Hot Rod Racing Before The War - Hare & Hound

The May 2009 issue of Rod & Custom will feature a story on hot rodding in Southern California before the Second World War, focussing on the guys racing at the dry lakes during the late Thirties and early Forties.

In the course of interviewing people for the article, I got to spend some enjoyable time with Ed Iskenderian and John Athan. Both of them were participants in that whole scene, and both of them reminded me about the hare and hound races that were popular in those days.

I'd read about this races in other histories of early hot rodding, and know that rodders today have held their own hare and hound races, but had never heard an actual first-person account until sitting down with Ed and John. I had to leave that information out of the magazine article because I was running out of room and because it didn't specifically related to the dry lakes-but here is the story of the hare and hound races, straight from the memories of Isky and John.

Ed Iskenderian: "The San Fernando Valley was way out in the country back then, with big long streets and maybe a quarter or half mile between cross streets. A pickup truck would go 10 minutes earlier or so, and he'd have paper sacks of lime, about a pound of lime in each one. He'd drop a sack in the road a couple hundred feet before an intersection. We'd wait for him to get ahead of us, then all the roadsters would follow him. If you saw a lime spot on the road-it showed up in your headlights real good at night-you knew he'd been there. But you didn't know if he went straight ahead, left, or right at the intersection. They guy in the lead roadster would have to take a chance. You knew you were right if you saw another lime sack 200 or 300 feet past the intersection. If you didn't, you were going the wrong way and you would have to turn around.

"If the guys behind would see the car ahead of them turning around, they knew he did it wrong, and they'd go in one of the other directions.There was a lot of confusion, and the guy in the lead could end up last if he went the wrong way."

John Athan: "Ed had his dad's Model A at the time, and we'd go up. It was a buck a head and there would be about 30 or 40 cars out there. You can imagine trying to figure out which is the right way. If you're wrong you had to come back. So we're laughing and going that way and the other way. And then we get to one corner and we're cutting the corner, and there's a lady there-on some farm out there-and she's out there with a broom trying to hit all these cars!

"One time, we made the right turn with the bag and all of a sudden we're in the lead. and we're thinking 'Oh man!,' because if you win you get the 40 bucks. And here come all these hot rods behind us, and they're passing us going 70 or 80 miles an hour. Somebody else won it and we all headed back to Beverly Hills to talk about it."