For a number of years, I’ve wanted to share this story from the good ol’ days. With the NHRA celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, it seemed like the right time to finally dust it off.

Inspired by storytellers like Dave Wallace, Phil Burgess, Brian Lohnes, David Freiburger and countless others, I find myself at times addicted to piecing together what happened in the early days of our sport.

I once had the chance to visit over the phone with a real character who knew a bunch about the formative years of drag racing here in western Idaho. I’ve documented plenty of stories from the Gem State in the 1950s, but the mid-’60s was a stretch of time that had escaped my history knowledge a bit. Digging through some older file folders, I turned up this “tell-all” about the day in 1965 that the “Green Dragon” fuel dragster made the tow to Boise to race for the famed Clark Marshall, who was staging both a car show and a drag race on the same blistering-hot August weekend.

Marshall was a bit like P.T. Barnum of the Barnum & Bailey Circus — a motorsports innovator, drag racer, entrepreneur, and event promoter who would go to any length to get fans to attend one of his events. A true suitcase promoter if there ever was one in the great Pacific Northwest.

“I was five years old when this event took place — my first drag race,” recalls Firebird’s Scott New. “All I remember is my dad taking me to this racing event on Gowen Field Road, and seeing tanks, tanks, and more tanks, as far as the eye could see. It left a lasting memory that’s still with me to this day.”

Looking back, that dusty stretch of road out by Gowen Field was about as unofficial as a “state record” could get — a folding table, a stopwatch, and a couple of local kids marking the quarter-mile with their feet. But it said something about how hungry Idaho was for real drag racing.

It wouldn’t be long before that hunger got answered — just three years later, in July of 1968, Firebird Raceway opened its gates, and Idaho finally had a proper strip to call its own. Funny how it goes… we came up from Seattle chasing a record on a back road, and by the end of the decade, western Idaho had a home for the sport for good.

Green Dragon Top Fueler

Told by Fred Vosk

“Showin’ Up in Boise”

In the ’60s we went to Boise to put on a drag race and car show with Clark (Marshall). Don Staats and I brought all the airbrushed T-shirt stuff and towed along a digger we’d just finished — “The Green Dragon,” a AA/FD out of Seattle (yeah, we were the “Bardahl guys”). The car was a new Woody, trick full body, green and silver flake with lots of artwork … it was a show getter and race feature. To give you an idea of what Boise was like in those days, we did so many t-shirts with tractors on them that we were starting to know the different makes and models (John Deere seemed to be the most popular). We did one for a kid with his 4-H pig on it — Staats did it as an AA/Fpig, with a blower, zoomies, and slicks. The kid loved it! The caption I came up with for the artwork was “When Pigs Fly.” This was a strange town — everybody wore cowboy hats and boots. Felt like I’d walked into a Lash LaRue type movie.

It was like 100 degrees, and by the time we got the digger set up at the show, the paint was starting to shrink (we’d put the last coat on just before we left Seattle), so we were rubbing it out just before the show opened. I was wet-sanding it with 1000 grit and didn’t have anything to put the water in, so I used an empty Coors can (we had plenty of those). After a while I happened to look up and noticed that several of the local guys — cowboy types who’d set up around us — were polishing their cars with Coors too. Guess they didn’t realize I had water in the can … figured if that’s what the “big city guys” do, it must be cool.

Needless to say, since the outdoor car show was at the Boise Fairgrounds in August, the beer attracted flies. Man, it was fly city! I suggested frogs to catch the flies — since the car was green, it would have made a nice display — but nobody else was going for it, so we just lived with the flies. We painted and sold a lot of T-shirts at that show, and the race was something else. One of those 200-mile-an-hour cars on a two-lane blacktop back road … but that’s another story.

“Back Roadin’ It”

As far as we knew, there had never been an organized drag race (with clocks) in the state of Idaho before — and there certainly hadn’t been a AA/Fuel Dragster there. We brought two! It was the first outing for the “Green Dragon” AA/FD since the new paint and a few other improvements. Clark had brought along another fueler to run against us — a hard-touring car, driven by Dave McKenzie. Clark staged the race on a straight stretch of two-lane country road where the local kids did their street racing, out by the Army base with dozens of tanks everywhere on the edge of town. We set the clocks up on a folding table at the start, and the finish lights up where the kids had marked the end of their quarter mile. We’re talking 200-mile-an-hour dragsters on a rather bad stretch of two-lane blacktop. McKenzie’s car was an oldie and pretty short, but ours was the latest from Woody (Gilmore) and was quite long for those days.

There weren’t any wide spots in the road, so we’d push the car down, then have to get out of the truck — four of us would grab the front axle and pivot the car around. That wasn’t bad. The scary part came after we’d fired it up: coming back down to the starting line, the four of us had to pick up the front end again and walk it around to point it back down the strip.

I’ll never forget walking that car around, looking down the nose at a running fuel Hemi — like looking down the barrel of a loaded gun! I can still remember which way the slots were pointed on the screws that held the butterflies, and I could see ‘Ronnie’ (Rolstad) peeking around the blower with his foot on the clutch — not shaking, I hoped! It was myself, Butch Bowers, B.J. Manning, and Russ Griffith (Drag News photographer) walking the car around. Bet they still remember it too. You could feel the car trying to creep. Scary! Probably one of the dumber things any of us ever did … and we got away with it!

Nobody went down and checked the road closely before we ran — the local kids said, “She’s as flat as a kitchen table.” Ronnie discovered on the first round that right after the finish line there was a dip in the road. In fact, it was a big dip — we could see he was off the ground from the start line! Seems the Army kept their tanks on one side of the road and their testing track on the other, and that was where they crossed. The locals said they raced out there all the time and “never had any problem” … probably because they weren’t doing quite 200.

We won the match, and Harold (‘Zeek’), who was running the clocks, gave us a 203. We took it, and Staats lettered “IDAHO STATE LAND SPEED RECORD HOLDER” on the side of the truck, and we headed for home. The first thing we did when we got back was stop at Jerry Ruth’s place and show him. The “King” must have sputtered and shook his head for a week. I think as soon as they had an actual drag strip in Idaho, he was there — just to take our record away.

It was the start of the never-ending battle for the ‘Idaho State Land Speed Record’… a memory from 1965 in a town that never expected two Seattle boys and a Woody-built digger to show up and take their record right out from under them.

Thanks to Rick Hale for sharing the early photo from his historical archives; and to Sugar City Design for the Gowen Field artwork originally created in 2013 featuring the `32 Ford three-window coupe of Firebird founder Bill New, circa 1953.