Samoa Airport (Eureka)

History

The Blockbusters Car Club held its first drag race at Eureka’s airport on October 26, 1952, with help from the Road Knights and Saints car clubs. Cars were timed with stopwatches over a measured quarter mile, with a quarter mile of shutdown room. In 1953 the clubs joined to form the Humboldt Timing Association so they could run races the same way each time, buy electric timing gear and pay for insurance. The first NHRA-sanctioned event was on November 21, 1954, though NHRA reportedly says it began sanctioning Samoa in 1953. The Redwood Championship began in 1955. The second one, on September 23, 1956, drew about 500 people to watch sixty cars and eight motorcycles, and Miss Humboldt of 1956, Norma Anderton, handed out trophies. The Shafters car club’s roadster had top speed at 129 mph, breaking its own track record. Races ran every two months in 1957, when Dave Lindstrom and Gene Calanchini tied for the year’s fastest time at 112.50 mph, and the third Redwood Championships ran September 22, 1957.

Racing stopped in 1958 and early 1959 while the city of Eureka built a drag strip near the airport. It came back on August 23, 1959, after two years off, on the airport runway because the auxiliary strip wasn’t finished. That meet had NHRA sanction and was open only to cars with brakes on all four wheels. In 1960 the races moved to the auxiliary landing strip. That August the timing association asked the city for a $900 loan from its airport fund to build a return road, but the city attorney turned it down and told them to get a bank loan. Orvil Wilson played a big part in building the drag strip in 1967, and in 1981 it was officially renamed The Orvil Wilson Memorial Park for Off Street Vehicles. It still runs as an NHRA-sanctioned quarter-mile strip.