AT Shorts: Racing, Drive-Ins, and Tucson's Classic Car Culture

The quintessential, Hollywood-like version of Tucson in the late 1950s and early 1960s comes to life with Alex Jacome’s description of drive-ins, fistfights, and street racing.


ALEX JACOME: Cars were a big deal. The entertainment of the day was Speedway. You know you had to go out Speedway and do the street races where you can roll up your sleeves and hang your arm out the door. Drive-ins were a big thing. And you took your girl to the drive-in. And some of the drive-ins, they had gals on roller skates, otherwise they had a gal that came out and you had to put a tray on your window… hamburgers were the food.

I wish I could remember the names of all the different drive-ins. There was Pinkies, there was Chicken in a Basket. There was Pat’s Chili Dogs, and of course Pat’s Chili Dogs are still there. In those days you get ten chili dogs for a buck. [laughs] The Polar Bar Drive-In was where all the cool guys hung out—all the hot rodders. It was its own world. You know, the airman would swagger in there and the high school kids would take exception to the fact that they were hitting on their girlfriends so, invariably, there was a somebody getting punched out somewhere during the night.

And, where else you're going to go with a car culture? You're going to go to the drive-in movies. So we had the Cactus Drive-In, you had the Rodeo Drive-In, you had the Prince Drive-In which was on Campbell and Prince… you had a couple more and the names escape me, but the drive in movies was a big deal! They they went to the drive-in either before, or after, or both—and put the movie in between. Windows got fogged up pretty bad but the rest of it was okay. [laughs]

There was a motorcycle cop by the name of Dudak and they had laws on the books about noise, so what's the first thing a hot rodder wants to do? Have a loud car—neat set of pipes! And they would, of course, show up over there and show off their car at Tucson High, and they’d go out there and rev that car up—and the first thing you know, John Dudak would have his foot on the bumper, writing a ticket. So the guys would go home and fill the exhaust pipe full of steel wool and then the car would pass the quiet test. [laughs]

The races were actually out on the Mount Lemmon cut-off. The cut-off was an area there that was three-eighths of a mile from cattle guard to cattle guard. So whichever one got to the other end first won, that was as simple as that. All the midnight street racing that went on was out there. There weren't any houses out there—the occasional ranch house, a lot of barbed wire fences. Occasionally the sheriff's department would go out there and do a raid, and that was really interesting because you had the cars all lined up along the road with their headlights on the road, so they could watch the races. And the sheriff's department would try and cut on at one end and the other end. They think they’d have it bottled up. Well you’d see all these sedans and coupes and roadsters going—and pickups—going in all directions through the desert. [laughs]

Got such an uproar about street racing that they opened up the runways at Davis-Monthan for organized racing on Saturdays, Sundays. After Davis-Monthan they opened one out at Marina, and they also built the drag strip which became Tucson Dragway out there off Houghton Road. I drag-started a race car against an airplane. When the airplane crossed the starting line, I flag started the dragster, which beat the airplane to the end of the strip… and so the airplane is doing over 200 miles an hour. That tells you about some of the fun things that that happened out there.

Aengus Anderson