Kendall County area residents enjoy sharing Oswego Dragway memories at local ‘History Happy Hour’ event

Long-time Chicago area residents will likely remember the commercials blaring from their transistor radios over stations WLS and WCFL from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s.

“SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY!!! Racing in Oswego” the announcer would yell.

The commercials served to attract a generation of drag racing fans to the Oswego Dragway and effectively put the then tiny village on the map.

This past Thursday evening, Aug. 11, a capacity crowd of area residents enjoyed sharing their stories and memories of the dragway at the Oswego Brewing Company at 61 Main Street in the village’s downtown. The “History Happy Hour” event was organized and hosted by Oswego’s Little White School Museum.

Annie Jordan, manager of the Little White School Museum, led the discussion.

Oswego resident Alan King said his father raced at the dragway in the 1950s. King recalled spending all day out at the dragway and coming home sunburned.

King also recalled racing both cars and motorcycles at the dragway throughout the ′70s. King still has two trophies he won at the dragway which he displayed for the crowd.

Jordan began the discussion by detailing the rise of drag racing across the country in the 1930s. Jordan said in that era many Americans were upgrading their automobiles, trying to make them go faster to compete with their neighbors’ cars. People on the west coast started taking their cars out to the desert to see whose was the fastest, leading to the beginning of modern drag racing.

World War II put a pause on racing, as many men went overseas and the automotive industry shifted much of its production to planes and armored vehicles for the war effort, Jordan said.

When WWII ended, Jordan said, men came back from overseas and got right back into racing. In 1949, California hosted the first organized racing event at an air base, using the runway as a drag strip, which is where the quarter mile drag standard began.

In 1951 the National Hot Rod Association was formed by Wally Parks. Today, the NHRA is one of the largest motorsport sanctioning bodies in the world.

In the 1950s, the sport had become widely popularized and the racing bug was migrating from the west coast across the nation.

In 1955, Dan and Wally Smith, two young Oswego area farmers, staked out a quarter-mile strip on their family farm on Route 34 a couple miles west of the Route 34 bridge and opened the Oswego Dragway for its first season.

Jordan said that according to reports, the Smiths’ soil wasn’t producing a favorable yield, and the brothers loved racing. So they opened their dirt strip in the middle of a corn field to the public, and the strip immediately became popular.

Responding to the popularity after the ‘55 season, the Smiths came to an agreement with the Aurora Autocrats, who took over management of the dragway.

The Aurora Autocrats took to fundraising, and in no time raised $40,000 for track upgrades. Before the opening of the 1956 racing season, the Oswego Dragway had a blacktop surface, bleachers, concessions, restrooms and a 5,000-car parking lot.

Jordan read the first line of an article about the dragway from The Chicago Tribune: “You can spot the drag strip from a quarter mile away, the corn shuts down for the space of about 100 yards, before it picks up and continues...forever.”

Within weeks of the 1956 season’s start, the dragway was drawing thousands of drag racing enthusiasts from all over the Midwest every Sunday from spring to fall right, creating a traffic problem on two-lane Route 34 through the village.

Reports from the 1956 season state that on an average Sunday between 2,000 to 3,000 people were coming to watch the races and 300 to 400 cars were racing each week. That September, the Oswego Dragway hosted the Chicago area’s first championship drag race event.

Jordan said the population of Oswego at the time was 1,200 at most, and the village had only five police officers on the force. With the population of Oswego tripling nearly every Sunday during racing season, the village was confronted with problems.

Races started at 8:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings. According to the Oswego Ledger, on May 9, 1957, state troopers issued over 100 ticket violations in one day.

Oswego resident Ted Clauser said he remembers the windows of his church would start rattling at 8:30 a.m. every Sunday morning and it was the only time the village ever had a traffic jam.

By the 1960s, sponsorship racing began to take over drag racing, and the sport moved away from local mechanics with souped up engines to professional dragsters.

Al Thompson was one of those mechanics. Thompson was a well-known driver at the Oswego Dragway. He was an auto mechanic at Al’s Speed Shop in Aurora. When he started racing in the 1950s, the top speed he could reach was 138 mph in about 9.5 seconds. By the time Thompson retired in the 1960s, the average speed was about 195 mph, reachable in 7.9 seconds.

As the years passed, bigger and bigger crowds kept coming to Oswego to see some of the most famous drag racers in the nation and their dragsters. By the early 1960s, the dragway was seeing anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 fans every Sunday.

In 1979, Stan Smith sold the farm along with the drag strip to a local veterinarian, Albert Koch, who closed the drag way after the 1979 season due to legal concerns, according to Jordan.