Cedar Creek Drag Strip/Bullitt Dragway (Louisville)

Soon after C. W. “Wally” Sunderhauf bought a farm on Cedar Creek Road in northern Bullitt County, some young men came to him in November 1955 about building a drag strip. They had visited strips in other states, Wally thought the idea had promise, and they made a deal and started leveling and grading. The Kentuckiana Timing Association ran the first race on July 4, 1956. Thousands came, jamming the narrow dirt road to the track. The newspaper said dust was everywhere and it was 90 degrees in the shade, with no shade to be had. The track had six-foot ditches along its length and only a chain-link fence in front of the bleachers.

Drag racing had a bad name in conservative 1950s Kentucky. A Paducah columnist, Bill Powell, wrote that many people pictured a drag strip as full of slimy-eyed, long-haired young people with nothing on their minds but speed. In November 1956 a Bullitt County grand jury indicted T. E. Tucker, John Stillwell and Sunderhauf for building and running the strip, which it deemed a common nuisance. Drag News columnist Bill Holz visited in late 1958, when it was the only strip in the Louisville area. He figured the oiled dirt surface caused some problems but was impressed by the clean grounds and adequate restrooms. He said the Pushrods ran the roughly 3,600-foot strip and hoped to pave it for 1959. Paving came in 1960, and the name changed to Bullitt Dragway in 1961.

The track ran without sanction through the 1960s. Frances Sunderhauf, Wally’s wife, said people made too much of sanctioning, since their insurer required safety features that matched or beat some sanctioned strips. Wally fought complaints and lawsuits for years. The legal trouble discouraged the young men, leaving Wally and Frances to run the strip on their own, until rising insurance costs and federal safety rules led Wally to shut it down. Local racers called it “Cheater Creek,” and Steve Conder, who drove a ‘55 Chevy called “The Outlaw” there in 1968-69, called it “The Dust Bowl.” His son Tim remembered a barely legal country strip in a farmer’s cornfield with grass pits, people popping off their hubcaps to race, and kids everywhere while mothers unloaded coolers and lawn chairs. The site is a cornfield today, and hay is stored on what’s left of the strip so pilots don’t mistake it for part of Bluelick Airport, just to the west.