Slot Cars | Woody, Skeeter and Huey

There were a lot of cool crazes in the Sixties. From surfing, both the aquatic and sidewalk varieties, to superballs, tie-dyes to troll dolls, mini-skirts to mood rings, go-go boots to granny glasses, the Twist to turtlenecks, the decade was defined by these fads and a host of others. In 1965, a craze hit the States and took off, bringing millions of boys, teenagers and dads along with it. I’m talking about slot cars.

Slot car tracks opened in just about every suburban neighborhood in the country. The tracks were big and made from wood. Most tracks consisted of eight lanes had featured hills, hairpin turns, high banked curves and long straightaways where you could really open up your miniature Maserati. You bought time on the lanes, generally in fifteen or thirty-minute increments. My father built and raced model airplanes, so naturally he and I jumped into the slot car scene with both feet, along with my cousin Herb and Uncle Tub. Herb and Uncle Tub lived in Forest Park, south of Atlanta. There was a slot car track called Buddy’s at the corner of Ash Street and Forest Parkway, which was then known as Central Avenue. There was one track in Buddy’s. The place was always jam-packed and smelled of cigarette smoke and oil of wintergreen, a tire additive. After a year or so, Buddy moved the raceway to a shopping center at the corner of Ash Street and Morrow Road. It was a bigger place and he added a second track.

In Gresham Park, Clifton Springs opened a track in a building that was originally a dance hall and then a bowling alley. If memory serves me correctly, Clifton had two tracks. It was great because it meant that racing could now be reached via bicycle.

One night a week, usually on Friday or Saturday, my father and I would ride down to Forest Park with a couple of cigar boxes containing cars and equipment, or Herb and Uncle Tub would ride up to Gresham Park. We would spend some time hot-rodding our cars by re-winding the engines, putting higher gears on them or custom racing tires. Herb had a blue MGA with a Tiger X motor in it. It was fast as lightning but had trouble holding the track. One night before we went to Buddy’s, Herb put two wide tires on the back. My father laughed and said that it looked like Fred Flintstone’s car. It may have looked funny, but the trick worked. After that, the little blue beast held the track like glue.

The cars I owned were a red Ferrari formula racer, a Mercedes gull-wing, a ’64 Mustang and a 1931 Ford woody surf wagon that my father built. It was a little top-heavy and very slow. It was fun to run around the track and always got a lot of comments, but it got pretty boring after a few laps because of the lack of speed.

The woody may have been a little top heavy, but it was nothing compared to Huey’s Hut Rod. Huey’s Hut Rod was one of the Weird-Oh models that were popular in the Sixties. Huey was a typical Weird-Oh character in a dragster built from an outhouse. I put the kit together and my father modified it onto a slot car chassis. Huey always got a lot of laughs at the track, but he was hard to control because he was so top-heavy. If he was on one of the outside lanes he would always topple over in the high banked curves, simply because he was too slow to stay upright. He was so tall that he would block two or three lanes until a track attendant could reach him and set him upright. This would cause problems, particularly if a couple of cars were seriously racing. People began to complain, so I quit taking him to the track and eventually gave him to one of the other kids in the neighborhood.

The first controller I owned was one that was pistol-shaped with a trigger for the throttle. The problem was that it got very hot after about ten minutes of racing. I saved up my grass-cutting money and bought the industry standard, a Cox controller, which used a plunger throttle and was designed to remain cool in your hand. I still have it stashed away in a box somewhere along with some other slot car gear that was in my father’s workshop.

One Saturday night, my father and uncle took Herb and me to the old Peach Bowl racetrack in Atlanta to watch a new class of racers called super modified, or “skeeters.” The cars were fast, loud and furious. An Atlanta racer whose name long escapes me won that night, driving a blue car that was the back end of a ’32 Ford sedan and the front end of a Fiat Topolino. The next week I went to the drug store, bought a model of a ’32 sedan and a Topolino, chopped them down, put them together, painted the car blue and mounted it on a slot car frame. Daddy rewound an engine, hooked up a top-end gear and we had ourselves a race car. And boy would it run! I won several heats with it both at Clifton Springs and Buddy’s. One night I won a feature race at Clifton Springs and the best part was my cousin Herb and I finished first and second, with me just nosing him at the checkered flag. I didn’t win a trophy, but to the best of my recollection I won an hour of track time and a ten dollar gift certificate. Herb won a half-hour of time and a five dollar certificate. In those days, five and ten bucks went a long way at the slot car track.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, a friend and I drove the big hobby shop in downtown Decatur and ran cars for a couple of hours. It was the last time I ever went racing. The craze had just about wound down and it wasn’t long afterward that the last of the tracks disappeared.

Only two of our cars survived and are pictured above, the woody and the skeeter. They sat my father’s big glass cabinet in his workshop until we sold the house in 2015 and are now in the display cabinet in our den with all of our memorabilia. I often wonder if they would still run. I wonder if there are any tracks around?