The fence, made of sheets of corrugated metal, held up with leaning two-by-fours seemed to go on forever, there were splits and gaps, but none so wide that you could really get a view of what was going on inside. The noise was enough to let you know that the quarter mile oval was filled with cars with v-8s and straight pipes. On the inside were bleachers, and not much else around the bare asphalt, with a dirt and grass infield. The Salem Speedway had been known as the “Hollywood Bowl” because it was on the north end of the Hollywood district. Its not clear when the name was dropped officially, old timers still called it the Hollywood Bowl up until the seventies when it was closed forever, and destroyed. The anchor of the district was the Hollywood Theater, a great old fashioned movie theater where kids could go on Saturday mornings, get in for a quarter and watch a great double feature, and a serial. The cliff hanger serials were awesome, with heroes who would drive into an explosion one week, and survive it through creativity the next, when it picked up and showed you how they avoided complete and utter destruction.
And destruction was also the name of the game at the Speedway, the most exciting races were not races at all, but smashups using reinforced lead sleds with the last car running being the winner.
The midget racers were little bullets zooming around the track at high speed, no doubt emphasized by their diminutive nature, chrome nerf bars gleaming and glittering numbers shining on the fancy little paint jobs. The wrecks of these little cars were exciting despite their size and left one wondering how you could survive such a violent encounter with asphalt metal and tin. These little cars, and their smaller brothers, the quarter midgets are often credited with bringing affordable racing to the small out of the way tracks, like the Salem Speedway after the war, and they did just that, midget racing originated in the 1940s among enthusiasts unable to afford Indy cars.
The midget cars from the fifties and sixties were designed to be like the current Indy style racers, and gave off that aura on a small scale.
Heres part of a schedule from the fifties, Oregon Midget racing was rained out a lot…
Oregon Midget Racing Association, 1957
4/21 Jantzen Beach Ken McLaughlin (37)
5/17 Jantzen Beach –Rain–
5/18 Salem –Rain–
7/4 Jantzen Beach Nick Uren (?) Day Race
7/4 Jantzen Beach Pogo Lundquist (?) Night Race
7/22 Salem Bob Gregg (?)
7/28 Jantzen Beach Pogo Lundquist (22)
Thanks to Oregon Midget Racing Association Site visit here for a bit of very rare nostalgia
Racing, Cars, commentary, oregon, sixties | No Comments »
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