Growing up around cars leads to need for speed

Before he was old enough to drive, Bill Stuart knew more about cars than most people learn in a lifetime.

Stuart started working on cars with his father when he was 13-years-old. Stuart’s father, Bill Sr., was “a pretty, darn good mechanic”, who worked on cars and sold them in the family’s front yard.

“In the early ‘70s, we were told the world was running out of oil,” said Stuart. “All of these dealers were taking the muscle cars — the big engine hot rod factory cars — to the sale. Dad always said, ‘Kids are still going to want to be kids.’ That’s really how he started. I know some of the cars are still around. Road Runners, Super Bs, Chargers — these are the cars Dad would sell, and he would get them at the sale.”

Stuart said, for about two days, he thought he wanted to do something other than work on cars, so he got a job on the meat counter at Fareway.

“I’ll never forget my first day,” said Stuart. “I was thinking, ‘This isn’t for me.’ One day, after school, I popped into the shop and Dad said, ‘What are you doing? Aren’t you supposed to be working?’ I said, ‘No. I quit.’ He said, ‘Well, get in the house and change your clothes and then get out here.’ From then on, there hasn’t been a day I haven’t been here.”

Bill Sr. also raced circle track and Stuart remembers going with him to the track and thinking, “There’s got to be a better way of racing where you weren’t tearing up your stuff.”

Drag racing

Stuart was only 14- or 15-years-old when the the new Highway 34 was opened. He couldn’t drive yet, but he remembers there was drag racing on a strip of the old Highway 34.

“They called it the ‘34 Nationals’,” Stuart said. “It was on a Sunday afternoon. A bunch of guys got together and there were several cars. I missed out on that because I was a little too young, but it was really cool. Frank White won the event with a ‘69 Z-28, but who beat him overall was Gary Spencer. Gary had a Triumph motorcycle.”

Although Stuart had a choice of cars he could drive after he got his license, his favorite, the car he spent the most time and money on, was a 1955 Chevrolet — and it was fast.

“That’s the one that everybody has classified as the King or Queen of the street,” said Stuart. “I’ve raced that car hundreds of times. I’d have quite a retirement portfolio if I had matched everything I put into that car over the many years.”

The ‘55 was built for speed, and Stuart liked to showcase that speed by pitting it against other cars in the area by running drag races on the weekends on North Cherry Street north of Casey’s General Store.

“Later, when they redid Cherry Street Road by REA, that was a much better road and you didn’t have any hills,” said Stuart. “From the tracks we’d run south. For the most part, local guys would run against each other.”

Stuart said, all their races started out as quarter mile runs. However, soon after Rick Carter moved to Creston from St. Joseph with his yellow Ford Mustang and introduced them to eighth mile races, all the races were run at the shorter distance.

“It was a shorter race, so you had to gear your cars different to make them quicker,” said Stuart.

Stuart said, it was a different time the. For the most part, because they knew Stuart and the other racers weren’t causing trouble, the police didn’t bother them much.

“It wasn’t legal, but at the same time they weren’t real strict on it like they could have been,” said Stuart. “They were pretty forgiving. You could make some noise and stuff as long as you weren’t getting reckless.”

Winning a race gave the driver bragging rights. Competition was friendly, Stuart said, and usually resulted in a tweak of the engine here or there if a driver lost a race.

Cruising Adams Street

Stuart said cars would cruise Adams Street and make some noise to let people know there was going to be a race later in the evening.

The cruise route started on Adams Street, went around McKinley Lake, which was paved all the way around at the time, back up Adams Street and around North Maple, West Montgomery, North Elm streets back to Adams Street.

Stuart said sometimes drivers would turn around in the swimming pool parking lot near McKinley Lake, and the route almost always included a loop through Lil’ Duffer and A&W restaurants on West Taylor Street. He added that for a brief time, Mondo’s, on North Sumner Avenue, saw some cruising traffic.

“It was an ego deal,” said Stuart. “You had to have noise. Some guys got by with just removing the headers so their car was a little louder and putting on some nice wheels. It was easy to take the mufflers off. They had header mufflers and in a couple minutes after you unbolted them — three bolts — and you were ‘uncapped,’ as they called it. Maybe you put a different carburetor on so it performed better.”

Stuart pointed out that the movie “American Graffiti” — from the cruising to the drag race at the end — was almost exactly like what a person would see in Creston on a Saturday night.

Stuart said he’s disappointed that he didn’t have the foresight to document his cruising and racing days as those days were bit of Americana that people will never get to see.