Monday, August 3, 2020

The Carpinteria Thunderbowl Part eight – 1950 & 1951 Jalopies take over


The Carpinteria Thunderbowl

Part eight – 1950 & 1951

Jalopies take over

Author’s note – This series of 12 articles highlights the brief 12-year history of one of Southern California’s least-documented auto racing venues – the Carpinteria Thunderbowl.

As 1950 opened, Granite Construction crews created excitement in the Carpinteria area as they worked to build a divided highway for a section of Highway 101 located near the Thunderbowl. The Thunderbowl ran a wintertime series of jalopy races with the pre-war cars on Sunday afternoons through the months of January, February and March.

Before the 1950 racing season at the Thunderbowl, sanctioned by the California Jalopy Association (CJA) officially opened on April 17, the touring Joie Chitwood Thrill Show paid a visit to Carpinteria on Saturday night April 8. The two-hour program featured 22 stuntmen and two clowns, Graham Jobe and Larry Ladd, with 27 stunts performed by a “$150,000 fleet of 1950 Ford convertibles and sedans.” 

The Carpinteria Thunderbowl featured three major facility improvements for the 1950 season. An 8-foot high wooden fence now surrounded the entire facility while the track itself had a new wooden crash wall, while spectators appreciated the new parking lot access road.  

The season opener at Carpinteria on April 17 featured entries from both the 1949 CJA champion Bob Stanclift (sometimes misspelled Stancliff) from Long Beach and the CJA 1949 runner-up, Paul Norman of El Monte, but neither driver figured in the outcome of the inaugural 1950 30-lap feature. 

Eight cars collided and tore down 15 feet of the new crash wall during the main event, and “Tiger” Nick Valenta passed Warren “Chubby” Sorenson in the final turn on the last lap to take the win, then Bojack Johnson also squeezed past Sorenson to grab a second place finish.   The author of the Ventura County Star-Free Press article race report published the following day noted that the track “was in exceptionally good shape at the start of the program.”

 It appears track promoter C. N. “Charlie” Cake and the United Racing Association (URA) President Roy Morrison temporarily patched up their legal differences, as the URA “Red Circuit” (non-Offenhauser) midgets were scheduled for Friday night April 21st. As a promotion for the midget races, during intermission on April 17th Charlie Cake staged a match race between midgets driven by Jack Tate and Clay Robbins, which Tate won by a ¼ lap.

The first URA scheduled event April 21st with featured entries from Tate, Robbins and Jackie Jordan rained out after 100 fans had passed through the turnstiles. It is unclear whether the URA sanctioned the rescheduled date, held on April 28th, as this race does not appear in URA records.   

The Ventura County Star-Free Press reported that Jack Tate, George Smart and Floyd Perry captured heat race wins, although Perry crashed in the first turn after he took the checkered flag when his steering jammed, possibly damage left over from the earlier tangle between he and Marty Cline in the trophy dash.  Rather than a 30-lap feature, 1950’s first midget racing program featured twin 20-lap features won by Jack Tate and George Smart respectively.

During intermission, Charlie Cake told the crowd of 1,200 spectators that the midget races were cancelled for the next three weeks but that the jalopies would continue to run weekly on Monday nights.  The cancellation suggested more problems for the URA, as the popularity of midget racing in general and the URA further eroded in 1950, as the West Coast’s top midget racers defected to the American Automobile Association (AAA).

By contrast to midget racing’s fading popularity, the public’s interest in jalopy racing skyrocketed throughout the Los Angeles basin and at Carpinteria in the early nineteen fifties. 

On May 29, 1950 perhaps the largest crowd ever at the Thunderbowl watched the track’s “Poor Man’s Indianapolis” program a promotional idea that Cake copied from famed West Coast promoter Bill “Hollywood” White. Bob Stanclift won the 50-lap feature over Fred Russell and Paul Norman.  

White’s “Poor Man’s Indianapolis” race on May 30 at Carrell Speedway in Gardena Speedway featured a starting field of 66 jalopies, scheduled to race 500 laps on the half-mile dirt track, in contrast to the weekly Carrell jalopy races which were typically held on the shorter infield “Figure 8” track.

Fred Steinbronner won the Carrell title as he took the lead from the pole-sitter Howard Shirley on the 462nd lap and held on to win. With a reported paid attendance of 14,780 fans, the grind took four hours and eighteen minutes to complete and only 29 of the original 66 starters finished.

Jalopy races continued at Carpinteria through the month of June – future United States Auto Club midget owner and driver Don Weaver won the feature on June 5th, then Al Moran from Los Angeles won the feature on June 12 in a photo finish over Stanclift. Bojack Johnson won on June 19 before 3000 screaming fans reportedly the largest weekly crowd seen at the Thunderbowl all season.

On Saturday June 24, The Joie Chitwood Thrill Show returned with its newest star, Dick Cobb, who performed the featured “Dive Bomber Crash” advertised as “one of the most dangerous stunts ever devised for man and motor.” For the stunt, Cobb drove a 1950 Ford Sedan up an elevated ramp, then launched 70 feet through the air and crashed head-on into two parked cars.

“Chubby” Sorenson won the June 26th jalopy feature, a program marred by two crashes in the 15-lap semi-main event that eliminated seven of the thirteen starters. Mark Smoot won the special 50-lap race held on July 3, 1950, advertised as a celebration of the Carpinteria Thunderbowl’s third anniversary, even though the track’s first event ran on August 3, 1947.  Don Iddings won the feature on the evening of July 17th on a track that was dark at both ends, after three light standards were knocked down during accidents in the preliminary races.

On August 5th, 1950, the Carpinteria 1/5-mile once again hosted the ‘hot rod roadsters’ for a 30-lap feature before 1,750 fans. Walt James won in a photo-finish over Johnny Miller and George Seeger. The jalopies returned on August 7 as Iddings scored a repeat win then “Rip” Erickson scored his first win on the 15th. Don Iddings led most of the feature on August 21st, but his motor lost power late in the race and sometime midget racer Jack Tate grabbed the win.

Ventura’s Pat Deardorf broke through for his first win on August 28th.  Newspaper advertisements indicate that racing at the Carpinteria Thunderbowl continued through September and October, but the author has been unable to locate race records for the latter part of the 1950 season or for much of the 1951 season. The California Jalopy Association crowned Fred Russell as the 1950 season champion with 18 main event wins, with his final 1950 win scored on December 31 at the Culver City Stadium. 

The 1951 jalopy racing season opened at Carpinteria on Monday April 23 and continued weekly through October with Russell and “Rip” Erickson of Santa Barbara joined by a new slate of drivers that included local drivers Bob Ellsworth of Ventura and Tony Nelson of Oxnard joined by “Dapper” Danny Letner,  Buford Lane, Paul Lang and Lloyd Woolever.

During the May 21st program, one of the jalopies ran down flagman Mike Gallio, the owner of the Big L Garage in Ventura. Thrown 20 feet by the impact, Gallio was treated and released from Ventura’s Foster Memorial Hospital with only cuts and bruises.  At the end of the 1951 season, Russell repeated as the California Jalopy Association champion although Letner scored the most feature wins throughout the 1951 season in his 1934 Ford.  

Open wheel cars returned to the Carpinteria 1/5-mile track on July 4, 1951 for a doubleheader program with fireworks sanctioned by the Three-Quarter Midget Racing Association (TQMRA).  The group, led by Jerry Wright of Norwalk, promised thirty cars and drivers that included 1950 TQMRA champion Paul Sankey, ‘Speed’ Boardman, and Harvey Fleuerhem.   

On Wednesday, August 1 the Thunderbowl hosted a “Moto Polo” match between the San Francisco “Pirates” and the Hollywood “Wolves”. This entertainment program combined “daredevil drivers in rollover cars with a 6-foot rubber ball for a blend of football, hockey and polo.” Devised by the Goodman family of Bakersfield, the “rollover” cars were 1935 and 1936 stripped Ford chassis fitted with skeletal roll cages.

With the first “Moto Polo” match played at the Kern County Fairgrounds in April 1950; the new sport was featured as a cover story in the March 1951 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine. The goal for each three-man teams as they drove the “rollover cars” on a regulation football field was to drive the 200-pound ball into the goal during the games which were played in four 15-minute quarters monitored by a referee in a jeep.    

In addition to the teams in Hollywood and San Francisco (that called Belmont Speedway home) the league included teams from Kern County (“The Red Devils”), Los Angeles (the “Shamrocks” based at Culver City Stadium), Sacramento (the “Speedbusters” that played at Capitol Speedway), “Thunderbirds” based at Oakland Stadium and the Stockton “Skyrockets” from the Stockton 99 Stadium. Early “Moto Polo” matches were televised in Los Angeles on KLAC for sixteen consecutive weeks.   

Touring “Moto Polo” matches were held at race tracks in Santa Rosa, Salinas, Santa Maria, Marysville, Lancaster and Modesto among other cities. After a surge of interest in 1951, the “Moto Polo” league steadily shrank and appeared to close in 1955.

The 500 CC motorcycle powered TQMRA midgets returned to Carpinteria on Sunday November 10 for a special Armistice Day “road race” that utilized part of the oval and the infield with both right and left-hand turns

On Sunday afternoon November 18th the Thunderbowl hosted a different kind of horsepower - a high-point horse show and gymkhana. The program featured ten events that included horsemanship competitions for multiple classes in both Western and English riding style, a cloverleaf race and a rescue race.     

The final 1951 event at the Thunderbowl provided a glimpse into the future as the Pacific Racing Association (PRA) presented late model hardtop races on Sunday afternoon November 25.  The PRA founded in 1948, had co-sanctioned the previous week’s ‘State Championship Hardtop Races’ at the Bakersfield Stadium.

Join us again for our next installment as we  continue to trace the Carpinteria Thunderbowl’s history through the early years of the 1950’s.



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