Racing fans from days gone by as well as current enthusiasts may want to cruise by the Little White School Museum in Oswego where a special exhibit on the former Oswego Drag Raceway was recently unveiled.
From now until the end of September, the facility at 72 Polk St. will be offering visitors a view back in time with its “SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!” display featuring the Oswego Drag Raceway quarter-mile race track at the Wally Smith farm, a mile-and-a-half west of town on Route 34 that was “drawing three times the village’s total population” during its heyday.
The raceway opened in 1954 and operated into the 1980s, museum officials said.
According to a press release from the museum, “at a time when Oswego’s population was around 1,200 residents, the drag raceway regularly drew some 4,000 spectators each Sunday to see such well-known drag racers as Arnie ‘The Farmer’ Beswick and Art Arfons and such famed dragsters as Arfons’ jet-powered Green Monster not to mention well-known local racers including Al Thompson from Aurora’s Al’s Speed Shop and Oswego’s own Bob Mead.”
The release adds that the exhibit “includes a variety of drag raceway memorabilia including trophies, drag racing magazines featuring the Oswego Drag Raceway, photos of dragsters and drag racers and memorabilia from pit passes to T-shirts.”
Museum Manager Anne Jordan said officials were “looking for something that would bring people to the museum here this summer and one of the big things people think of when they hear Oswego is the dragstrip.”
“We thought this would be a nice summer blockbuster to bring people into an air-conditioned museum and look around and see some of the fun artifacts and memorabilia we have from the dragstrip,” she said. “We have tons of pictures of both the cars and the racers and trophies and some of the programs.”
Jordan said the increased traffic that came to town due to the dragstrip created problems from time to time with local police, and some of those developments have been included in the exhibit.
“We have a bunch of magazines from the whole Midwest drag race scene and articles about Oswego and some artifacts from the police force that had to deal with all of the traffic and hooligans that were coming to the dragstrip and wreaking havoc on the town of Oswego,” she said.
“We saw a lot more young people coming to town and thinking the dragstrip meant we could also street race and there were stories of dozens and dozens of speeding tickets and arrests on Sunday mornings with people coming to and from the dragstrip,” she said. “We’ve had people come into the museum and talk about how they remember hearing the dragstrip starting at 6 a.m. on Sundays and hearing the revving of the engines. It was just the sounds of Oswego.”
Today, the dragstrip is “mostly gone” Jordan said, adding that “if you go onto what is now private property there are a few remnants of it still remaining.
“There’s really not much of it left at all, unfortunately,” she said.
Artifacts on display, Jordan said, all came from the museum’s collection, which includes over 100 items in all.
“We have had them and they’ve been donated to us throughout the years,” she said. “Several of them we’ve had for decades. Once the museum started running in the 1960s up until the dragstrip closed in the 1980s people just started bringing us anything they had that would remind them of Oswego’s history. They’re all from donations of local people.”
After culling the collection, Jordan said there were some surprises discovered in the process.
“For me, the thing that is always surprising is how many people knew about this dragstrip,” she said.
“I’m not from Illinois, so I never heard of this, but we get people from all over Illinois who remember hearing about Oswego for the very first time and only know Oswego because of the dragstrip,” she said. “To me, that’s really interesting that that’s the thing that put us on the map.”
Museum hours are 2 to 6:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; and 4 to 9 p.m. Mondays. The museum is closed to visitors on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Admission is free. For more information, call the museum at 630-554-2999 or send an email to info@littlewhiteschoolmuseum.org.
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
