Bruce Lorimer , the builder of Casper is still alive and well here on the island . His son is a good friend and equally as talented as a mechanic about 10 minutes from me .Bruce Sr. still owns the model A coupe he had as a kid before Casper.
Suddenly is still my favorite camaro race car after all these years.... Posted using the Full Custom H.A.M.B. App!
Does anyone know or remember Allan Marshall? Lived in richmond and bought a red 68 el camino , L78 396, m22, 3:73 posi from Manders in N Van.
Way past my bedtime, i'll keep this brief. Spent the last three hours reading this whole thing that i somehow missed before. Boots must have passed just today or yesterday. I went to school with his son Butch. They lived just east of the 99 overpass on Highway 10. That Austin that crashed was during an organized cruise wasn't it? Hard to believe there was a time when there were several speed shops within Vancouver city limits. I recall one on Denman Street in the west end and California Marine still having car stuff. DG's on Main around 18th, that building is still there. Great pix a few pages back from Boundary Bay and Mission. I haven't ever seen shots from some of those angles. Just a few years ago that top end turnout of the track was still visible beside the Staples store. It's gone now. I am curious where Jack was going with the race car when there is snow and going through Lac LaHache?
OK after a brief sleep i can reply some more. The 1953 Abbotsford pix mentioned were probably the ones i posted. They came from BCCCA member #5 Jim Greenlees. His sister took them with a 35mm camera, rare back in those days They were slides and the fuzziness is me taking digital pictures through a slide viewer. I did make prints of a few of the slides before returning them. His sister got to stand right in the middle of the track at the finish line with cars coming around either side. They shout at me nowadays if i'd do that. Some of the slides so more than four cars abreast. Jim says as many as six sometimes. I just lost my hard drive and had to get another computer so i have no way to access those unless i find them online somewhere. The gov't pictures posted near the start of this great thread look like they might even be the first race in 1952. There was a "rail job" there from the several eyewitness accounts i've heard from Jim, Jack Williams, Larry Braine, Bunny Jeboult and Ron Farmer. The shots of Jack on the unfinished Mission Raceway are very interesting. I have pictures like that of the new track of Ron Farmer's Thames on the concrete pad before the paving was done and Glen May and Bob Davenport before the track opened.
Im looking for information on the Kaleden Raceway which ran outside of Pentiction in the mid 1960's. Anybody have info, or photos? Thanks
Wow Boots Olsen, that name conjures up many memories. Remember his C cab in indoor show at PNE years before he moved his shop to Surrey. In Surrey we worked in the same building, different bay. I used to go to stare at the walls during lunch. He had many historical pictures covering the walls. Eventually he pinstriped a mountain bike I had at the time. He also painted my shrouding on my 57 beetle. I watched and learned. He gave me some brushes to experiment with at home and I stuck around some days to pick up window etching how to's.
I noticed in the obits for Boots it only mentions he had two daughters. Looking at my high school yearbooks Butch's last name was not Olsen so maybe "son" isn't the correct term. Kaleden is still there, it's south of Penticton across the highway from the lake and there is a driveway with a gate with some sort of "No trespassing" sign by the Indian band which i couldn't read Finding your way to the other side of that gate and avoiding the large livestock that roam there you walk up the driveway and get to a wooden pole sorta thing which is past the finish line, to the right is the strip and starting line would be around where the is a wide spot. The shutdown is to the left and came southbound around the corner toward the highway. It's an older section of the highway, quite narrow as highways were back then. It later became the Okanogan Game Farm in the 70's and is now used for some sort of Indian spiritual gatherings.
Thank you Tom. I had the feeling it use to run through the game farm. Ive known about the track for years and when we use to take the little ones to the farm, I just imagined a track running down the straight and narrow part of it. Do you have any other info regarding track? When it opened etc?
Anyone out there have any photos of the old Dog & Suds Drive-In in Surrey? That place was a hot bed of hot cars. The few times I went there in the mid seventy's before it shut down I recall seeing some cars with ETs in shoe polish still on their windshields.
I seem to remember seeing pictures of Von Dutched cars on the walls in his shop. I didn't know who Von Dutch was back then, but because of that exposure through those pictures, I became more curious about the name. I sorta thought maybe he got some of his education being close to him. Just supposition mind you, nothing definitive. Maybe someone can enlighten us.
The late Ross Giles was able to gather these quotes from 'Boots'. "For me "it" all started when I stopped in at Von Dutch's shop at the Crazy Arab's body shop in north Hollywood, California and this guy was doing wonders with this brush, wow designs that were easy to look at, plus looked like they belonged where he was hanging them on cars, it just looked right. A friendship started, along also came instructions on how, why, and when, and home I went to try, and try. After 6 or 8 months, I tried on my own '40 Ford, a 2 door sedan which Dutch had stripped for me, a spider web over a pounded out dent, rear fender, it turned out looking good". This was part of a story about 'Boot's early education on stripping. Lucky for us that Ross was able to record this information that was to be an article on the late great 'Boots' Olsen.
B-Bob. If you don't have any photos to share with us perhaps you can enlighten us on what it was like to be part of that magical time in one of the centers of Hot Rod Heaven.
That is the very end of the shutdown, go north a bit to the start. Now that i think hard, the guy i was think of wasn't Boots' son, it was Norris... he was a painter too. How about drags on an old airport on the Sumas Prairie. Supposedly it was torn up to keep people from racing afterward. Would be way before my time, around 1959 after Abbotsford closed. It wasn't legal from what i've heard. Place was shown as a big triangular WW2 looking airbase on an old topographical map i'd seen. Just south of the #1 near the rest stop.
No, I don't have any photos of those places except in my mind. I was 16 years old in '65 and got my license in March of that year, so I was like the proverbial deer in the headlights. We would go also quite often to the White Spot in New West where there were often a lot of Corvettes and high end street rods and of course the high performance muscle cars. I remember a couple Plymouth Satellites with a Hemis. One was red and another, it may have been a Coronet that was black. Memory is a little hazy. The Dog and Suds was the busiest of the Whalley places, always full and you had to get there early to get a good spot to park. Of course you had to back-in to be real cool so you could see the parade going through there. Always very lively, guys in cars or just standing around yapping with each other or the girls that showed up, but that's another story. Most guys had late model GM, Dodges or Mustangs, lots of 55-57 Chevys, etc. Occasionally a cool hot rod or custom would show up from Burnaby or Vancouver area, cars you wouldn't see very often. Lots of variety. Lots of burn-outs by those that could and even a few crazy accidents from those that did. I remember one guy in a big new Dodge did a big burn-out and end up rolling in over. And the public driving by and would be looking in and rear-end the guy in front because they weren't watching the cars ahead of them. It was a good time in life, everyone seemed to get along don't remember any serious trouble. I am sure it was the same in Van. and Burnaby too, just different cars and people all with a common interest. Brian
Gonna try to post these photobucket pictures that I just came across in my albums. A few colour slides taken at the old Mission track back in 1974. I can't tell you much from that particular race, other than it was a stinking hot day at the track! Here's hoping that you can access the pictures. By the way, can anyone identify the starter from the earlier batch of photos, taken around 1972 I believe? http://s1126.photobucket.com/user/79mbu/library/Mission 1974
B-Bob. Thanks for giving us a 'visual' image of those lost years at the Surrey Dog & Suds through your own words.
The Jalopy Journal
