Life’s a Drag : Hot-Rodder Creighton Hunter, Who Opened a Strip in 1950, Still Has a Love for Cool Cars

SANTA ANA —  When drag racer Creighton Hunter opened the first legal drag strip in the United States on what is now a John Wayne Airport runway, the Korean War was just beginning and the Andrews Sisters were at the top of the charts.

The year was 1950, and young men in hot rods challenged each other on city streets, the sound of roaring engines briefly filling the neighborhood.

Today, Hunter still cruises around his Santa Ana neighborhood in his custom, powder blue ’34 roadster. At 75, he might be Orange County’s oldest active hot-rodder. He also is one of the major pioneers of a multimillion-dollar sport.

“He and his partners are certainly the fathers of organized drag racing,” said Greg Sharp, director of historical services for the 80,000-member National Hot Rod Assn. based in Glendora. “They got the kids off the streets and made it legal; it legitimized the sport.”

The strip Hunter and two partners opened in 1950 was the world’s first legal drag strip, according to Sharp. Named Santa Ana Drags, it was an overnight success, inspiring hundreds of imitators throughout the country.

By the time the strip closed in 1959, drag racing had begun its evolution from a street crime to an internationally recognized professional sport commanding millions of spectators and dollars.

It was on the streets of Orange County that Hunter first became enthralled with drag racing. “I got my first car in 1936,” he said, a 1932 Model B Ford that his parents bought for him for $100 while he was still a student at Santa Ana High School.

It was the first of about 50 hot rods that Hunter would build.

In those early years, Hunter recalls, he and his friends raced illegally along city streets.

“There was always some guy mouthing off that his car was faster than yours,” he said, “so you had to try it. In those days, of course, we had streets where you could do it, not like today.”

He was ticketed more than once, Hunter said, but police were friendly about it.

“We had a lot of nice cops back then,” he said. “They were neat guys. They’d stop you and say, ‘Don’t do it again,’ and we’d just say that we wouldn’t.”

After serving in the military during World War II, Hunter went into the oil distribution business with his father. Then, in 1950, a hardened attitude by police about drag racing prompted him to team up with two customers to open Santa Ana Drags.

“We’d gotten run out of a couple of places,” recalled C.J. Hart, 84, one of Hunter’s former partners who now lives in Lake Elsinore. “So we rented a strip at the Orange County airport and it just took off from there.”

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The operation was simple. For just $1, anybody with a hot rod could race it on the mile-long strip that was open every weekend. And for an admission price of 50 cents, spectators lining the strip could watch the race from the hoods of their cars. The first race attracted about 75 spectators and 25 entries, Hunter recalled. Within a few years, he said, as many as 15,000 people were lining up to watch the races every Sunday.

One fatality marred the drag strip’s nine-year history. A flywheel shot off a car in the early 1950s, striking a spectator in the chest. And Hunter’s own racing career ended abruptly in 1956 when a car he was driving at 150 mph crashed and burned. When he came out of a coma two weeks later, his reactions were dulled to the point that racing became a hazard.

But he kept working at the drag strip until an expansion of the airport forced its closure in 1959. And he continued tinkering with hot rods, building them from parts found at swap meets and maintaining them with the patience of a parent.

“I just love cars,” said Hunter, who has four grown children, none of whom are hot-rodders.

Today, he spends an average of four hours a day tinkering with his Model B Ford. And when he’s not working on it, Hunter is often driving it (within posted speed limits) around his neighborhood, to meetings of hot-rod enthusiasts in distant cities, or to the Fountain Valley coffee shop where Orange County hot-rodders gather each Saturday morning to swap tales and compare cars.

“I think it’s remarkable,” said Rick Martel, a neighbor who regularly sees Hunter cruising neighborhood streets wearing a black nylon jacket and red-and-white baseball cap. “He gets around really well. He’s got more vim and vigor than most people at 40.”