We stationed ourselves on the curb along the bay side of Rosecrans Street, just past Avenida de Portugal. All the better to witness the action of the vintage vehicles careening around the infamous Roseville turn.
Of course, on this sunny Sunday about a month ago, there was no flying gravel, no bursting tires or broken axles, and certainly nobody exceeding the 30 mph speed limit. Traffic flow was positively sedate, in fact.
Even if you didn’t know you liked old cars, if you missed it, you reeely missed it. Over 100 vintage automobiles cruised down the hill from Balboa Park and circled the old racecourse twice. It was a beautiful thing.
The event was the Point Loma Vintage Car Parade, not a race at all but an excursion commemorating the 110th anniversary of the famous 1915 Panama-California Exposition Road Race in Point Loma.
The unspeakable war in Europe, not yet known as World War I, was in its sixth month and had introduced miserable trench warfare to the lexicon. Yet war worries had yet to wash up on the beaches of California. A world away in the prosperous port of San Diego — and particularly along the warm hillsides of Point Loma — the new year, 1915, had brought an almost giddy sense of optimism. The Panama-California Exposition, celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal, invited folks from far and near to stop by and have a look at our splendid town.
‘Proud achievement’
On Jan. 7, a Thursday, (the Weekly Union came out on Thursdays), the paper was almost beside itself: “San Diego’s Exposition is a proud achievement, and the rejoicing thereat is not a vain exaggeration. We have every reason to congratulate ourselves on our accomplishment, and our ebullient and effervescing hilarity in the dedication of our great enterprise is natural and human.”
“Every day in San Diego is now a holiday, and so it will be for an entire year,” the paper continued. “Aside from what San Diego is doing for a vast section of the United States, this city may claim full reward for its pluck, judgment, foresight, wise determination and generous expenditure. Hundreds of thousands of visitors will come to see the city that has made this Exposition, and the fame of the city will go abroad over the whole Earth.”
Ebullient and then some.
The road race, co-sponsored by the Automobile Club of Southern California and the Al Bahr Shrine, was one of the first big events of the Exposition. Nineteen cars and 19 distinguished drivers — some of the most prominent in the very popular motor sport of road racing — were set to tackle the hilly and harrowing Point Loma racecourse.
Top drivers Barney Oldfield, “Wild Bob” Burman, Eddie O’Donnell, Harry Grant, Tom Alley, Earl Cooper, Eddie Rickenbacker — a couple of years before he learned to fly — and local favorite Billy “Bad Bill” Carlson signed up to race for the top prize of $5,000.
Mercers, Maxwells, Marmons, Peugeots and Duesenbergs were a few of the marques represented in the great race. Each car also carried a highly trained co-pilot or mechanician, as mechanics were referred to in those days. Breakdowns and repairs on the fly were always an integral part of the action.
‘Grim Reaper lurks’
Excitement ran high among San Diegans and Exposition visitors before the race.
“GREAT SPEED CARS PRIMED FOR POINT LOMA CLASSIC” trumpeted the Evening Tribune. “Nineteen Dare-Devil Drivers To Flirt With Death.” And even: “GRIM REAPER LURKS AT EVERY CURVE AND TURN FOR SPEEDSTERS.”
“Under the canopy of the clearest skies San Diego can offer, the most dangerous flirt with death ever attempted in the history of the auto racing game in America will be run tomorrow morning on Point Loma,” continued the buildup in the Tribune.
All those dire warnings notwithstanding, “it is the most spectacular road racecourse in the world,” opined veteran starter Fred Wagner, “and the race is bound to eclipse all other sensations.”
Small wonder that an estimated 50,000 fans turned out to behold the spectacle that Saturday, Jan. 9.
The Point Loma course had one previous race two years earlier, a 200-mile event won by Carlson. The 1915 race was to be approximately 305 miles, or 51 laps around the not-quite 6-mile circuit. The city streets in Point Loma and Loma Portal were graded but not yet paved. Some spectacular skidding and sliding ensued as a direct consequence.
Race fans came by jitney, trolley, ferry and automobile. A $1 ission price got you onto the race grounds and entitled you to park your vehicle anywhere you chose. Spectators were instructed to be off the racecourse by 10:30.
A large contingent of San Diego police and a company of 250 local Marines were on hand to help control the crowd and keep everybody safe. Five fully staffed field hospitals were established around the course, and three ambulances, along with Mrs. Ballou from the Red Cross, were standing by if needed.
Following directions
A wooden grandstand with seating for 6,000 had been constructed along the west side of Rosecrans Street between Dumas and Goldsmith streets. The start and finish line was near the corner of Elliott Street. The racecourse started north along Rosecrans to a hard left at Lytton Street. Known as the clubhouse turn, Lytton headed west in front of Al Spalding’s beautiful Point Loma Golf Club clubhouse.
Rosecrans did not go through north of Lytton at that time, and eight more years would go by before the Navy broke ground on what would become the Naval Training Center.
The racecourse proceeded from Lytton to Chatsworth Boulevard, winding through Loma Portal up the hill and down past the site where, a decade later, Point Loma High School would be built.
Continuing southwesterly downhill, the course crossed the tracks of Charlie Collier’s Point Loma Railroad at Wabash, now called Nimitz Boulevard.
An exceedingly bumpy transit it was. Gordon Huntley’s No. 5 Gordon Special, a Mercer, blew three tires and nearly careened into some spectators, bouncing across those trolley tracks on the first lap of the race. Regular auto traffic — what there was of it in 1915 — rolled cautiously across the tracks when the coast was clear. Powerful racing cars barreling down the hill at speeds near 60 mph were something else entirely.
Race historian Boyd Goddard told me he is surprised that crossing those tracks was such a hazard.
“You would think they would have done some research on those trolley tracks to mitigate that terrible series of bumps there at Wabash,” Goddard said. “The racetrack crossed the trolley tracks again along Rosecrans near Macauley, almost in the middle of that long straightaway, and no bumps or incidents were reported. So they must have smoothed that crossing over in some way.”
The course continued along Chatsworth to another left turn at Catalina Boulevard, and then south along Catalina to a sharp left at Talbot Street and left again two short blocks east at Cañon Street. Those two quick lefts were referred to as the Theosophical turn, being on the outskirts of Katherine Tingley’s Theosophical estate, Lomaland.
The No. 10 car, Jack Callaghan’s Duesenberg, missed the Theosophical turn, also on the first lap, ramming straight into a telephone pole. Both driver and mechanician were slightly injured in what proved to be the worst crash of the race.
Cañon Street was a narrow, long downhill route, “almost a gully,” according to Goddard, with a much more exaggerated “S” turn than the path of that road these days. The drivers picked up quite a bit of speed going down through that canyon, which turned the hard left onto Rosecrans Street at the bottom of the hill — the famous Roseville turn — into quite an adventure. Both the No. 6 car, Burman’s Peugeot, and No. 14, Oldfield’s Maxwell, missed the turn onto Rosecrans and skittered into the weeds on the first lap.
The 2-mile-long straightaway north on Rosecrans saw some of the contestants reach speeds of more than 100 mph. That was the Point Loma Racecourse. Fifty more laps and you were home-free.
Two entries failed to make the start and only five finished all 51 laps. A sixth car, still running but way behind, was flagged in at the conclusion of the race.
Cooper assumed the lead near the middle of the race and took the checkered flag in his No. 8 Stutz, finishing in four hours and 40 minutes and averaging just over 65 mph. Carlson in the No. 17 Maxwell finished second, and Alley, who led in the early laps in the No. 2 Duesenberg, was third.
A roaring success it was. “I think the safety-first arrangements were splendid, and to prove my statement, not one serious accident has been reported,” declared starter Wagner. “The people behaved themselves wonderfully. The policing of the course has been wonderful, and no one realizes better than I what a hard course this was to police.”
Growth on the Point, the development of the Naval Training Center and Point Loma High School and the explosion of automobile traffic in the years following the Panama-California Exposition all combined to let the air out of the tires of any subsequent racing on the streets of Point Loma.
At least for a century. In 2015, the Horseless Carriage Club of San Diego and the La Jolla Regional Group of the Horseless Carriage Club of America got together for a centennial salute to the great Point Loma Road Race of 1915.
Newell Booth, organizer and past president of the San Diego club, laughed while telling me that “we thought it was so much fun that we couldn’t duplicate it!”
Yet, 10 years later, duplicate it they did, opening the run to all pre-World War II buggies.
“Now we are going to try to make it an annual event,” he said.
Here’s hoping they do.
Eric DuVall is president of the Ocean Beach Historical Society. Thanks to Newell Booth and Boyd Goddard for their assistance on this story. hip in OBHS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is $25 annually. Visit obhistory.org.
