Puyallup Dragway

Drag races were held weekly at this strip just east of Thun Field, now Pierce County Airport, about five miles south of Puyallup, from its opening on April 3, 1960. Before it was built, racing ran on the Thun Field runway from at least 1959, and one racer said he raced there from 1957 to 1959. A strip was also built around 1957-59 in nearby Spanaway but never opened. The Puyallup Valley Racing Association ran the races. On September 4, 1960, Carol Ann Lobdell, 21, was killed in a Powder Puff Derby. Driving a 1936 roadster for only the second time, she had won the final when her accelerator apparently stuck at over 116 MPH, and she hit an embankment, rolled and struck a tree. The crash was reported nationwide. One fan remembered nearly being run down in the pits at his first race there by a scruffy, bearded man in a pickup, who turned out to be Jerry Ruth. By 1965 it was called Puyallup International Dragway.

Another longtime fan remembered Puyallup as too narrow, too dark and too short, with awful food and smelly wooden outbuildings, and incredible all the same. Promoter Clark Marshall, 6 foot 8, knew that big attractions drew crowds. For a quiet Sunday afternoon you went to Pacific Raceway in Kent, with its road course and nearly 400 acres. For flame-throwing match races between jets and fuelers you went to Puyallup on Saturday, and plenty of fans did both. Puyallup was carved out of the trees and barely paved, and the noise hit you the moment you left the highway. He saw Don Garlits there, learned to say and spell Chris Karamesines, heard the Surfers, saw the Little Red Wagon with about 8,000 others, and breathed nitro fumes strong enough to nearly knock him out. TV Tommy Ivo came with his metalflake Cadillac and show-quality AA/FDs. Funny cars arrived in 1965, Dick Landy, Sox & Martin, Malcolm Durham and Dave Strickler among them, along with A/GS coupes such as Shores & Hess, the Kohler Bros., Jack Coonrod and Mike Mitchell. He first saw fuel altereds there, watching Willie Borsch beat Sush Matsubara, Leon Fitzgerald and Leroy Chadderton one night. He snuck out of the house, begged rides and slipped in through the woods to get there, and made lifelong friends including Jerry Ruth, Jim Green, Mike Miller, Jim Warter, Fred Vosk and Richard Schroeder.

Marshall had leased the strip in the 1960s from John Thun, who built and owned the airfield, and in January 1969 Craig Breedlove bought the lease, planning to move his racing operation there. Thun sold the airfield to Pierce County in the early 1970s. Under International Raceway Parks the track closed in September 1978, with a motocross event on September 13 as its last race.