Morrow Drag Strip (Colton)

Work to ready Morrow Field for quarter-mile drag racing began in 1954. The airfield, built around 1942, had a single blacktop runway running northeast to southwest, 60 feet wide and 3,200 feet long, about a mile west of Colton just off old Valley Boulevard. About $12,000 went into improvements for racing. The Argonaut Club Timing Association ran the strip, which had NHRA sanction from at least 1955 through 1960. On May 15, 1955 it hosted the NHRA-supervised Southern California Regional Championship Drag Races. Elapsed time clocks went in around October 1955, and on October 15-16 a two-day race marked the strip’s first anniversary.

Emery Cook set an unofficial world record of 168.85 mph on May 5, 1957 in the Cook & Bedwell dragster. The first night race was June 15, 1957. At the fall 1957 open fuel and gas meet, Ted Cyr had the fastest gas time at 134.93 mph in the Cyr and Hopper dragster. Twenty-one track records fell over Labor Day weekend 1958, when Dallas Martinson took top eliminator in his Chrysler fuel dragster with track marks of 8.89 seconds and 164.80 mph. At the fifth annual Labor Day meet on September 5-7, 1959, Colton ran the first 3/16-mile drag race anywhere, and it kept the shorter distance into October. On October 10, 1959, Hayden Proffitt won top gas eliminator in his C/D at 9.18 and 119.20 mph over 3/16 mile. In 1963 Mike Snively, driving C. W. Scott’s Scotty’s Muffler fuel dragster, set the ET record at 8.22 seconds, then the speed record at 184.04 mph on June 16 and 186.54 mph on September 29.

One old-timer remembered the track as fairly short. Running off the end took you up and over a hill into a cemetery, which happened to him once. The golf course built by airport founder Howard Morrow still sits on the southeast part of the old airport, but development has wiped out any visible trace of the runway.