Found photos : Three lost decades of Iowa Speedway recovered. With Merlin Benning, Lester “Red” Dralle. Claus Stricker, Don & Dick Feckers & Red Droste. 1950>1970.

TUNIS SPEEDWAY, WATERLOO, IOWA, U.S.A.

1950/1960/1970

The race tower at Tunis Speedway where the races were monitored and announced. Pictured are left to right, Claus Stricker, promoter, Dale Hansen, announcer, Leroy (Tiny) Russell, set up and spotter, and Jim Fickess, sports writer for the Waterloo Courier and statistician. (1970)

In the late 1940s, Judd L. Tunis, a local meat cutter and sausage maker was tired of loading up horses and hauling them 25 miles away just to exercise them on a track. He bought 52 acres of field beside Highway 218 on the city limits of Waterloo in eastern Iowa and built himself a horse track there. It was a 1/2 mile long and complete with bleachers.

“I was raised with horses,” said Judd later, “I love ‘em. I built the track in 1947 as a place to work out my horses because I had to go all the way to Waverly to do it,”

“I paid $200 an acre for the land,” he said, “The top price at the time was $150 an acre. Everyone called me a damn fool.”

Tunis’s Speedway began in 1948. One account says it was all Judd’s son-in-law, Bill Higgins’s idea. In this version Higgins persuaded Judd it was a great idea to build a another track inside his horse track to race midget cars on. With the help of the gloriously named Ira “Speed” Chumley, Judd built a steep banked, oval shaped 1/4 mile dirt track within his horse track.

In a 1975 interview Judd himself said it was “John Gerber of Davenport, who was staging midget races at Cedar Rapids and Davenport, talked me into building a quarter-mile track and we’ve been in racing ever since.”

*“Added Attraction – Grudge Race”*
*Tunis Speedway ad* (1953)

Tunis Speedway hosted bikes as well as midget car racing when it opened. The following year, men began arriving in huge misshapen jalopies. Stock car racers. Locals rode the stocks there like they stole them for cash prizes of up to $3000, it was wholesome carnage and spectators arrived too. In droves. Week after week, huge crowds of up to 10,000 people turned up for Tunis’s Speedway. Tunis ran the show for 17 years then contracted a racing association to put on the Sunday night races. In 1973, Judd gave Claus Stricker, a local driver racer from Cedar Falls, the contract to promote and run the races. Judd stay around, in the thick of it, never missing a race day. “There are always a few little details that need tending to,” he would say, “Seems like someone always wants something. The other night, I jumped in and helped one of the ticket sellers,”

After two decades of racing, Judd Tunis made an error in the sixties that almost pulled the handbrake on his speedway dreams. He sold off a portion of his property to a department store group and quickly discovered that the survey details on his land were way out and he’d mistakenly sold off turn four of the track, The new owners of turn four wouldn’t sell it back to Tunis but did allow him to continue racing.

By 1983 Tunis, fed up with continual complaints about the noise, closed the doors to his venue ending three decades of racing.

Incredibly only two deaths occurred in 3 decades of racing at Tunis’s speedway. Neither had anything to do with with stock car racing. One was a boy who fell from a horse he was riding on the track and died from his injuries and the other, a thrill show performer who was killed during his act.

“It was the Lee Overland Thrill Show,” remembered Tunis wistfully, “Some guy had an act where he blew himself up with 12 sticks of dynamite while he laid sealed in a coffin. Something went wrong that night.”

Credits :: to Jim Volgarino for posting both images & captions to the found photography repository, FORTEPAN IOWA : “Lost Tracks” section of speedwayandroadracehistory.com : The History of Cedar Rapids and Eastern Iowa Car Culture, Street and Racing Facebook group ; midwestracingarchives.com

MERLIN BENNING

*Merlin Benning emerging from his car at Tunis Speedway* (1965)

Merlin Benning, from Waverly, Iowa, began his racing career at Tunis in 1959. This 1933 Ford coupe was his second race car after he wrecked his first, a 1940 Mercury.

Benning’s 1933 Ford in retirement on the
Benning farm in Waverly, Iowa. (ca.1963)

He purchased the 1933 Ford from brothers Lloyd and Bob Hesse of Waterloo, painted “17” on the doors, got Dick’s Conoco of Waverly to sponsor him and raced the it from 1959 to 1963. He retired #17 at his farm outside Waverly.

*Merlin Benning, pictured in 1885 with one of his first race cars, the #17 1933 Ford coupe, and a car he drove in the 1980s.*

BOB HILMER

*Bob Hilmer at Tunis Speedway, ca. 1960.*

CLAUS STRICKER

TUNIS ca. 1950

It’s easy to see how, in the mid 1800s, Paul Gustave Doré “hypnotized the widest public ever captured by a major illustrator”. Even Van Gogh was a fan, he copied Doré shortly before shooting himself.

Obscurity

*An undentified female driver at Tunis* (1955)

Betty Halligan, a driver from Waterloo
recieving a trophy (1959)

*Waterloo Savings Bank window display promoting the recently opened Tunis Speedway* (1955)

*Racers with their chequered livery belonging to the Petersen family* (ca. 1955)

*The Petersen family was involved in racing at Tunis for a number of years. (ca. 1955)*

*Race driver John Hill at left, with his crew, (left to right), Stan Hermanson, Marty Robinson and Ronnie Nye at Tunis (1964*)

Tunis driver & Waterloo local, Bill Zwanziger raced many types of vehicles over the years including midget cars. Here he is in the mid-1950s in a midget racer at Waterloo’s Hippodrome Auditorium. The venue hosted many indoor midget racing events during the 1950s. (1955)

*1949 Ford race car at Tunis, sponsored by Custom Paint Shop, 2507 Logan Ave., Waterloo* (1955)

Driver Arnie Spore (holding flag on left) and his wife Verna (front) celebrate Arnie’s win in at at Tunis (1955)

*Charlie Moffit, an Iowa city driver* (1955)

DON FECKERS

*Don and Dick Feckers from Waterloo, raced at Tunis Speedway from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s.*
(Tunis Sppedway, 1965)

RED DROSTE

*Red Droste at Tunis Speedway, well before race cars had safety equipment that would keep gas from flooding from a rolling car.*(1950)

*Red Droste at Tunis Speedway* (ca.1950)

*Red Droste is driving the car directly behind the #142 car which is about the flip over.* (ca.1950)

*Tunis Speedway racer, Red Droste* (ca.1950)

*A racer belonging to Red Droste in the parking lot of Red’s Auto Service on Independence Avenue in Waterloo, Iowa. The child is Red and June Droste’s 3 year old son, Rich.* (ca. 1950)

On the forecourt of his transmission repair business in Waterloo, Tunis Speedway racer Red Droste sits in a Studebaker race car he purchased from a racer from Florida. It had cut down doors, a full roll cage and, so the driver could get a better view of the track, steering moved to the centre of the car. (1950)

*A Droste ride that came to an abrupt finish at Tunis in the ’50s.*

Around 1960, Red Droste, drove the first convertible race car to campaign at Tunis Speedway. The steering and driver position were placed in the centre of the car which was sponsored by Schukei Chevrolet in Waterloo.
(ca. 1960)

*Racing was a family affair. Red Droste’s brother-in-law, Don Graham, also from Waterloo, and racer at Tunis* (1950)

AL RUNYAN

JOHN HILL

HERMAN WENZE

*A totally trashed Herman Wenze racer.* (ca. 1950)

TUNIS ca. 1970

Russ Tucker, of Evansdale, Iowa, injured at Tunis in a 1971 mini-stocks roll-over accident when
his car spun sideways after striking another car, throwing him out.

Driver, Larry Wasserfort at Tunis Speedway (1975)
*Wasserfort began racing in 1970. He raced at Tunis and many Midwest dirt tracks during his career.* (1975)

LESTER “RED” DRAILLE

*Lester “Red” Dralle raced regularly at Hawkeye Downs, Independence Motor and Tunis Speedways in addition to competing at special events throughout the Midwest during the 60’s and 70’s.* (c.1970)

Lester “Red” Dralle of Waterloo, Iowa passed away on October 25, 2010.
From left, Larry Kemp, Judd Tunis, Sandy Scott (trophy girl), Red Dralle. (1975)

It’s although nothing at all happened. Today, the Tunis Speedway site is resting, re-wilding itself, morphing to its former, natural self. A lonely, scrabbly field beside Highway 218, city limits of Waterloo, Iowa.

Helene Schjerfbeck began as a precociously skilled, slightly melancholic late-19th-century academic realist. She finished as a painter whose sublime abstract images are an exquisite harmony of pure paint and cryptic description.

“I have to draw to the point of madness, just draw. Just work, work and think of nothing else”, said the brilliant Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It did him no good, he was just another “degenerate” artist to the Nazis.

From hat shop girl to Dutch art icon. But who was the Girl in the Kimono? The opaque story of an 1890s working class teenager immortalised by George Hendrik Breitner.

Descendant of samurai and relentless entrepreneur, Ogawa Kazumasa opened Tokyo’s first photo studio, shot Japan’s art treasures, the 100 prettiest geisha in Tokyo and taught photography to the military. His legacy is these exquisite images of flowers.

L’Estampe Moderne; the 1890s Parisian Art Nouveau “best of” album feat. various international artists. 4 lithographs every month. Just 3₣r 50c an issue.

It’s easy to see how, in the mid 1800s, Paul Gustave Doré “hypnotized the widest public ever captured by a major illustrator”. Even Van Gogh was a fan, he copied Doré shortly before shooting himself.

In the 1890s the Dutch painter, George Hendrik Breitner took nude reference photos for his paintings. In the 1990s they were found.

Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. 1880s free love messiah, naturist, pacifist, vegetarian, sun worshipper and unique symbolist painter.