History Putting a Face with a Name: Cars and Drivers in the 1950s

Bill Quirk and Bob Powell: Whiz Kids with Fiberglass
​

I stumbled on this delightful photo of a young North Hollywood teenager at the wheel of his home-built dragster on Calisphere. My grandkids would probably use words like sick, rad, dope, or epic to describe the photo. There’s a generation gap in the language we use. Calisphere is an online gateway to over 2 million digitized items, including photographs, from various repositories in California. During my professional career as a historian, I used it numerous times to illustrate scholarly history articles that I wrote. Now that I’m no longer a working schmuck in the history business, I mostly write stuff that I’ve been passionate about my whole life—like drag racing history.

Bill Quirk is the North Hollywood teenager who helped build the Luggers Car Club dragster. That short-lived car club was established in 1954 in North Hollywood, but only lasted about a year before dissolving. The photo of Quirk behind the wheel of the club’s dragster appeared in the August 19, 1954, issue of the Valley Times. That issue published three other photos of Quirk.


Dennis Farlow was the Luggers club’s president. As their spokesman, he attended the first meeting of the North Hollywood Youth Coordinating Council. He was the sole representative of a car club at that meeting. “There are a lot of hot rod clubs in San Fernando Valley and no place to drag,” Dennis said at the meeting. “We need a drag strip.” Nobody seemed to know what he was talking about, and nobody seconded his motion.

The time wasn’t right, but the idea that he voiced took root a few months later when other clubs began voicing the same thought. Burbank, San Fernando, and Glendale established their own timing****ociations with the express purpose to push for a drag strip in San Fernando Valley. In early 1955, the Sunland-Tujunga Timing****ociation was organized. An umbrella organization called the Valley Timing Federation was established to unite all these independent timing****ociations and the estimated 3,000 hot rodders in San Fernando Valley. They were getting positive press in the newspapers to try to change the public perception of hot rodders as juvenile delinquents.


Bill Quirk, a clean cut fifteen-year-old high school boy, attended North Hollywood High School in the morning and worked part-time in the afternoons for Victress Manufacturing, learning the art of building fiberglass sports cars. This grainy newspaper photo appeared in Valley Times (9/10/53), showing him smoothing a sports car body with a rasp.


This photo was one of the four taken of Bill Quirk in the Valley Times (8/19/54) feature article about hot rodders in San Fernando Valley. The caption stated that Quirk (in driver’s seat) operated the pressure pump while Bob Powell, also of the Luggers, listened for sound coming through the tube.


Powell began racing a GMC Victress at Pomona in 1953-54. He collected several trophies for class wins. On November 21, 1954, he set a class record in A/SP in his GMC Victress Special with a speed of 101.71 mph. This photo of Powell’s Victress appeared in a 1954 Pebble Beach racing program.


Quirk was described in the Valley Times article as just a normal, well-adjusted, “average Valley boy.” Like other hot rodders, he took his date to Bob’s Big Boy hamburger joint in Burbank in his hot rod roadster.


But Quirk was more than an average high school kid. This enterprising lad began working part-time for Victress sports car manufacturing company before he even had a driver’s license. In this photo that appeared in the Valley Times article, Quirk adjusts the carburetor on a $600 fiberglass sports car.


In fact, Quirk became so adept at the trade that, after a few years, he was made foreman of the company. With all the enthusiasm of youth, his dedication and hard work were rewarded. This photo shows Doc Boyce-Smith, the owner/president of Victress, and Quirk (right) demonstrating the process of fiberglass layup at the Victress exhibit at the 1953 Petersen Motorama car show.

Powell also became a part-time employee of Victress when he was 23 years old. Quirk and Powell became production managers at Victress in 1954. Pretty heady accomplishments for a couple of enterprising young men.


Quirk and Powell brought their love of drag racing with them to Victress. This July 1955 issue of Rod & Custom featured a 2-page article about the duo entitled “Assembly Line Dragsters.”


Powell (left) and Quirk (right) were still young men, ages twenty-five and seventeen respectively. They convinced Victress that there was a market for an affordable mass-produced, all-purpose fiberglass dragster body.


Victress was enjoying good success in building mass-produced sports cars, but they gave the boys’ idea some thought. Drag racing was enjoying increasing popularity, especially the dragster class. Why not build a lightweight fiberglass dragster? So, they did. Their universal dragster body would fit nearly any chassis, house nearly any front-mounted engine, and provide for nearly any wheelbase. The resulting 42-pound dragster body could be bought for $250.


It became the first fiberglass bodied dragster offered for sale to the public in the world. It boggles the mind that two young men, one a mere teenager, were behind the whole endeavor. But drag racing was, except for a few exceptions, a young man’s sport. But Quirk was barely wet behind the ears, had barely started shaving, so to speak. And Powell was a relatively young man himself.


The Victress company exhibited the fiberglass dragster at Robert Petersen’s 10-day Motorama national show in October. The boys designed and built the full-size mock-up which was displayed at the show. Although Victress put the car into production, the mock-up was built by the young men on their own time (over 1000 hours mostly spent measuring countless dragsters) and at their own cost.


There was no opening for an engine in the mock-up, but a hatch could easily be cut to fit. The mock-up had a 115-inch wheelbase with frame rails 26 inches apart. The 26-inch frame width was the maximum width, but the wheelbase could be longer or shorter (between 100-118 inches) simply by cutting axle, spring, and radius rod holes where desired.

This color photo shows the principal people involved with the dragster at Victress. From left standing behind the fiberglass mock-up: John Corwin, Doc Boyce-Smith, Bob Powell, and Bill Quirk (with helmet and red shirt). As of this date, no surviving examples of the Victress dragster have been found.


In the March 1956 issue, Car Craft published a special buyer’s guide to fiberglass kit sports car bodies.


Car Craft also published a short special feature on the Victress fiberglass production dragster that had been shown at the company’s exhibit at the ’55 Petersen Motorama. In this CC photo, we can see that the dragster now had everything in place to race. It had an engine, roll bar, slicks, radius rods, tie rod, drag link, and push bar. The fiberglass dragster body was available for purchase from Victress through 1961.


Before all the hoopla about the fiberglass dragster even became publicly known, Bob Powell was killed at Willow Springs Raceway on February 12, 1955. He was driving his 500cc Cooper during a practice session when he skidded on a turn, went off course, and overturned three times. He died while being transported to a hospital. This article in the Los Angeles Times (2/13/55) reported the fatal accident. It was a tragic end for the young man.

Bill Quirk and the employees at Victress were all greatly saddened by his death. “I took a ride with Bob, out in front of Victress and it was one of the wildest rides I ever had,” Quirk said. “Bob was a great guy and his funeral was the first one I ever attended. A sad day and great loss.” Robert Alden “Bob” Powell was only 25 years old when he died. The Rod & Custom article that showed him in a photo with Quirk and their dragster hit newsstands a couple of months after he had died.


Bill Quirk worked for Victress until 1961. In that year, Victress was sold to Les and Joan Dawes of La Dawri Coachcraft. This photo taken in 2015, shows Bill Quirk (left) and Merrill Powell (Victress co-owner) in Nevada City, California. Quirk has lived in Nevada City, an historic old mining town on the western slope of the Sierras, for many years. As of this writing (2025), William Henry “Bill” Quirk is still alive.

 

makes me want to go visit him!

 

Joe and Jerry Mahoney built this fiberglass-bodied gas dragster that took class wins at various California drag strips in the latter half of the 1956 season. At first glance, I thought this might be a Victress dragster fiberglass body. I'm still not entirely sure that it isn't. The Victress dragster bodies were available for purchase at the time this dragster was built. The body shape of the dragster behind the front tire just screams Victress dragster to me.


Photographs of the dragster graced the pages of Drag News three different times. I unfortunately don't have hard copies of the issues, so the photos that I do have all come from the digitized files of Drag News sold by Don Ewald on his We Did It for Love website. The digitized photos are poor at best. The above photo of the Mahoney Brothers dragster appeared in the September 7, 1956 issue. The photo was taken at a 3-day Drag Racers, Inc. race at Lions Drag Strip held on September 1-3. The brothers' dragster was described as "immaculate" in the write-up of the event. The overhead view of the camera offers a look at what the front of the dragster looked like. With this overhead angle, I'm still thinking that the dragster body could be a Victress fiberglass body.

A week later, the brothers won the A Open Gas class at the 2-day Central California State Championships at Madera on September 8-9. They turned 128.57 mph in the win. On October 21, they set a strip record in the Open Gas class at Cotati with 127.07 mph.


The second photo of the dragster was taken at the Grand National Challenge Drags at Bakersfield held on November 3-4. It appeared in the November 16, 1956, issue of Drag News. They beat the Reinhardt Brothers to win the B/D class with a speed of 132.35 mph. The photo is not helpful in trying to determine if the fiberglass body was a Victress.


The last photo taken of the dragster appeared in the November 31, 1956, issue of Drag News. The photo was taken at Vacaville on November 25. They set top time with a speed of 131.60 mph. This front-on view of the dragster body shows the nose. Take a close look at the shape of the darkened cavity of the nose.


This is a photo of the Victress dragster that appeared in the March 1956 issue of Car Craft. Look carefully at the nose of the fiberglass body. Unfortunately there is not a full front-on view of the Victress to make a definitive comparison between the Mahoney dragster and the Victress. What do you think? Did the Mahoney brothers use a Victress fiberglass body? I'm not sure. For me, the jury is still out. At this point I'm thinking that the brothers might have made their own body. A few other racers in the mid-1950s were making their own fiberglass dragster bodies. Howard Stamp did.


This story ends badly. On December 16, 1956, Joe Mahoney was killed at a race at Cotati in his fiberglass bodied dragster. He was only 26 years old.

 

never heard cotati called the 'santa rosa ' strip...

 

The city of Santa Rosa sponsored the drag races on the runway of the Cotati Naval Outer Landing Field. The first race was held on October 7, 1956, conducted by the Redwood Empire Timing****ociation. That was an organization comprised of 38 area car clubs. As you can see by this drag race newspaper ad, the strip was called Santa Rosa Drag Strip in the beginning. This was for a race on December 2, 1956.


The strip continued to be called Santa Rosa Drag Strip in 1957. This newspaper ad was for a race on January 27, 1957. The drag strip didn't operate for part of 1957 and all of 1958.


The strip reopened for racing in 1959 as Cotati Drag Strip. So, it was called Cotati Drag Strip from 1959 until the strip stopped operating in 1972. The site of the former strip began to be developed into a large mobile home park and then into a large commercial retail development. All traces of the former airfield/drag strip were gone by 1993. You can see the outline of the former airfield/drag strip on an aerial view of the site as it appears today on my Drag Strip List website on the Santa Rosa/Cotati entry on the California page. I have pinpointed the exact location of all the old drag strips in California using old aerial photos and USGS topo maps.

 

Tom Indovina, the Throttle Merchants,
and the Construction of San Fernando Raceway
​

The “truth is in the details” has been my mantra in my 40-plus years working professionally in the history field. In this story, I’m going to start with a small, almost inconsequential, tidbit and proceed to a larger, more important facet of drag racing history.

I found this delightful photo of a bare-bones 1956 club-built dragster in Calisphere, the online source that is a gateway to over 100,000 historical photos preserved in historical archives and museums in California. Calisphere was an important resource for me back when I was in the history business, writing and publishing scholarly articles and giving papers at historical conferences. I’m mining it now to look for photographs that I could use to tell stories about drag racing’s past.

This photo was published in the Valley Times, a North Hollywood newspaper, on August 2, 1956. The young man with the helmet was Tom Indovina, an 18-year-old driver of the Throttle Merchants Olds-engined club dragster. Helping push the dragster was Orlanda Munyon, Miss Panorama City. Herb Lightfoot, president of the Panorama City Kiwanis Club was in the driver’s seat. The photo was staged to publicize the kick-off ceremonies for ticket sales for Drag Strip Day that was to be held at San Fernando Raceway on August 26, 1956. The proceeds of that event were going to go to the Kiwanis Club underprivileged children project.


The Throttle Merchants car club had its organizational roots with a group of about four men in the early 1950s in the Tarzana/Encino area. These were guys like Leon Herman, who raced his roadster at Saugus. The garage at Frank Huszar’s ranch was also a magnet for hot rodders who came there to watch and learn how to build race cars from the “Old Man.” From that circle of guys, the Throttle Merchants car club was born.

I have a lifetime membership in Don Ewald’s fabulous We Did It for Love website. That gives me access to over 19,000 drag racing photos. I found this photo on the WDIFL website. Everyone in the photo were members of the Throttle Merchants. The 1954 photo was contributed by George Bolthoff. “This is a picture of my first dragster,” Bolthoff wrote on the photo’s caption. “The guy standing in the middle is Frank ‘The Old Man’ Huszar of later Race Car Specialties fame. That’s me [George Bolthoff] standing on the right (I don’t remember ever being that young!!). Standing on the left is Fred Chavez and Earl Gerrard is in the driver’s seat. We were all members of the Throttle Merchants, a car club in the San Fernando Valley. I built the car from parts taken from Fred’s junk yard (you thought this was a fuller car?) and Frank supplied the engine. This picture was taken in 1954 at Saugus. Earl is holding the check ($18.75) for winning TE. The car was run only a few times, then returned to the junk yard.”


In November 1954, Earl Gerrard, a member of the Throttle Merchants, was elected president of the Central Valley Timing****ociation. That was one of the timing****ociations organized at this time to fulfill a prerequisite by the mayor of Los Angeles to get government support behind the building of a drag strip. Three other local timing****ociations, in addition to the CVTA, became part of the overarching Valley Timing Federation.


Drag strips don't just magically appear to delight the fancy of hot rodders. It takes money and men to build and run them. The San Fernando Airport Development Company had the land and the money to build the drag strip. This photo was published in the May 27, 1955, issue of the Valley Times. The drag strip benefactors and financiers in the photo are from left: William Hannon, Fritz Burns, and Charles Dunn. These men put up the money, about $70,000, to build the strip. As owners, they would also pay all the operating costs and reap the benefits if it was profitable. Burns, a realtor and developer, was the chief officer and major stockholder of the firm. Hannon was the manager of the Airport Development Company. Dunn, a realtor, was a co-owner of the Airport Development Company. In the photo, they are looking over the plans at the site of the strip. Behind them, the grading had started for the strip.


In 1955, Frank Huszar was the president of the Throttle Merchants. Huszar had been instrumental in the drive to set up the Valley Timing Federation and played an active role in getting a drag strip built in San Fernando. In July, he was chosen to be the manager of the new San Fernando Raceway drag strip. Soft-spoken and widely respected, he was the unanimous choice of the Valley Timing****ociation’s board of representatives to be the strip’s manager.


This photo appeared in the Van Nuys News a week before the strip was to have a dress rehearsal opening. Frank Huszar (left) led Don Brown (center) and Bob Brenner (right) on a tour of the strip’s grounds to show them its progress. Final grading and paving were still waiting to be done, so Frank Huszar’s****urance that the strip would be ready for the dress rehearsal was met by doubtful amazement by the two men. Brown was the vice-president and Brenner was the president of the Valley Timing Federation.


The dress rehearsal was held according to plan on August 7, 1955. One week later, the grand opening of the strip was held on August 14. The track had been fenced and they had a paved pit area. They drew 2,000 spectators to the grand opener. In this grainy aerial newspaper photo, I have added identifying place labels. The photo was taken of the strip during an event held in its first month of operation. The photo was published in the North Hollywood Valley Times (8/25/55).


This color photo looks to have been taken in the early years of the strip’s operation, possibly even in its very first year. When the strip first opened, it had 3,200 feet of paved straightway with an additional shutdown area that was graded and oiled. The shutoff area made a gentle turn and ran under a bridge that Foothill Boulevard ran over. You can see that bridge in the distance in the photo. That was a dangerous place for speeding cars as they tried to slow down and a few racers lost their lives at that pinch point. The two race cars seen in the photo are entering the turn at the end of the paved return road that led into the paved pit area, out of the photo to the right. The small grandstand is also out of the photo to the right. The front row of spectator parking allowed people to sit in their cars and watch the races. You can see a few houses in the distance to the west of the strip. Persistent complaints about the noise from the strip caused strip operators to shorten the hours of competition.


Dave Wallace, Jr., the longtime writer with Hot Rod, has been interested in my drag racing history websites. About five years ago, he sent me a bunch of photos that he took of the remnant of what once was San Fernando Raceway. I uploaded them to the Memories (California) page on my Drag Strip List website. He had been doing some research on the drag strip for a story he was writing about the closing of the strip. In his estimation, the closing of the strip had little or nothing to do with the persistent noise complaints. "The sudden closure had nothing to do with noise, rather, builders of nearby I-210 made a deal with owners Fritz Burns and Bill Hannon to dump excavated soil onto the sloping site and level it--instantly doubling the property value."

The above aerial view shows where San Fernando Raceway used to be on today’s landscape. It is one of the old strips whose location I have pinpointed using old aerial photos and USGS topo maps. It is taken from the San Fernando Raceway entry on the California page of my Drag Strip List website. I’m working my way through all the states in pinpointing the location of old strips. As of this date (2025), I’ve completed that research for the old, long-gone drag strips in over half of the states.


I started this story with a photo and story about Tom Indovina, the teenager who brought the Throttle Merchants’ fuel dragster for a publicity shoot to kick off ticket sales for the Kiwanis Club’s charity race to benefit underprivileged children. Amazingly, Indovina took top eliminator at that race held on August 26, 1956. In the top eliminator finals, he was the odds-on underdog against Tom Augar’s big Vincent fuel bike. But halfway down the track, Augar ran out of fuel and Indovina took the win with a speed of 120.32 mph.

This photo appeared in the August 27 issue of the Valley Times. The young lad from Encino accepts the trophy for top eliminator. Bob Aiton (left), district governor of Kiwanis presents the award with help of Orlanda Munyon, Miss Panorama City. Herb Lightfoot (second from left) presents a trophy to Jerry Firestone (wearing dark sport shirt), the winner of Panorama City Kiwanis interclub competition. Miss Munyon is being a good sport about it all. The body-less dragster must not have been very comfortable to sit on.


Tom Indovina continued drag racing and participating in Throttle Merchant activities for at least another year. He had an Olds-engined fuel roadster that he raced at San Fernando. In that car, he got the second fastest time of the meet and won his class with 131.19 mph on February 27, 1957, at San Fernando.

But as Tom grew older, he started thinking about what he wanted to do in life. His father was an attorney and Tom decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. He went to college, then to law school.

While he was still in school, he took up drag boat racing. “I’d been racing drag boats since 1964 and was a member of National Drag Boat****ociation since ’67,” said Tom. While in the process of finishing law school in 1969, he raced a Sanger-built boat that was powered by a 427-inch Chevy engine. The boat was fittingly named “Barrister” and competed in the 85-90 mph class.


After finishing law school and passing the California Bar, he joined his father’s law office. He still raced drag boats and, in 1971, the NDBA asked him to act as their legal advisor. “Thereafter I became very involved with the operations of the corporation. I ran for the board of directors and was elected. And when the chairmanship was vacated, I was elected to that.” That was in 1974. He was made chairman of the board of directors of the NDBA. He was 35 years old.

He continued racing drag boats while serving in an administrative role with the NDBA. Only the boats were much faster than his old Sanger. “I started with an 80-mile-per-hour boat. And I’ve driven faster than 180 mph now,” said Tom in 1974. The above photo shows Tom driving Del Masino’s “Playmate” blown gas hydro.


In 1976, he clocked 157.35 mph on February 22 at Turlock in Masino’s “Playmate” drag boat. As late as 1985, he served as legal counsel for NDBA. He died in 2003 at age 65.

 

Dennis Stiles, His Sparkling Roadster,
and the Cops Who Helped Start the Pomona Drag Strip​

I’m still delving into the massive collection of great photos in Calisphere for drag racing photos that I can use in stories about early-day drag racers for this thread. I found this photo on Calisphere.

My wife, who is blind, gets a kick out of the fact that the H.A.M.B. website is comprised of “threads.” She can’t read or see these threads (or much of anything) anymore, but she likes me to read the stories (she calls them “sewing threads”) that I have been writing, to her. She****erts that I could write an interesting story about almost anybody who ever raced a car on a drag strip. Well, I doubt that. But it’s nice to hear that my stories give her pleasure. We’ve been married for 56 years. She used to see well enough that she drove (even raced the family car on a drag strip) and was the track photographer for a couple of years when I was working as tech man at Bonneville Raceway drag strip in Salt Lake City in the 1970s-80s. But sadly, her world is now dark.



This ’70 Buick Skylark was the car that she hot rodded back in the day when she could still see. We were a hot-rodding family. In the garage you can see our tricked-out ’95 Camaro Z28 and under the car cover is our ’67 Malibu that she and I restored together. Parked behind them is the yellow 2002 Corvette Z06 owned by our son, Will. We really needed a four-car garage.


As I have written before, I get easily sidetracked. It doesn’t take much. Old geezers are prone to that.

This is the photo of Dennis Stiles’s roadster that was published in the North Hollywood Valley Times newspaper on September 14, 1954. The caption under the photo was****led “Engine Sparkles.” In the actual photo that I found in Calisphere, the whole car sparkles. The actual photo is so much better than the photo that I found in the newspaper, even though I did everything I could to enhance it digitally. This is why I’m still combing Calisphere for photos and story ideas. The quality of a photographer’s actual photo is so much better than a newspaper photo, especially a 1950s newspaper photo. There is no comparison.

The photo was taken at Pomona Drag Strip. The Pomona police officer talking with Stiles is Ron Root.


Ron Root was a hot rodder. This photo, published in the September 15, 1954, issue of the Valley Times, shows him at the wheel of his hot rod when he was off duty. Conversing with him are fellow Pomona police officers George Walters and Clark Peters.


The Pomona Police Department gave its full support to the establishment of the Pomona Drag Strip in 1951-52. Chief among the supporters was officer Eldo J. “Bud”*****s. The story of*****s and the role he took in helping start the Pomona Drag Strip is beautifully written in an article in Hemmings.com by David Traver Adolphus. Briefly told,*****s was hired by the Pomona Police Department in 1949. Police chief Ralph Parker appointed*****s to find some way to curb the street racing that was causing so many fatalities. In 1951,*****s persuaded the Pomona Choppers car club to listen to his offer. The police department would loan the Choppers money to establish a paved drag strip on the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds parking lot so that they could safely race. It sounded like a great deal. The car club went for it.

Coons left the police department in 1954 to work full time for NHRA as their new executive manager. His role with the NHRA was like the work he had done as a police officer—to promote and develop organized drag racing. In this photo, taken December 11, 1954,*****s (far right) is seen handing a petition to some city officials in Los Angeles City Hall. The petition advocated that drag strips be established in Los Angeles. The seated official holding the petition is Councilman Everett Burkhalter. Seated next to him is Sally Smalley, the public relations chairperson of the Co-ordinating Council Federation. Standing from left are City Councilmen Gordon Hahn, Ernest Debs, and Don A. Allen. They were the first ones to sign the petition for*****s.


The Choppers established the Pomona Valley Timing****ociation, and with help from the Pomona Police Department and the Lions Club, began holding races at that historic venue—Pomona Drag Strip. That is where I saw my first drag race—a wet-behind-the-ears teenager—in 1959.


A thousand hot rodders gathered at a rally in Burbank on October 19, 1954, to voice their support for building a drag strip in San Fernando Valley. One of the highlights of the rally was the appearance of Wally Parks, president of the NHRA. He presented a plaque to Pomona’s police chief, Ralph E. Parker (left) for his “outstanding contribution to the recognition and advancement of organized hot rod activities.” Parker, who spoke at the rally, was instrumental in the establishment of the Pomona Drag Strip. Parker credited Pomona Drag Strip with making streets safer in Pomona Valley. His remarks brought cheers from the hot rodders.

I’m aware that these stories and photos of guys in suits and ties don’t make the most stimulating reading on a website focused on hot rods and drag racing. But the fact is, were it not for the guys in suits and ties who paid out the money and the officials who backed the building of the drag strips, there would be no Pomona Drag Strip. There would be no San Fernando Raceway, Lions Drag Strip, Santa Ana, Fontana, or any other of our storied old drag racing strips. Their part in the history of drag racing doesn’t come with all the pizzazz and glitz that accompanies drag racers and their cars, but they need to be given their due.


Dennis Stiles, the hot rodder whose roadster I showed when I started this story, was born in 1934. He graduated from a high school in Alhambra in 1952. This is his senior high yearbook photo.


Before joining the Army in 1958, he won class trophies with his roadster at Pomona in 1954 and 1955. He ran in the B/R class with his Ford roadster. He set a strip record in the B/R class at Pomona on January 23, 1955, with a speed of 97.40 mph. He was living in Monterrey Park at the time. In the 1970s, he was working for Southern California Edison and living in Santa Barbara. Presently he lives in Tucson, Arizona. I would imagine he would be very surprised to read this story.

 

well,i was just like your bride for a few minutes- i couldn't read it for the tears in my eyes--as always--WONDERFUL stories!!

 

Belmont “Beach Ball” SanChez:
A Guy Who “Lives, Eats, and Sleeps Hot Rods”
—and Had the Loot to Build Them​

In 1953, Belmont Joseph SanChez, Jr., brought a 1931 Austin-Bantam to the Bonneville Salt Flats for Speed Week. It was top-notch in every respect, engineered to run fast and safe. It appeared briefly at the start of a newsreel that was shown in movie theaters across the country. In its brief appearance in the newsreel, young Belmont, only 20 years old, is seen with half a dozen crew members, sporting a Ramar of the Jungle helmet. I have circled him in this still frame from the newsreel but click on the link to view the newsreel clip. It’s short and, possibly, the first image that I found of SanChez’s Bantam salt flats hot rod.


“Ramar of the Jungle” was a TV series that I used to watch circa 1952-54. Ramar was a doctor, working in the jungles of Africa and India. He wore a nifty helmet, which kids like me got so that we could look cool like Ramar. Young kids of all ages are impressionable. For kids in the 1950s, TV shows took us into another world—a world beyond our neighborhoods. I freely admit that I also got a Daniel Boone*****skin fur hat (with a snap-on tail) and Mouseketeer hat (it came with membership in the Mickey Mouse Club).


I see at least three guys in this photo of the Speed Week staging lanes at Bonneville in 1953 who are wearing jungle helmets. They were somewhat practical for shading your head. Young Belmont wore one, as did at least two of his crewmen.


In the many years that I went to Speed Week, I wore a bit more practical headgear to shield my melon and neck from the sun and glare of the salt. I called it the Sheik of Araby look—handkerchief under hat and home-made cardboard inserts on the arms of my dark glasses (made from Häagen-Dazs ice cream box card stock). How cool is that! But, once again, I’ve veered way off the topic.


In the March 1954 issue of Hot Rod, Belmont’s Bonneville Bantam coupe was featured in an article entitled “Cheesecake Chassis.” The article, written by Bob Greene, described SanChez (pronounced Sanchey) as “short, round and jovial [who] lives, eats and sleeps hot rods, almost to the point of his undoing.” He could do that because his father was filthy rich.


His father, Belmont Joseph “Monty” SanChez, Sr., became a self-made millionaire by age 21. He owned car dealerships all over the country. He was a multi-millionaire many times over. Young Belmont was sent to private schools in the Hollywood area-- Black-Foxe Military Institute and Harvard Military School.

While he was still in high school, his mother, Helen, divorced his father. She received a handsome settlement and alimony. She was a socialite of the first order, partying to beat the band and getting mentioned with regularity in newspaper society pages.


After high school, young Belmont went to Santa Monica City College. This is his portrait that appeared in the 1953 yearbook.

He started hot rodding and drag racing before he left college. At some point, he picked up the nickname “Beach Ball.” He was one of those people who never missed a meal. I’m going out on a limb here, but I think he probably liked his nickname. Hot rod guys back in the ‘50s were mostly blue-collar guys, working in service stations, car dealerships, speed shops, and in the trades. I’m guessing here, but I would bet that if some rich kid showed up at the dry lakes and drag strips with some fancy car, he wouldn’t be very well accepted. But with a self-deprecating nickname like “Beach Ball,” that might go a long way toward gaining a measure of inclusion in the racing fraternity. One time a Drag News reporter remarked that it was obvious that Beach Ball had some serious coin in building one of his race cars. “Hell,” said Beach Ball, “that isn’t my fault.” He didn’t want to be known as a rich kid. He wanted to be one of the guys. But he used his wealth to build and run a couple of fine race cars.


This photo in the 1953 Hot Rod issue shows how, even though just 20 years old, Beach Ball was beginning to fill out his short frame. It also shows that he was more of an overseer of a car-building project than a hands-on guy. Chuck Calvin is showing him the multiple engine mount feature that he built on the frame. It allowed the car to run any one of four different engines—Chrysler, Ford, Studebaker, or Oldsmobile—without making any modifications in quick-change fashion. So, if Beach Ball wanted to change out a Studebaker motor for a Chrysler, he could do it easily and fast. The center crossmember, a quarter-inch thick aluminum plate, was drilled to take each bell housing of the four different engines. Then, he would fit an adapter ring onto the transmission main drive pilot shaft before bolting the rear of the engine to the plate. Ingenious. Heck, maybe even Beach Ball could do it. Eric Rickman took all the photos for the article.


This photo shows the beautifully crafted framework done by Chuck Calvin. The article subtitle said it was “a shame to put a body” on the car. I’m also guessing that the article****le, “Cheesecake Chassis,” was a 1950s way of saying that the frame was****y. Words like “sexy” and “pregnant” were just not used at that time in polite company. Hard to believe, but the 1950s were “Leave It to Beaver” times.


Beach Ball’s partner, Chuck Porter, did the body work on the Class D coupe. They picked up the ’31 Bantam body for $20. Then Porter stretched and chopped it, giving the front of the body a drooped snout look. Construction took eighteen months at an estimated cost of $5500. Big money back then. When Racer Brown drove it on the salt for the first time, they ran a 371-inch Olds motor in it on alcohol. Timm’s Precision Engines of Pasadena built the motor.


The results of Speed Week printed in the November 1953 issue of Hop Up showed that the Bantam came in a weak second to Don Bishop in the D Competition Coupe class with 152 mph. They returned home and started tinkering.


They took it to Santa Ana and Pomona for testing, turning a best of 130 mph in the quarter. This photo shows the car at Pomona when it was Chrysler powered and painted purple and yellow. A similar color scheme appeared on the car when it was exhibited at Robert Peterson’s Motorama at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in October 1953. A photo of the car (minus the racing number) at the Motorama was published in the February 1954 issue of Car Craft (p. 20).


In 1954, J. R. Eyerman, a Life magazine photographer, visited the Bonneville Salt Flats during Speed Week and took dozens of Kodachrome photos of the cars. One of the photos that he took was of this 1953 Studebaker Commander. I have searched high and low to see if Beach Ball took his Bantam to Speed Week in 1954 without success.


I did find this photo of the Bantam on the salt, but it didn’t have any accompanying metadata, like date taken, etc. Was this taken during the 1954 Speed Trials? Or did he possibly take two cars to Speed Week—one to race (the Stude) and the other to show to other racers for possible sale? Notice that there isn’t a spot of salt crust on the Bantam. Did he tow it there to interest racers in buying it? Was he just racing the ’53 Stude, the car that he plucked off his father’s car lot?


I know that by at least September 1955 or before, he had sold the Bantam to Art and Henry Koopman of Whittier. This is a photo of the car when it was owned by the Koopman brothers. They had a short learning curve when they first began racing the car with a Dodge engine in the B fuel competition coupe class. But by the end of 1955, they were really humming. They set a new strip class record at Lions on December 11 with a speed of 128.57 mph.

I know that Beach Ball was racing a ’53 Studebaker at drag strips at least as early as mid-April 1955. He set a strip record at Santa Ana on April 17, 1955, with a speed of 86.25 with a Studebaker in the C/S class with an automatic. So many questions, and no definitive answer. Admittedly, I’m doing a lot of supposing and guessing here.

So, was the Studebaker that Eyerman photographed at the Bonneville Speed Trials a Stude entered by Beach Ball? Most people credit SanChez as being the person who influenced Bonneville racers to turn to the Studebaker for a Salt Flats race car. Of course, this didn’t happen for a few years, as SanChez inched his way up closer to 200 mph. But other racers began to take notice as he turned 166 in 1955, then 185 in 1956. Then his Stude turned the racing world on its head in 1958 when it became the first door slammer to top 200 mph. “This is the car that started the Studebaker revolution on the salt,” hot rod historian Dean Lowe wrote. Let’s look at the progression of that car on its way to achieving stock production body automobile history.


This is what the post coupe Stude looked like in 1955. A lot of drag racing history buffs make a big deal about the car sporting the number 400 during its various iterations. Not so. It started out as number 157, with an Ardun-Merc motor, sponsored by Lakewood Muffler. He ran it at Saugus and Russetta Dry Lake prior to taking it to Bonneville. At Saugus, Karl Malwald drove it to snag the Late Fendered Fuel track record on August 20, 1955. Beach Ball partnered with Clark Cagle and Carl LeMmon when he raced at Bonneville. They raced in two classes, driver Clark Cagle setting records in B Coupe with 152.935 and C Coupe with 155.458 mph.


There are a couple of things to take note of in this photo. You can’t miss the first, which is the backside of Beach Ball. No doubt, he got his nickname by 1955. The other thing to notice is the duct-taped fender headlight form that he employed to change from a competition class to a stock-body class. Pretty crafty.


Hot Rod, March 1956, featured the car in an article entitled “Slippery Stude.” One of the photos in the article showed Carl LeMmon sequestered in the driver’s seat in its far-back location.


Before leaving 1955, there is a post-script that I should mention as it is an important first in drag racing history. On November 13, 1955, San Fernando hosted drag racing’s first live national network TV broadcast. Although the ’53 Stude didn’t appear on the 4-minute-long live NBC broadcast, it was at the track that day. This program should not be confused with the later “Wide World of Sports” TV program. They are two totally different shows. Clark Cagle drove the Stude to a class win in the Fendered Fuel Coupe class with 115.90 mph.


The SanChez-Cagle-LeMmon partnership persisted through 1956-57. In addition to racing the Stude at Bonneville, they ran at Lions, El Mirage, Bakersfield, and Saugus. The only real change was they swapped out the Ardun-Merc in about mid-1956 for a Chrysler Hemi prepared by Cagle. At the Salt Flats speed trials in 1956, Cagle pushed the Stude to a D Fuel Coupe class record of 185.18 mph. The 200-mph door for them was two years away, but they were getting close. The next year at Bonneville, they set a C Fuel Coupe class record with 175.696 and turned 180.45 mph in qualifying in the D Fuel Coupe class. Beach Ball would make some changes for 1958 that would make all the difference. In short, he would make some personnel changes, infuse some new blood into his quest to crack the 200 mark. It was just too dang close. He could smell it, and he was itching to open that door.


This is the brain trust that Beach Ball put together to take his ’53 Stude into the record books in 1958 as the first production body door slammer to go over 200 mph. Beach Ball is all smiles on the right. That looks like a paunchy Jim Kamboor in the middle. They were supported and sponsored by Lou Senter’s Ansen Automotive Engineering firm.


This is an interesting photo of the record-breaking car. The rollbar is the same one that the car had in it in 1955. But Beach Ball went crazy with louvers—all over the trunk lid and behind the rear wheels.

Powered by a 448-inch Chrysler Hemi, they put a hefty load of nitro in the tank to qualify first in the D Coupe and Sedan class with mind-blowing 210.40 mph. They not only knocked on the 200 mph door, but they also absolutely busted through it to become the first door slammer over that barrier. They followed that up with two runs on alcohol at 184.474 mph to******* the class record.


In 1959, Joe Locasto from Garden Grove, joined Kamboor and SanChez as their driver. He wasn’t Beach Ball’s only driver for different cars that he raced in the 1960s, but he was his main go-to driver. In ’59, Locasto drove the Stude to Speed Week class records in B Competition (217 mph) and B Coupe (204 mph). In 1960, when they added a front-mounted blower to the injected Chrysler Hemi, that advanced them one class. Locasto blasted by the old A Comp mark of 201 mph by a whopping 19 mph—turning 220 mph.


At some point after 1960, Neils Thompson joined SanChez and Pat Akins in the Slippery Stude car as a part-owner. Thompson built his own Studebaker car to race at Bonneville in 1965. People often mistakenly think that Thompson’s ’65-built Stude, which came up for auction in 2024, was the same car that the trio raced in the early 1960s. They were both yellow and looked similar, but according to land-speed engine builder Les Leggitt, that’s not the case. “Neil built his car in 1965,” Leggitt attested. Leggitt would know because he built an engine for Thompson to run at Bonneville in 1966 and was intimately familiar with the car’s past.


Cigar-smoking Pat Akins had his fingers in a lot of pies. When it ran at Bonneville in 1960, he was partners with Thompson and SanChez in the record-breaking ’53 Studebaker. In early 1960, Akins had bought a blown Chrysler A/FD from Chuck Gireth. This is a photo of that dragster back when Gireth campaigned it. Gireth is in the middle of the photo, wearing a white Isky T-shirt. The photo was taken at Riverside in May 1959.

After Akins bought the fueler, he hired Jack Chrisman to drive and got Howard Cams as a major sponsor. The car really started to turn some heads when it clocked 190.27 mph at Henderson Dragway in Nevada on April 10. This speed got them national record recognition and the number 4 position on the Drag News Mr. Eliminator Record List. In May, the Akins-Chrisman-Howard team began a month-long East Coast tour at Sanford, Maine on May 22. Their next stop was Roanoke, Virginia, where Chrisman set a new national A/FD record of 8.11 at 195.65 mph. On July 17, they lost their number 4 Mr. Eliminator position to Bob Haines in the California Equipment A/FD at Puyallup Raceway. This dropped them down to the number 6 position. Before September, Akins had gotten a new partner—Dave Duffy.


In the short space of seven days, Akins-Duffy built a new blown Chrysler fuel dragster that they debuted at Fontana on October 8, 1960. Lefty Mudersbach was hired to drive it in the beginning. On its second week out, Akins-Duffy snagged top eliminator at Colton. Despite being plagued by a faulty fuel pump drive, Mudersbach drove the dragster to a top fuel eliminator win at Fontana on October 22. Lucky Harris began driving the A/FD in November, taking top fuel eliminator at Pomona on November 13. The dragster also started showing its potential with a speed of 174.91 mph.


But after the Pomona race, Akins and Duffy got a new partner—Belmont “Beach Ball” SanChez. No pun intended, but from this point on, the ball really started rolling. With the infusion of coin from SanChez and sponsorship from Herbert Cams, the car started doing very well right off the bat. Running in B/FD, the Akins-Duffy-SanChez 392-inch ’57 Chrysler turned 175.43 mph with ETs of 8.73 and 8.76, back-to-back, at Henderson Dragway in Nevada, on November 20, 1960. Those times were better than Gary Cagle’s national ET record. Unfortunately, mechanical problems kept them from backing up the record at Pomona the following week. In mid-December, Joe Locasto took over the driving duties from Lucky Harris. In the photo, you can see that the major sponsor of the car was EELCO, a racing parts company. They began sponsoring the fueler in January 1961. This photo was taken at Fontana in 1961.


With Joe Locasto at the wheel, the Akins-Duffy-SanChez-EELCO Shift Fast Special ripped off a mind-blowing number at Kingdon on the 2-day race at Kingdon on March 19-20, 1961. In addition to Akins, Locosto, and SanChez, members of the crew at Kingdon that day included John Jenney and Mike Bartlett. Their 8.90 and 185 numbers were way under Gary Cagle’s national record marks for B/FD.


In about 1963, Akins and SanChez built another dragster powered by a blown Chrysler Hemi. They ran it through at least 1965. This photo shows it in 1965 at Pomona when it was called the Akins-Adair-SanChez AAA Engineering Special. There are a couple things to note. First, the slimmed-down guy on the right is SanChez. He’s no longer the rotund, roly-poly guy that people called “Beach Ball.” He wanted to drive it, but in order to do so, he had to lose some weight. As you can see, he did—and drove it. It was beautiful, painted purple with silver highlights. The guy standing in the middle is Pat Akins.


The second thing to look at is the header configuration. Never before and never after has anyone ever built dragster headers like this. It was a combination of zoomies and tire cleaners. The experiment was short-lived. By the end of 1965, they employed conventional upswept zoomie headers.

I don’t think SanChez raced after 1965, but Pat Akins and Roger Hardcastle built a funny car in 1966. SanChez died in 2004 at age 70.

 

Great history and a trip down memory lane. Thanks for the stories and photos, timeless for all enthusiasts.

 

I just stumbled on a photo of a fiberglass bodied dragster that was exhibited in the Victress booth at the 1953 Motorama show. The owner of the dragster was Stan Weisbard from Van Nuys.


The photo of the Weisbard dragster was published in an article about Robert Peterson's October 1953 Motorma show in the February 1954 issue of Car Craft.


That 1953 Motorama was held in the Pan Pacific Auditorium, a building that was located in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles just north of the La Brea tar pits park. The distinctive architectural style was called Streamline Moderne. The building was unfortunately destroyed in a fire in 1989.


This is a clearer photo Victress fiberglass body of the Weisbard dragster.


In 1954, Stan Weisbard exhibited his dragster at a car show held at the National Guard Armory in Exposition Park. A press photographer from the Los Angeles Examiner took this photo at the press day prior to the event's opening. The young ladies adorning the car were a couple of Hollywood B actresses. On the left is Vivian Mason (The Lost Planet) and Ina Anders (48 Hours to Live) is sitting on the front wheel.


The Armory Building in Exposition Park was just a stone's throw from the campus of USC.


The Weisbard dragster graced the cover of the Hot Rod 1957 Annual. Strangely, the car wasn't featured in any of the articles inside the magazine, but there was a descriptive note about the cover. It read: "The exceptionally immaculate modified 'B' Ford Dragster shown on the cover is owned by Stan Weisbard of Van Nuys, California, and was photographed by Bob D'Olivo. Gleaming power plant has Cragar head, two Winfield model S carburetors with George Wight manifold, high dome pop-up pistons and split pipes. Transfer tube cooling system eliminated the use of a radiator. Special fiberglass body by Victress."

The car ended up in the Harrah Automobile Collection and was sold at an auction of many of their cars in 1984.

 

Owen Bowling: Old School Master Cam Grinder​

Owen Bowling finished building his blown Plymouth A/Open Gas dragster in time to compete at the second NHRA U.S. Nationals being held Kansas City Timing****ociation Drag Strip in Missouri. He set out with his mother, Orbin Bowling, from San Gabriel, to tow the dragster over 1,600 miles. Owen, age 27, lived with his mother. She was a big help in her son’s racing ventures. It was all big fun. They were hauling the dragster to Missouri on a trailer when a wheel came off the trailer. By the time they got the wheel back on the trailer, they knew they would arrive after the noon deadline to compete in the races. Nonetheless, they continued driving on so they could watch the races and hopefully be permitted to try out the new race car. This photo was published in the Kansas City Star (9/3/56) recounting the story of their bad luck.


Officials let Owen make a few runs in his race car. In some movie footage taken during the race, Owen is seen being pushed through the pit area at the wheel of his yellow dragster. He appears in the film for a couple of seconds, smiling for the camera. We don’t see his mom in the movie, but she is undoubtedly driving the push car. If you click on this link to the movie, Owen appears at the 5:21 mark.


Owen began racing at Pomona—and winning trophies occasionally—in his ’29 Ford roadster. He was joined by other members of his car club, the Road Rebels, at the races. Owen was the club secretary. The engine in Owen’s roadster was a 365-inch ’52 Chrysler sporting four Stromberg 97s. The roll bar was fashioned from 2-inch water pipe. He spent $1,800 and two years of labor in building the roadster. This photo appeared in the Los Angeles Mirror (11/15/55) in an article about the emerging popularity of hot rodding.


Drag News (5/13/55) featured Owen’s roadster in a 2-page feature article. It mentioned that the car had recently turned 111 mph. It turned that at Santa Ana when it ran 111.11 mph on May 1. Just prior to that, it set track records at Pomona on April 10 (106.13 mph) and April 24 (110.00 mph).


After that, Owen made the rounds of So Cal strips like Colton, Santa Ana, Paradise Mesa, and Pomona, setting new strip records three different times. With this kind of success, he thought he might try his luck at the first NHRA U.S. Nationals at Great Bend, Kansas.


Unlike the misfortune that happened to him en route to the ’56 Nationals, he towed his roadster back to Kansas without incident. This photo shows the staging lanes looking down track toward the starting line and end of the track. The timing tower is just to the right of the starting line.


Owen wasn’t the only member of the Road Rebels car club who raced at the ’55 Nationals. He had the company of some other club members at the race.


Owen is kneeling (left) with his back to the camera, working on something on the front end of his car. The sign affixed to the roll bar reads “Go, Man, Go!”


This photo shows some of the winners at the ’56 Nationals. I’m thinking that these men are the ones who set new national records. The papers that they are holding look like certificates that were often awarded to national record holders. If Owen is in this photo, he would have been one of the older men. He was 26 years old. The best photo that I have of Owen is on the 8mm movie taken at the ’56 Nationals. I have looked at that film repeatedly to see if I could use it to make a guess at who Owen might be in this black-and-white photo. My best guess is that he is on the back row, second from the left. But that is just a guess. He set a new national record of 111.11 mph in the A/SR class.


The larger number of men in this photo, I believe, are the class and elimination winners. Their trophies are on a table behind them. I have circled the man on the back row, to the right of the trophy queen, who I think may be Owen. Again, this is just a guess. He won the A/SR class.

After the Nationals, Owen returned home, filled with confidence and satisfaction. He had raced at a national event and returned home with a class winner trophy and new national record to his credit.

He picked up where he had left off at So Cal strips, winning trophies and setting more strip records. At Colton, he set a new strip record at a 2-day meet on October 15-16 (113.20 mph). He went to the Arizona State Championship at Perryville and set a new national record of 115.26 mph on November 20, 1955.


Owen campaigned his funky-looking blown Plymouth A/Open Gas dragster through the remainder of the 1956 season after his brief outing at the Kansas City Nationals.

The 1956 NHRA rules stated that the Open Gas class must run service station pump gasoline. It was a special class for gas-powered cars that didn’t seem to fit in the other classes. The 1950s was a time of a lot of experimentation and some cars didn’t seem to exactly look like they belonged in any certain class or didn’t meet all the requirements for other classes. They were just kind of an odd bunch of orphans that needed a home. That’s what the Open Gas class seemed to do, to provide a home for the oddball cars. And Owen’s car had that oddball look. It was a dragster, but with a funky front nose.

San Gabriel Valley Drag Strip (Old San Gabe) opened in 1956. San Gabriel was where Owen lived, so he had a strip in his hometown. After six top eliminator victories in just over two months, Drag News (11/16/56) declared that Owen “reigned over the San Gabriel Top Eliminator races with an iron hand and heavy foot.” He just stormed through the competition, beating such racers as Tony Nancy, Bob Armstrong, and Fred Waterworth.

I didn’t find a shred of evidence that he raced in 1957. That’s not to say that he didn’t, but I just couldn’t find anything about him racing in ’57. The explanation may lie in something that happened in his personal life. He fell in love. The young lady’s name was Mary Otto. Did I say she was young? Owen was 28 years old. Mary was 18. Ten year’s age difference. They got married in 1957. The marriage didn’t last. They got divorced. In 1960, Owen remarried. Matilda’s age was at the other end of the spectrum. She was fourteen years older than Owen. That marriage didn’t last either. Owen was, as they say, unlucky in love.


Owen got back into drag racing in 1958. He built a low budget gas dragster. It was hardly a thing of beauty. Far from it. But it was a goer, so much so, that he towed the ugly duckling A/GD back to Oklahoma City for the NHRA U.S. Nationals. The entry list stated that the Transmission Specialists Special, number 272, was powered by a ’51 Chrysler engine. The absence of chrome was a distinguishing feature. Owen didn’t build his dragster for looks. He built it to run. But so did many others. The competition was too stiff for Owen. In this photo, in the staging lane behind Owen is Art Arfons’ Green Monster dragster. Arfons set a new national A/D record with a speed of 156.25 mph. Owen was simply outclassed. His days of being a hot dog on the national stage were in the rearview mirror.

But he could still make a dent in local SoCal races. He took gas top eliminator honors at Colton on November 30, 1958, with 11.64 at 133.33 mph. Three weeks later, he took three trophies at San Gabriel Dragway on December 21. He snagged the A/D class win, top eliminator, low ET (10.63) and top time (133.33 mph). But that seems to have been just about his last hurrah. I didn’t find him mentioned in the press anymore.


But he kept his foot in the drag racing business—by starting a business. He called it Owen’s Orbit Cams. He joined a bevy of cam grinders doing business in Southern California. And there were many—Weber, Potvin, Howard, Herbert, Mooneyes, Isky, Engle, Crane, Clay Smith, Crower, and Schneider. Owen was a small bit player in a crowded field.


This is a job tag for a cam that a customer wanted Owen to grind. The customer thought it dated back to about 1965. The tag gives the address for Owen’s Camshaft Service at 10215 South San Pedro Street in Los Angeles.


There is still an automotive repair shop located in that old building at 10215 South San Pedro in South Central Los Angeles. That building is an historic site in hot rod history in Southern California.


Tony Capanna, seen here (wearing red shirt) on the cover of the November 1953 issue of Hot Rod, had his place of business in the building later occupied by Owen Bowling. Capanna co-founded Wilcap Automotive along with Red Wilson in 1947. Wilcap was one of the earliest operating businesses serving hot rodders. They ran their business out of the building at 10215 South Pedro, located midway between Inglewood and South Gate. It was a mecca for drag racers, hot rodders, and speed merchants.


Wilcap manufactured speed equipment parts, like engine-to-transmission adapters, and racing fuels. Capanna, who some called the “Nitro King,” is credited with being a pioneer in the use of nitromethane.


Tony Capanna left the South San Pedro building in 1958 to relocate to Torrance where he built Hot Rod City.

This is second hand, but there was a guy who used to hang out at Owen’s shop. He said, “He told me the building where his shop was, it used to belong to Hilborn. I remember him telling me he was about to pay it off. I remember going to his shop during the LA riots [1965] and he had a shotgun in his window that faced the street upstairs. He never got messed with.”

So, if the Hilborn Injection Engineering Company was in that building, then I can supply the approximate date when Owen moved into the building on South San Pedro. It would have been in late 1963 or early 1964, because Hilborn broke ground for a new factory in La Niguel Industrial Park in October 1963.


Owen used to pay contingency money if a racer using his cams won at Lions. The Herman Brothers-Itow’s Auto blown Olds-engined ’29 roadster, driven by Larry Herman, ran at Lions a lot in the early 1960s. The car, recently found and undergoing restoration, sported a painted Orbit Cams decal.

Stories about Owen and His Cam Grinding Business

That guy who used to hang out in Bowling’s shop and spoke of the shop having been previously owned by Hilborn, recalled Owen with fondness. “I can still see him in his blue coveralls with a Crook brand cigar in his mouth and several in his chest pocket,” he said. “What was really interesting was, you would go in his shop and ask for a cam with a certain ratio and lift, and he would go over to one of 50 shopping carts full of cams, pull one out and put it on his lathe and clean it up. I would put it in, and the car would run like a scalded cat. Damn, I miss those days. Man, I miss him.”

Another guy recalled going to Owen’s shop when he was a teenager to get a cam ground. “The first aftermarket cam I ever installed was an Owens Orbit,” he said. “As I remember, the cam shop on San Pedro Ave. was a corrugated museum to us. Race car body parts on the wall and hanging from the ceiling. We did all our talking with his wife as Owen was grinding cams. He just looked up and smiled at us dumb 16-year-old kids. His wife told us he ground a lot of Isky’s cams when they got behind.”

One of the Panneton brothers, who later raced in North Carolina, was working at Ross Pistons in Los Angeles. A customer came into the shop to get some custom pistons made for his Datsun L16 road race engine in the mid-1990s. My buddy says, ‘You ever hear of Orbit Cams and that old dude Owen?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ The customer said that he ran Orbit cams in his L16 road race engine. He’d run Webb, Engle, or Isky cams in it, but now only ran Orbit cams. This was interesting for Panneton to hear because he had a big race coming up and needed to get his Datsun L16 engine ready by the weekend. But he had lost a follower and killed his best cam. “I was in a big panic,” he said. “My buddy says, ‘Let’s go see Owen at Orbit Cams.’ We go to this grungy ole place with like one light bulb, smells like*****, and I’m thinking, what in the world are we doing here. Well, Owen finds a suitable core and tells me, ‘Get this. I got a real good flathead Ford grind that works like gang busters in them L16s.,’ he says. I’m thinking this old dude is some kind of nut job, but I pay the $35 bucks, go back and get the engine*****oned up, and it sounds pretty dang good. We go to the track and I beat my lap times by a tenth of a second and pick up nearly 2 mph and about 600 rpm at the top and I’m laughing like a crazy man.”

Another guy who had an injected gas FED frequented Owen’s place. “I made many a trip down to see Owen,” he said. “I had to wade through the dog droppings and the smell. Damn, that guy could grind a cam. I think it was $35 and you brought the core to regrind and if you needed, he would reface the lifters, too. Nicest guy. He liked to open at dark and close at dawn.”

Brenn Lane said that Owen used to grind her husband’s cams for all his cars. “I remember going to his shop over on San Pedro Street late at night. He lived over his shop with his mother.”

Bill Gude was mentored by Owen in the cam grinding business. He worked in Owen’s shop for eight years before going out on his own to establish Gude Performance Camshafts. Gude wrote a story entitled “Grinding Cams at Owen’s.” It was all about his years working at Orbit and learning the trade under the tutelage of the master cam grinder. Bill Gude passed away in 2020. I’ve reached out to his brother, Jim, hoping that he might have a copy of Bill’s story. I haven’t heard back from him, yet. But if I do, then I’ll certainly pass that along and enrich the story of Owen Bowling’s life.

Owen Ray Bowling died in 1997 at age 67.