Racing Through Time: Arlington’s Open-Wheel Legacy

“Racing Through Time: Arlington’s Open-Wheel Legacy” hits the track as the newest episode of Arlington Archives. Host OK Carter teams up with Erica Rousseau, Processing Archivist with University of Texas at Arlington Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives, to uncover the city’s nearly forgotten racing era just in time for the Java House Grand Prix of Arlington March 13–15, 2026.

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Welcome to Arlington Archives, the podcast that dives deep into the stories that shaped the American Dream City. As Arlington celebrates 150 years of history and progress, we're bringing you the voices and legacies that make this city a cornerstone of Texas and a proud part of America's story. I'm your host OK Carter. And this esteemed scholar is today's co-host. UTA Special Collections processing archivist, Erica Rousseau. Hey, Erica. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you for having me. Stick around and do all the podcast about Arlington and you become an expert on this city's colorful history. Our topic today is a bit of Arlington’s past that only really old timers are maybe archivist, know about. For just a brief, shining and very noisy years, Arlington was a southwest hub for open wheel auto racing. Ready to go, Erica? Let's do it. We'll get to that auto racing business in a second. But first, let's have just a brief overview of Special Collections at UTA, which one of my favorite places, by the way of which I've sent many, many people too, over the years. Thank you so much. So at UT Arlington Special Collections, we are the University Archives, so we have housed the entire history of the university there. And we also hold collections that have to do with Texas history. So, pre Texas, early Texas, Texas regional history, US-Mexico War history. We are the home of the Texas political history, collection. The Texas labor collection were the largest, archive of Texas labor history in the state. We also housed Texas disability history. And so all in archive is for those who don't know is a we are a repository. We're a place that hold old documents so that they can be researched and accessed by the public. Okay. I, I have a little bit of, background. Part of this is that, the Star-Telegram, the Fort Worth Star Telegram from about 1902 to 1992, kept what they call a morgue of all of their clips, all of their photos. And, when they went digital back in 1992, who ended up with all that stuff. That is us. We are the official now photo morgue of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram collection. I've got that is it's interesting because I, like I say, I've seen a lot of people up there, but but, I had a guy got the other days says Well, it's. Hey, maybe they'll digitalize that soon. Yes. I don't think so, because I think there are millions. And as it turns out, 3 million. Right? 3 million. Yes, sir. Okay, let's get around to it. Now. You are, a collection archivist. So my official title is Processing Archivist, but I'll take whatever you want to call me. That is. That is a mouthful. So you're searching. You're searching for stuff all the time. So eventually, you came upon what we're going to talk about today, which is that racing history. Tell us a little bit about it. Yeah. So I, am a lifelong race fan. I grew up watching racing with my dad, and now my husband is really into racing. He's a mechanic, so I'm just constantly surrounded by cars. And, I knew that the, Arlington Grand Prix was coming up, and I thought, there has to be some race history here. Like somewhere. So I just started digging, and I found a few mentions of auto racing at Arlington Downs, the horse track that we used to have here. And but nothing really dug into it. So I spent some time and myself and a colleague kind of just dug into the Fort Worth Star-Telegram collection, because our best guess was that, if there was something that big going on, the Star-Telegram was going to send a reporter out. And thankfully, we were right. And we found some great negatives that had never been printed before, either in the Star-Telegram or anywhere. And, got to dig in into that history. So it's kind of cool. This is pretty useful at the moment because, right before we're taping this, just a few days before, the Java House Grand Prix of Arlington, which I think was March 13th through 15th. So you put together an exhibition about this era, which is open wheel racing, which was popular in the late 1940s and 50s. In fact, the Indy racing is open wheel now, but, your, your exhibition that you put together is called Uncovered Speed The Legacy of open wheel Racing. And. All right, when was this? So the Arlington era of open wheel racing, was specifically from 1947 to 1950. So there was just three years, three short years, but there were five races held during that time span of open wheel racing. And an open wheel race car is just a car that doesn't have the wheels underneath the chassis, like in a wheel well. So think of a modern Indy car or a formula One car or things like that. But they used to call midget racers to the up there midget racers. And I think something called a big car sprint car, which is, which is, which is what they would have called a big car back then. We have now extinguished my total knowledge about open wheel, racing. So I hope you know a lot. but I can add to this is that that during World War two, there were tens and thousands, tens of thousands of of young men who went to war. And they were acquainted with a couple of things. One was the state of art mechanical technology at the time. And you got aircraft and planes and and vehicles and all that kind of stuff. And a lot of them have never had this exposure. So the US emerges out of World War Two with sort of a renewed appetite, really, for speed, spectacle, technology, and all this stuff that they can use these military skills that they've, that they've used. And that's kind of, how, you know, open, open wheel racing is all about, is it not? Yeah. No, absolutely it is. There's some of the fastest cars out there. And so it is all about speed and adrenaline and and yeah. Excitement. Okay. I'm going to back up just a second because, we had a guy, very wealthy man here named WT Waggoner Yes, sir. And in 1929 he built a horse racing track. Thoroughbred racing track, which was, terribly successful economically and in terms of audiences and crowds that it attracted. And so, unfortunately, this was during the depression. And also we're kind of in the Bible Belt. There's a lot of hostility to the track and the racing. So, the track basically was open just for a few years, with legal, pari mutuel betting. And then the legislature shut it down in 1937. So there's the question of what you're going to do with the track. And they used it for carnivals. They used it for, all kinds of different racing. They used it for special events, but eventually you'd get around to what you found, this open car racing. So, fans were flocking to tracks all over. Indianapolis 500 is a good way to talk about it. So you went through all these archives? And tell me what you found. So at first the first thing we found were just the photographs and, but I wanted to know, I mean you know, a picture can only tell us so much. I wanted to know a little more. So I got to digging online and I found some great forums, for people that gave information of, of, race results and things like that. And we also had already in the collection some great maps, some overview maps of Arlington Downs. And then I kind of started digging outside of our collection to try to grow it a little bit because there was so little racing history, that we already held in the collection. And so I went and sourced a couple of race programs from, in 1947 and 1948 race at Arlington Downs that, a really, really neat if you get a chance to come to UTA to come view them. And the exhibit is open for anybody to view, but they have like the spectators notes and you could see where they were keeping times in them and keeping track of each racer and who didn't finish. And so not only does it have great, racing history, it has that fun like spectator aspect to it, too. Yeah. As as these veterans return, they they've had a taste. They've you've been to war. You have a taste for adrenaline now. And also as people as these races became more popular, media coverage of them began to expand this. I mean, you're beginning to see newsreels really expound you, and you begin to see, this is, well, too early for television, but we're about into that era. And but all of these media things introduced racing to a really a wider, a wider audience, did it not? Absolutely. Yeah. And and then we had, a regional tracks that sprung up across the Midwest and, the west creating sort of a pipeline of drivers and teams. And one of those tracks was probably the leading track in the southwest was where Arlington Downs and okay, so these are cars and and these are front engine cars, right? Yes. Most most have a single seat. Most of them are single seat. There's a brief period in the 30s where they were dual seaters, but most of them are single seats. Yeah. So and but you basically have a sport that's kind of on the cusp of transformation, don't you? Absolutely. So I know you've got one famous driver who won a lot of those with this 47 to 50. Yes. So, Ted Horn is is one of his winning pictures. He's hoisting the Waggoner Cup in the exhibit. It's one of my favorite pictures in the collection. And one is one of the most prominent in the exhibit. And Ted Horn was the first person to win three consecutive AAA Championship Car championships, period. So he kind of started that winning streak and that drive to want to win so many in a row. Unfortunately, in the 1947 season, he lost his life at the final race of the season, of the championship season. So he won the championship post posthumously. But that season started in Arlington Downs, where he won. And we have the photograph of him winning that cup. And then in Du Quoin, Illinois, unfortunately, he lost his life in a race. The dangerous thing, I think some of the famous racers in that era, Bill Milkovich, Wilbur Shaw, and, we mentioned already the subset of this particular thing, these midget things. And you say the sprint cars are the big one. So. Tell us about the actual exhibit yourself. I know it's a small exhibit, and, if you don't know if you've never been to Special Collections, it's not like a museum, exactly, exhibition. It’s come and go. It's on the sixth floor of the library. Yes, sir. You take the elevator. The sixth floor, and then you walk out into the. foyer most. Most of the exhibits are right there. We first walk out. Yep. Where this one is. And that's exactly when you open the elevator. You walk out there right there to your left and turn to your left. Okay. So I know it's a small exhibit and, and by the way, if you hadn't have found this, this probably would have disappeared from Arlington history forever because there just isn't that much. I went back and looked in some 1950s citizen journal clips and things about them, although it was a citizen and the journal back in those days and they simply were not covering. Well, I found that quite often and whenever I was looking at news newspaper specifically where it would just kind of be a snippet of like, oh, also there's a race going on. I was like, well, like, I want to know more. What does that what does that mean? There's a race going on. They're just they still we're kind of into that football, baseball, exactly that sort of mindset and that. And I think that's probably why that you found so few pictures as well. The other is that those cameras of that era are typically, those sort of gigantic graphic things you see in the old movies, flashbulbs. And they tended not to have super shutter speeds, and be very slow. So it's difficult to get a moving some action shots. I mean, we were lucky that we have I think there's three action shots in the exhibit. But even those you can tell it's it's some antiquated technology. Yeah, I'm sure they're they're slightly fuzzy. Yes. Just a tad. Some of it's just a tad plus. The years have not been kind to those those old emulsions have. No. And thankfully, at UTA we have a huge it's called our cold storage vault. And that's where all of our photo negatives are kept. And so it's essentially a giant walk in freezer. And so we're doing our best to preserve them. But some of them are a little rough. Okay. Well I think the the track might have picked up a little fame along the way because, towards the end of the tenure, there might have been the very last race they had. We actually tell the story little Clark Gable. Yeah. So in 1950, Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwick starred in a film called To Please a Lady. And, the film centers around this, this grizzled war hero that Clark Gable is. And, he is postwar, doesn't really know what to do. So he starts racing and is kind of a dangerous racer, falls in love with Barbara Stanwyck along the way. And and of course, of course. And, so he's kind of finding himself you see this, going off on a tangent here, but you see this kind of, theme in films post-World War Two where it's, more kind of grizzled coming to terms with reality, coming to terms with war. And so veterans trying to trying to find themselves postwar. And this film is no different, even though it's a little more of a kind of a romance, if you would, I guess. So it's actually some of the footage from the track. It's actually made it to the movie, did it not? Yes, sir. So any, any scene in the film where they're on a dirt track was filmed at Arlington Downs. I, I looked up, I thought, well, hey, maybe, it being Gable and Stanwick that that, won an Academy Award or something. And evidently, evidently it wasn't the, the Academy Award. I don't think so. I have yet to see it. Winning genre I sent you, by the way? I found a couple of photos. Yes, I got it. I sent to you, but now I will have to send the podcast crew those same photos. Okay, so you end up with what? Maybe it's a small collection. Yep. There's about 8 to 10 photographs in the collection, along with a signed program from To Please a Lady. So from that race, that 1950 race that they held, to film for the movie signed by Clark Gable. We also have an overhead, map of the Downs track, and then those two programs that I mentioned earlier. Interesting. Well, in case people out there don't know what happened to Arlington Downs right around the race itself. Stopped for this particular type of racing. What, 1957? Yeah, I think they had some other dirt track stuff and there's some car racing and things other and stock car racing, other things there. But, around 1957, a, an entrepreneur named Angus Wynne bought the old the entire old W.T. Waggoner place I think was around 6000 acres, plus a lot of other stuff. And he and he created from that Great Southwest Industrial District. And then, then very soon after that, they need a little funding mechanism. So he created the first Six Flags, over Texas. There's a historical marker. Yes, it was three. It's so is it Six Flags Road? Yes. Road to Six Flags and then Six Flags Road which is off a Division. And then another historical marker I think when Randol Mill. Yes sir that you can find out other than that there, there's no hint in Arlington that this was ever part of the city's identity, even though at the time it was, really kind of a, you know, substitute for frontier victory, I guess. Absolutely. It's it's kind of outside of those two historical markers kind of wiped off. And, I did an overlay of, of where the old track would have been in comparison to the new track that we'll see this weekend, and they are less than half a mile away from each other. If you if you could take a turn on that street and that would have that, I think Six Flags Road, it would actually be on the western edge of the track and then and 3 or 4 blocks to the left, you would, you would be able to hear modern Indy racing. Exactly. So everything there, everything old comes around someday. Absolutely. Okay. the exhibits on right now. Right. And I know you've extended a little bit how long will actually be up in special collections? So the exhibit will be on view until March 30th. So the through the end of March and, yeah, it's it's available right now, open and ready for people to come check out. Price is right? Free. Free 99 showing up there. Okay. Okay. This I appreciate your time for this. Of course, you need to catch our special collections. You know, Erica are there are a particular type of collections up there that you want to brag about that are up there that would be great for people to have as a reference before we depart from this thing. Oh geez, there's so many great things to see up there. So much great, Arlington history and specific, our most popular Arlington collection is the Berachah Home Collection, which was a home in town for what they called erring and wayward girls. So that is, that is, constantly pulled collection. People love to see that one. Really, we have a great Six Flags map, the very first Six Flags map that was put out of, like the amusement park, which is fantastic. And we're just happy to poll whatever people want to see. We keep the archives for people to use them, so we encourage everybody to come check us out. be sure to subscribe and share this podcast for more stories, historical photos, and ways to get involved in Arlington’s 150th anniversary. Visit Arlington150.com and follow us@CityOfArlington on social media. Until then, let's keep honoring our past and pave the way for what's next. The story of Arlington is still being written and you're part of it. So long.