SEASIDE

The Seaside Oil Company was founded in Summerland, Calif in 1898 as a production and pumping company.

They later got into refining and by the 1920s were into gasoline sales and service stations. A fire damaged their refinery in Summerland in 1921, but they bought another in Ventura in 1923 and at one point grew to some 900 retail outlets selling SEASIDE gasoline.

By the early 1930s the Summerland fields along the ocean were nearing depletion and the company had to look elsewhere to buy crude oil. Along the way they incurred a lot of debt and one of the companies they owed quite a bit to was Tidewater. That led to the takeover of Seaside by Tidewater in 1946 after having a partial interest in the company for a number of years.

While this race was actually not held in Seaside, for the time being I will call it that until I get confirmation of just where it might have been held. Gene has a pretty good guess and I bet he is pretty close. Malcolm has some great information about Sprouts Elder who is on the cover.

To me this race is during the time before flat track and speedway went in different paths. Since I am not a history buff on the details of this I can not comment further, in any case the program is very interesting. The races are held in the speedway format, such as handicap and scratch racing, and on a 1/5th mile track.  The Hot Shoe Sprouts Elder is the only rider starting scratch, the rest are starting in front of the scratch line. This is European style handicapping as Nigel Bird of Birmingham England kindly pointed out recently. For example Lou Wilson has a staggering 120 yard handicap in his heat race.  Sam Leslie, Lloyd Logan, and Jack Feliz also had a monster 100 yard starting lead. For a four lap race that yardage was something else.  The bikes were the Indians and Harley's of the time with a Rudge-Whitworth and a couple of Douglass's from England thrown in.