie Andrew Robinson III probably doesn’t know a grant application from a Sears Roebuck catalogue, but has managed to get what he wants, through two mayors and three police chiefs, which might not endear him to anyone whose life’s work is grant applications.

The drag strip’s tenancy is 21 years less the 11 times it was shut down because the city said it had some tenant for the land. Big Willie would wait six months, nine months, and no lumber company set up shop, no pipeline materialized. “So we’d come back and say the land is empty, and they’d say, OK, you can come back.”

Now a coal storage facility really is coming in, and Big Willie and his wife and partner, Tomiko, have their eye on a strip of land below the Vincent Thomas Bridge. The mayor will rent it to them for $1 a month but the Harbor Department may have plans for it. And there could be other objections: of interfering with shipping, distracting traffic on the bridge.

If Big Willie were the grant-writing type, he could submit testimonials from the likes of Superior Court Judge Douglas A. McKee, who took his ’85 Corvette to the track and got blown into the weeds by the Nevada CHP and the LAPD. At this drag strip, McKee saw someone he sent away to prison acting like a decent guy. “I look at it as an anti-crime program”--and a pretty cheap one, at that.

LAPD Officer Robert Grant III, just out of 77th Division, spent some weekends at the raceway among “some of our biggest idiots right off the street” all in one place, “and all being good. It was a really big shock to see. We run around talking about this all the time, alternative activities, something to do other than being criminals. That’s what Willie’s done.”

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Hot rod and drag strip were unsavory words freighted with menace 25 years ago, when high school principals were soul-racked by questions like: proms--off-campus or on?

Today, 14-year-olds know more about semiautomatic rifles than about birth control, and have better access to the former than to the latter. And kids still cruise. Crenshaw, Mulholland, Whittier. Certain streets in the San Fernando Valley could carry the name “blood alley,” for all the cars and cycles wrapped around telephone poles at 3 a.m.

If guns and cars are phallic substitutes, the satisfying run down a drag strip, making sparks and noise, being macho and beating the other guy in the stretch, means the drivers are not using guns or cars where you live or I live or anyone lives--and how much that’s worth to the city, only the city can assess.