History Caddo Mills

I assume this track no longer exists... when was the last race held?

 

Great story..I heard about this in the 70's when we were racing at DIR & Green Valley . thanks for sharing

 

Excellent view into Rodding's past over there. Back before lawyers and insurance fears.
Think we'll ever duplicate this kind of event again?

 

<--------Mitch is from Caddo Mills..

 

Still there, apparently unsued. Listed as an Army Air Forces Auxiliary Field during WWII, one of hundreds built around the country during the war.

 

You know what....we had a thread on Texas drag strips here a while back. Maybe it was Houston area drag strips with a lot of pictures. I think I still have those. I'll pop them into a photo album if nobody can find them. They were great.

I'd love to run at an old drag strip. The HAMB drags is just a little to far for a lot of us and that's unfortunate as there just aren't enough events like that aside from DOTD in october. Sucks having to wait a year.

edit- I know it's not an old drag strip so what I meant was that it might be fun to "re-create" events like that.

 

I was told Goleta airport in Santa Barbara was the oldest dragstrip... I think it started in '49...

It was also a road track that James Dean raced on...

Maybe Goleta was closed already when this was written... Regardless, fun read.

 

Speaking of old military airstrip/dragstrips, I was at an C-47/parachute drop at Frederick Oklahoma the other day and drove around to the back of the airport to "Cherokee Dragway". Kind of made me smile to know the strip had been there around 70 years and will probably be there another 100. A friend of mine from Frederick said an "old timer" told him that the main runway was almost 6' thick. It was made for C-47 taining I think.
Larry T

 

Traces of the Goleta strip are still visible. A couple of the buildings at the starting line are still intact.

 

Very cool Ryan!!!

On the same note I am loving these altered wheel base coupes like this one...



...to me they are much like Canted Quads on a customs. There is something inherently goofy about them and the way they look but at the same time still very much rad!!!!

 

Here's Frederick AAF today. The comedian George Gobel was an instructor pilot at Frederick in B-26 medium bombers. His joke about his war experience on Johnny Carson's show (c1970) was that "not one Japanese plane got past Tulsa."

 

No, I think the city/county owns it now. It was the first place I ever saw a drag race, probably 1965. I helped them run the strip when we opened it back up for a short while in the mid 70's. Here's a flyer from when we first started running bracket races.
Larry T

 

There was also an internment camp in the Caddo Mills area during WW2

 

I'm looking at a copy of page 5 from August 23, 1963 National Dragster, headline is "Langley hits 8.16 at Caddo Mills Regional", he was driving Scorpion IV, A/FD, 187.5 mph.
Top of page photo of Olin Tiemann, an original Thunderbolt, running his '32 Ford 5 window against National Champion Bill Rasmusson's Topolino in C-altered. Olin defeated Rasmusson's Topolino with a 12.96 e.t. @ 109.46 mph in final runoff.
Olin still has the car, just as it was then, still has same 265 bored to 283, 3x2s,'39 ford tranny, early Merc rearend, still drives the car on a regular basis.

 

I grew up knowing several of the Chaparrals. Two of them are real good buddies (Bob and Glenn) of my dads.

Buzzard and I used to hear about the old days from my dad, his buddies (they were in the T.J. Rebels car club in the 60's) and from Bob, Glenn, and some of the other Chaparrals (the were all older than my dad and his crew).

It was even mentioned to me in the 80's by Bob the club should have been brought back...and it has been back for several years now.

It also was funny how in the DFW area and Dallas the Lakewood Rats were so well known and yet they were not really ever a car club.

The Chaparrals were a pretty dang interesting part of Texas Hot Rod history.

Karl Kencth is the pretty much the guy who can tell you all the history and I am very lucky to be part of the Chaparrals. In fact, Karl is a full on history nut that has been collecting info on Texas hot rodding for years.

Here is some stuff I did on my blog about them not too long ago (the following text if from the blog also):

I have the pure honor of being a member of the Chaparrals, one of the oldest car clubs in Texas.

The club was revived several years ago by some good friends of mine with the blessings of the originals and they asked me to join.

Technically they were a "hot rod roadster club" originally.

They never ran a traditional car club plaque but instead had metal tags like the one shown below.



They appeared in Hot Rod Magazine in the early 50's as shown below.



This is one of the original jackets.



Today we now have "traditional" (for a lack of a better term) club jackets similar to those found being worn by great clubs like The Shifters, The Choppers, and my very good friends in THEM! TEXAS and THEM! CALIFORNIA.

We used the original logo from the member "tags"



I am one lucky guy to be in the company of such great people!

 

Another interesting fact is one of the clubs members served on the Jack Ruby jury.

Tommy, one of the core of the new group, actually found the screening stuff for the original tags and some of the originals. All the new tags are made from the same screen, kinda one in a million of finding something like that.

Bob Wilson is also a member and has a few vintage pics on his web page:

http://www.wilsonweldingandmachine.com/About_us.html

 

Here is a certain car some of you might know as it was at Caddo in the 50's.




We have never been able to figure out who Loyd was.

 

Here is a set of the coveralls the members wore when running the drags and a member card.

 

Almost readable image of the Hot Rod article.

 

That's just cool all the way around. It's one thing to bring back a name but to find all the history that went with it is something else.

That roadster in the hot rod article has my interest. Any ideas or better pictures? I think I've seen that front end on a roadster before in a magazine from roughly the same time frame.

 

Didn't Eddie Hill run at Caddo Mills in his early racing days?

 

I'm sure he did. He raced at Cherokee and Houston too.
Pretty sure that's the Scorpion in the back of this shot too.
Houston Freeway Dragstrip-1958
Larry T

 

The Scorpion at Caddo article:

 

Cut55-

You beat me to the punch. I was just about to point out that Eddie Hill was a Caddo Mills "graduate". It was a real drag racing hot spot for several years.

In fact, I seem to remember Eddie listing Caddo Mills as his home address. That may have been quite a few years back though. (-: