NARRATIVE
CASCADE SPORTS CAR CLUB
AND THE
START OF RACING AT PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL RACEWAY February 23, 2008
I appreciate the invitation to speak during the grand reopening days at PIR.
I’m sure that many of you know the history of this site which goes back to the years of WW II when it was quickly developed into being the largest temporary city in the United States, a city of 50,000 people which included apartments, laundries, gasoline stations, banks, restaurants, barber shops, grocery stores, etc. A flood destroyed it all on Memorial Day 1948. After all the debris was cleared away only paved streets and building foundations remained.
We now move on to February 1953 when three of us, Bob White, Chuck Brown and I, Norm Creitz, all of us only twenty years old, had just been discharged from active duty in the Air Force during the Korean War and were recently reassigned to the Air National Guard at the Portland Air Base where we first met. We each owned an MG sports car and decided to form a sports car club. Two weeks later in April there were 14 people present at the charter member meeting. We all agreed that the club should be diversified and should sponsor road racing, rallies, gymkhanas, hill climbs, and family social functions. We felt that the club needed to be family oriented so that it would continue to grow in the years to come. Today Cascade Sports Car Club is the oldest and largest sports car club in the Northwest, including Western Canada, with over 400 members.
According to club minutes of 1953 meetings, possible race sites were discussed. These were: The Portland Speedway, Hillsboro Airport, The Portland Airport, Swan Island, and the McMinnville Airport, among several other locations. Max Schultz, Race Chairman, said the club should propose to the City of Portland a “Vanport Sports Center” and that the Rose Festival Association would “sponsor us for the Rose Cup Race.” How he made that determination was not recorded! However, it does show the foresight and determination of the club members, as eight years later, the first Rose Cup Race was held in 1961.
In 1954 there were other clubs sponsoring races at Paine Field in Everett, at Bellingham, and the airport in Shelton, WA., and in 1959 at Abbotsford, British Columbia.
With Max Schultz’ leadership as Race Chairman we moved forward and in August of 1955 sponsored a race at the Tillamook Blimp Base, and again in August of 1956 with the track going through one of the twin hangars which created a very dramatic effect!
The club, which originally had been called The Four Cylinder Sports Car Club of Oregon, changed its name in 1957 to Cascade Sports Car Club to more accurately define the membership.
The International Conference of Northwest Sports Car Clubs (ICNSCC) was formed in February of 1957 by Cascade Sports Car club and six other Northwest United States and Western Canada clubs to provide less expensive racing than was offered at that time by the Sports Car Club of America, (SCCA). Road and Track magazine in April 1977 had an article about the ICNSCC titled, “Who Says Racing is Only For The Rich?” By 1966, through expansion, there were more than twenty-five member and affiliate clubs with over 3,200 members and 490 licensed drivers. With ICNSCC sanctioning, Cascade put on road races at the Madras Airport in 1958 and 1960. (The ICNSCC became ICSCC).
It was obvious to all concerned that a local road-racing course was badly needed. With a lot of hard work from club member Dick Miller, starting in 1959, we contacted the Portland Jr. Chamber of Commerce and with their help the City of Portland agreed, after numerous meetings and negotiations, to allow us to put on a road race one time on the old Vanport City streets. Finally, the Rose Festival Association agreed to sponsor the 1961 Rose Cup Races with us and that was the start of the annual race.
It is of interest to note that we contacted all of the local sports car clubs for help and asked that they bring push and powered lawn mowers of all types, anything they had, as the grass was growing 12 to 16 inches high through all of the asphalt pavement as well as between the concrete foundations, and the grass had to be cut down so the concrete could be seen by the drivers if they ran off of the course. This was a tremendous undertaking and took two to three days of mowing daylight to dusk with over 100 people and their mowers. Harry Kersting, a dairy farmer from Vancouver, WA, brought his mowing equipment for several years to help with the mowing. The city did not have a street sweeper that they could “spare” to help us, so we used push brooms and ran our cars rapidly on the track to blow off what we could. 
The week prior to the Rose Cup Races in 1961, Cascade put on a driver training weekend and a demonstration race. This worked out well, although I do remember when a girl by the name of Lee Daly was taking a driver training course for the women’s powder puff race with her driving instructor, Ralph Livermore, when she hit a bump in the pavement and went off the course at 90 to 95 miles per hour, hit a hidden foundation, and, along with Ralph, went end over end twice then rolled over twice in her 1958 Triumph TR3. She was being followed very closely by Jim Caire in his 1958 TR3, and in his eyewitness account, he says that he vividly remembers seeing her car standing on its tail and he could see the entire undercarriage as it seemed to hang there as he raced on by. Ralph had ducked down below the dashboard and was not hurt. Lee was held overnight in the hospital but released, and spent all the next day at the races stating that she had suffered no physical injury except that her entire body felt like one great big bruise. The roll bar saved them. This was a common incident in those early days of road racing.
As we look around PIR Today, you must also realize that in 1961, there were not any man-made structures that existed: No fences, no lights, no buildings, in fact there was not a piece of wood or pipe that extended more than three feet above the ground in Delta Park with the exception of the high voltage electric wires on wooden poles which still exist at the west end of the track. For some semblance of crowd control, we strung up over a half-mile of pennant flags and put up about a quarter of a mile of temporary snow fencing which we borrowed from the Oregon Dept. of Transportation. We drove all of the steel posts and removed them by hand after the weekend races. Clubs such as Via Columbia Sports Car Club from Vancouver, Willamette Motor Sports from Salem, Team Continental, and Touring Club of Oregon from Portland helped with very necessary functions at each race, such as track preparation, technical inspection, crowd control, flagging on turns, timing and scoring and much more. I was chairman of crowd control for ten years, using all of the club member volunteers we could get. We even hired as many as 25 off-duty uniformed City of Portland policemen to control more than 10,000 spectators at several Rose Cup Races. Cascade members formed a citizen’s band radio club, The Grapevine, and it furnished all of the track communications for several years. We even enlisted some scuba divers and posted them at strategic bodies of water. They were called into action more than once when drivers ended up with their cars in the water. I remember one instance when a car was pulled out of the lake with a fish flopping on the floor.
Getting ready for, and cleaning up after each race was a monumental task. We hauled in hundreds of hay bales to create “safety barriers,” and borrowed a couple of Georgia Pacific semi-trailers which had removable sides and piled them with hay bales to serve as seats for the timing and scoring crews, and rented lots of portable toilets. Individuals furnished their own or borrowed trailers and motor homes to house communications headquarters, preparation of race results, etc.
We had a problem develop by 1964 whereby we had no access for drivers and spectators to enter the east end of the track or the pits except by crossing the track between races. The Oregon Highway Division had jurisdiction as Denver Avenue was classified as a state highway and they refused to help us acquire access as they felt it would have created an “unsafe condition.” Hank Pittock and I decided to meet at 4:00 pm on a Friday with a self-loading scraper, track hoe, dump truck, and operators, and we built the road to our satisfaction by Saturday evening. A small portion of it remains today.
Cascade sponsored, with the help of the Rose Festival Association, all of the Rose Cup Races from 1961 through 1969 when sponsorship was transferred to the SCCA. By this time gates, permanent fences, guardrails, and limited lighting had been installed.
Portland International Raceways has certainly come a long way since its inception fifty years ago.
Norm Creitz, Cascade Member
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