One Man Had Street Smarts

Sometime in the fall of 1973, Dan Gurney was showing a couple of visitors through his All American Racers shop in Santa Ana when he casually asked, “What would you guys think of a Formula One race in Long Beach?”

“Long Beach! Are you kidding?” I blurted out. “Where, up and over Signal Hill,” I added, facetiously.

“No, right down Ocean Boulevard,” Gurney said.

“That is the silliest thing I ever heard,” I replied.

Harold Hogan, then with Times special events, was more gracious, commenting, “It sounds sort of like Monte Carlo, but Long Beach isn’t quite Monaco.”

“Where in the world did you get a crazy idea like that?” I asked Gurney.

“Some travel agent from England asked me to help him get a race there,” Gurney said. “I thought he was touched in the head when he started talking about it, but the more he talked, the better the idea sounded. I think he’s about sold the Long Beach city fathers on it.”

The travel agent was Chris Pook.

The silliest thing I ever heard of will have its 30th running April 18, not down Ocean Boulevard but still in downtown Long Beach -- a totally different downtown.

Thirty years ago, Ocean Boulevard wasn’t the businesslike thoroughfare it is today with its fashionable hotels, its World Trade Center and Wells Fargo building. Then, it was largely seedy bars, porn parlors and pawn shops catering to servicemen.

On Sept. 28, 1975, when a Formula 5000 race was held so that Pook could demonstrate to the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile that he could fulfill his promises, the main Ocean Boulevard attractions were the Majestic Theatre, showing X-rated “Sodom & Gomorrah,” the Senior Citizens’ Recreation Center, International Tower, Breakers International Hotel and the Prestige Apartments, where a penthouse suite served as race headquarters.

Only the Long Beach Arena, Rainbow Lagoon and an under-construction Convention Center and Auditorium were inside the two-mile track. There was no sign of a Hyatt Regency hotel.

Race day was like nothing ever experienced in downtown Long Beach. Of the estimated 75,000 spectators, about 20,000 were outside the circuit, hanging from the balconies, rooftops and windows of the Kona, the Breakers and the International Tower, many with cool drinks in hand.

It was not lost on citizens that cars were screaming at 170 mph down streets posted with a 40-mph speed limit.

The late Allen Wolfe asked in the Long Beach Press-Telegram: “Can a city whose athletic tradition is steeped in lawn bowling, checkers and day boats out of Belmont Pier find true happiness as a mecca for international Grand Prix racing?”

Mario Andretti, who proved to be the catalyst for the success of the event when he won the Long Beach race in 1977 and the Formula One championship the following year, was as skeptical as the rest of us.

“I never thought it would happen in America,” Andretti said on the eve of the inaugural race, which was won by British driver Brian Redman.

True to Pook’s concept of producing an “international” race, the first six finishers were foreign drivers.

It also passed muster with the FIA, which sanctioned an unprecedented second Formula One race in the United States for March 1976. Also on the schedule was the traditional October race at Watkins Glen, N.Y.

Where did this audacious idea come from?

Pook said he got the idea while he was sitting in his American Aviation Travel Services office in downtown Long Beach, listening to the rain-shortened Indianapolis 500 in 1973.

“The thought came to me that we ought to hold a race, a Monaco-style Grand Prix, in Long Beach,” recalled Pook, who began following his dream by inviting members of the city’s convention bureau to lunch in his favorite booth at Lombardo’s on Linden Avenue, just off Ocean Boulevard. It was there that he sold the idea.

“I kept going back to that same booth when I talked with Gurney, and Les Richter, and newspaper guys who never thought [a race] would happen. It was my lucky booth,” Pook said.

The 555 Chop House now occupies the old Lombardo’s site.

“The weather, the locale, everything was perfect, except that everybody I talked with thought I was nuts,” Pook continued. “Gurney said he thought I was crazy. Richter said I was nuts. So did you,” he added with a smirk.

But he persisted.

Pook had seen signs proclaiming Long Beach an “International City,” and he had seen the Queen Mary berthed in the harbor, but he felt his adopted city needed more. He also knew that with his contacts, if a Formula One race came to Long Beach, he could reap a lot of business for his travel agency.

“The Long Beach Grand Prix will be more than a race, it will be a merchandising tool for the city,” said the Briton, who had arrived in Long Beach in 1967 as a 26-year-old.

“The city has an identity problem,” he told the Chamber of Commerce and Convention Bureau.

“It had hoped to cure the problem with the Queen Mary, but it didn’t do the job,” Pook said. “Long Beach just isn’t a household name. I was looking for something to take it out of the shadows of Disneyland and Los Angeles, to get its own identity around the world. I wanted to see that Long Beach dateline on papers in Europe and South America, as well as New York and Chicago.

“In most people’s minds, it was still Iowa West.”

For many years, Long Beach had been the site of one of the largest picnics in the country, the annual Iowa State Society gathering in Recreation Park.

Even with approval from the city, the FIA and, finally, the Coastal Commission, the race came precariously close to not coming off.

Crews were still building grandstands, hauling concrete blocks in place around the course and putting up fencing to keep kibitzers out when Vern Schuppan took Gurney’s blue Eagle out as the first car on the circuit. The first day’s practice got underway three hours late.

On Sunday, the featured Formula 5000 race started nearly two hours past its posted time.

Two years later, things were no better. In fact, they were worse. The Grand Prix Assn. was nearly $400,000 in debt and close to bankruptcy. F1 czar Bernie Ecclestone said his cars would not run without prize money up front, and track construction was halted while workers threatened to unionize.

In a bit of illusion that would do justice to David Copperfield, Pook and Jim Michaelian, his right-hand man who is now president of the Grand Prix Assn. of Long Beach, smoothed over the rough spots and the race went on.

“We offered our creditors 35 cents on the dollar, we raised cash at the last second to pay the purse and we unionized the workers,” Pook said.

After Andretti won with a last-lap pass of South African Jody Scheckter and then won the world championship, the race became a happening, enough so that some Formula One followers jokingly referred to Monaco as Long Beach East.

There were major changes in 1983. Development along Ocean Boulevard -- thanks in part to the city’s race-inspired new image -- prompted movement of the course off the main thoroughfare, and that year’s race was also the last for Formula One.

Pook decided that paying to transport Ecclestone’s Formula One traveling circus to Long Beach was too expensive and traded in his $2-million payout to F1 for a $500,000 investment in CART Indy cars.

For several years, attendance fell off, then returned in larger numbers than before.

“The event itself became bigger than the race,” Pook said a few years ago. “It’s not really a motor-car race, it’s a happening of Americana.”

Nevertheless, I would still say what I said in 1973. At the time, it was the silliest idea I had ever heard.

See you on the 18th, silly or not.*

Toyota Grand Prix

of Long Beach

* Where: Streets of downtown Long Beach

* Race: April 18, 1 p.m.

* Qualifying: Friday, 2-3 p.m.; Saturday, 1:45-2:45 p.m.

* TV: Spike TV (race only)