Zero to 50: Track marking half century of drag
racing
Posted: Sept. 2, 2005
Union Grove - Using the cash he
won off fellow Marines while dealing blackjack, Sgt. Robert Metzler made
a down payment on 150 acres of swampy farmland.
He recruited dozens of hot-rod-loving
volunteers to build a racetrack, to fashion light banks from sheets of
plywood and headlights and to spread the word in Wisconsin about a
southern California fad called drag racing.
Fifty years of "Sunday! SUNDAY! SUNNDDAAYYY!"
later, Great Lakes Dragaway is still going strong, and "Broadway
Bob" is ready for another party.
"When we went to the newspapers and
radio and TV, they said, 'Drag racing? That's not a sport,' "
Metzler recalled this week.
"They said, 'Go over to the city
side. Tell them you want to keep the kids off the street.' I went over,
and they put an article in: 'Drag strip to open.' I took sandwich signs,
put those up there and on the highway . . . until the cops made me stop.
"See these bleachers? None. No
fence. See where the track is? The people would go all the way out to
the track, and as the cars went down, they'd just kind of step back. I
don't even know if we had insurance at that time."
Broadway hasn't owned the place for 10
years now, but he rarely misses a night, much less a party. Smart money
says that a popular figure today and Sunday at the 50th anniversary
Labor Day Spectacular will be a certain 77-year-old with a shock of
white, Zubaz pants, an airbrushed T-shirt and martini-glass glasses.
The trio who bought Great Lakes have
spent millions of dollars on improvements over the past 10 years, but
they've worked to keep the ambience and mission fostered by Broadway.
They don't want to host National Hot Rod
Association national events or compete with 7-year-old Route 66 Raceway,
the $20 million strip in Joliet, Ill. They just want the track to be
Great Lakes.
"I want to be the biggest little
track, never the littlest big track," said lifelong Milwaukeean
Randy Henning, the facility's president and co-owner with Ray Drew and
Marcel Kuper.
"When you have a national event, it
becomes too big and it squeezes out all of the people who made this
racing. Drag racing was created to get people to stop racing on the
streets and race in a controlled environment and not hurt anybody.
That's still our philosophy, and that's what we work at every single
day."
To that end, the 175-nights-a-year
schedule includes everything from open racing to junior drag racing to
"Beat the Heat," pitting students vs. local law enforcement
officers, and Summit Super Series sportsman competition.
The track promotes special events aimed
at particular groups, such as motorcycle riders and the black community.
Owners of imported cars - more affordable and more tunable by
computer-savvy youngsters - have become a more important target audience
in recent years.
Metzler, an inductee into the
International Drag Racing Hall of Fame, first put the track on the map
with his revved-up commercials and non-stop promotion. The current
management tries to keep Great Lakes relevant in a changing
entertainment marketplace by building a real connection between the
ticket-buyer and the sport.
"When you can say to yourself, 'I
raced my car down that track,' and then you watched this other car go
down that same track, there's a totally different feeling than when you
see it on television," Henning said.
"When (people) go to work the next
day, instead of talking about television, they talk about what they were
doing in real life at Great Lakes Dragaway."
One of the first barnstorming racers
hired by Broadway Bob when he opened the track was Don Garlits. The
legendary Top Fuel ace has repaid the favor with regular visits over the
years and will do so again this weekend.
Garlits, an up-and-comer in the 1950s, a
star in the '70s and a competitor into the early 2000s, lived through
the evolution of drag racing from an unknown sport, where competitors
shared a laugh and a beer with fans after meets held at mom-and-pop
tracks, into an industry populated by multimillion-dollar teams and
drivers forced to hole up in motor coaches to practice their starts
against an electronic Christmas tree.
"My roots are here," Garlits
said. "You could talk to each and every fan, and you signed a
picture for them, you interacted with them, you knew the track promoter,
you went out with his family. (NHRA national racing) is all very
corporate and professional.
"This is the difference in going
into a real big fancy restaurant and going to a home-style
restaurant."
As long as people have an appetite,
there'll be room for both.
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