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

Bill Quirk and Bob Powell: Whiz Kids with Fiberglass
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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 associations with the express purpose to push for a drag strip in San Fernando Valley. In early 1955, the Sunland-Tujunga Timing Association was organized. An umbrella organization called the Valley Timing Federation was established to unite all these independent timing associations 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 Association. 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
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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 Association. That was one of the timing associations 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 associations, 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 Association’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 assurance 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 Association 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.