D.I. COLUMNIST
On the Road
with Van Abernethy
A
labama’s Baileyton “Good
Time” Dragstrip might just
be the quintessential ex-
ample of what homegrown fun is
supposed to look like. It’s a timeless
facility that’s still owned and oper-
ated by the man who built the track
over a half-century ago, swinging
open the gates in June 1966. “Back
in those days you didn’t have to do
much more than move some dirt,
pave it and go racing!” recalls Jack
Walker, as he reminisces about the
early days of drag strip construction.
Ironically, Walker wasn’t even
a racer or what you’d consider an
authentic gearhead when he first
had the idea of constructing a drag
strip back when he was 30 years
old, but wow, has he ever fallen in
love with the sport in the decades
that followed. “I was actually in the
construction business and one of
my young employees, a kid named
Bill, was really into cars and racing,”
explains Walker.
It just so happened that Jack and
his construction team were involved
in a project locally and the property
owner had some sort of Dodge drag
car that could be seen sticking out
of the barn on the property. Every
single day at some point, Bill would
walk down to the barn and eye-
ball the car. Walker was intrigued
with Bill’s enthusiasm for the race
car, and since Bill didn’t have the
resources to buy the car himself,
Walker actually bought it for him!
“The guy who owned the car kept
trying to sell it to me, and I kept
telling him I didn’t have any use for
it, so I just bought it for Bill instead!”
Walker and several members
of the construction team used to
go and watch young Bill race his
new pride and joy, and that’s what
spurred the idea for Walker to build
a drag strip. “One time Bill carried
the car to race it at a local air strip
and me and some other guys went
to watch, and on this particular day
there was this big ole guy who stood
right in front of me the whole day
and I couldn’t see a thing!” Walker
laughs.
On the way home that day, Walk-
er told the others that he was going
to go home and get started on build-
ing a drag strip. They laughed, but
Walker was completely serious. “I
told them how my drag
strip was going to have
high banks and bleach-
ers so everyone could see.”
Next, Walker came home
and told his wife, Sharon,
about his idea and amaz-
ingly, she was completely
on board with this plan.
“We’ve been married since 1957, and
I was young back then and didn’t
care!” smiles Mrs. Walker, as the
couple sits together in the living
room of their longtime residence it. By June the following
year, Baileyton “Good
Time” Dragstrip opened
for business.
The catchy name was
first coined by the track’s
original announcer,
Wayne Walker, (no re-
lation to Jack) who fa-
mously got on the mic on opening
day and said, “Alright, everybody,
we’re here to have a good time!” The
name has stuck for 52 years and
counting. “Of course, back in those
located beside the drag strip.
I enjoyed a fascinating play-by-
play of their life together thus far,
especially the construction of this
honky tonk eighth-mile strip beside
the house. Walker began construc-
tion in the winter of 1965 by moving
some dirt on this former parcel of
pasture land in the town of Bailey-
ton, carefully maneuvering the land
so that everyone would have a great
view of the cars, just as he imagined days, getting in a fight was our idea
of a good time!” Jack laughs.
Word of mouth spread like wild-
fire around Baileyton even before
the track was finished, and on open-
ing day Walker’s facility could hardly
even contain the amount of people
who showed up. “Made good money,
too, charging something like $1.50
for a spectator ticket,” Walker re-
members. Admittedly, Walker hard-
ly knew anything about the sport of
drag racing at the time he opened
the track. “We were learning as we
went,” he laughs. The track was
truly a slice of folksy amusement
with nothing more than the bare
essentials in the beginning. “We had
no guard rails or indoor bathrooms,
and the first spectator seats were
merely cement blocks with planks
of wood laid across them,” he says.
They did, however, have a tiny
concession stand that was actually
constructed inside someone’s work-
shop and delivered to the track com-
pletely intact! Mrs. Walker was the
original concession stand worker,
selling most items on the menu for
no more than $1.50. To this day, she
still shows up to work the conces-
sion stand every single weekend.
“They won’t let me quit!” she laughs.
Even though the Walkers are at
the track on a weekly basis, they’ve
recently turned over much of the
day-to-day operations to their
grandson, Russ Easterwood, and
his wife, Sasha. “I don’t know what
we’d do without them...and we also
run Sasha to death carrying us back
and forth to the doctor!” Jack says.
The strip in Baileyton has re-
mained unsanctioned since day
one, and has lately seen many im-
provements, although it’s never lost
the nitty gritty appeal of its humble
roots. Walker says he finally got
around to installing guard rails in
the early 2000s, eventually replac-
ing them with poured concrete
barriers just recently. “The biggest
expense I’ve ever encountered was
when I concreted the entire eighth-
mile racing surface,” Walker says.
“I reminded my wife that we can’t
carry that money with us.”
The Walkers operate the track
on a fairly modest schedule here
in Baileyton with test and tune
on Fridays and bracket racing on
Saturdays. “After that, we’re give
out!” Jack laughs. At 82 years of
age, that’s understandable. “We’ll
be involved with this track until we
die, and after that it’s up to Russ
and Sasha to keep it going.” Walker
rests in the assurance that the track
will continue on in capable hands,
and there’s little doubt that the good
times he started in Baileyton will
keep rolling right along.
DI DI DI
DI DI DI DI
DI DI DI
54 | D r a g
I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
Issue 133