1939 saw midget auto racing become established at East Vancouver’s Con Jones Park (now known as Callister Park). Initially, all the cars and drivers were from the US That is, until the final race of that first season when a local mechanic from the Dunbar area, Marshall Mickey McDowell, built a racer and entered.

He didn’t win, or even finish the race, but he came back for the 1940 season along with some other local cars and drivers. McDowell did the best amongst the local racers, winning some races with his Sealed Power Special number 101. However his major impact came as the result of a bad crash that had him in a coma for a week. Hoops, primitive roll cages, were mandated for the local drivers as it was felt they didn’t have as much racing experience as their southern competitors.

McDowell came back in 1941, again doing well but not quite able to beat the top US drivers like Allen Heath and Wayne Gaffney. He even towed to the newly opened Aurora Stadium in Seattle to race.

After the War, midget racing resumed in the greater Vancouver area but without Mickey McDowell’s name. It’s not clear if he didn’t survive the war or relocated (there is a Mickey McDowell in Vernon, BC, that appears in the mid-1950s as a stock car owner at the Knox Mountain Speedway in Kelowna, but no definite connection to

MICKEY McDOWELL - Inducted 2004

Pioneer - Oval Racing

Left McDowell in his car, circa 1940              Right  Joe Boyd in the ex-McDowell midget, 1946  (Brian Pratt collection)

By Brian Pratt, 2004

the coast Mickey McDowell has been made).

However, the Sealed Power Special number 101 came back in 1946 with former crewman Joe Boyd driving it. It still featured the headrest, a first for midget race cars in the northwest racing circuit. After Boyd’s run with the car, Bud Ryckman tried to get it up to speed when Digney Speedway opened in 1948. The car, like Mickey, seems to have disappeared.

At the end of the 1941 season, the midget races at Con Jones Park were advertised as being under the sanction of the British Columbia Midget Auto

Racing Association (BCMARA). The same club would encourage Andy Digney to build Digney Speedway in addition, they built their own track, False Creek Speedway.

It was the enthusiasm of drivers and crewmen such as Walter Armstrong, Fred Macey, Ben Stevenson, Jim Smith and Harvey Clifton that helped build the base for racing in the greater Vancouver area. The first of that bunch should not be forgotten: Mickey McDowell.

 

Mickey McDowell