Recalling the 'Great Highway' as drag strip

Woody LaBounty in the Ocean Beach Bulletin looks back on the Great Highway’s glory days as San Francisco’s drag strip of choice and digs out this World War I era newsreel of the police motorcycle detail set up to curb scofflaws. Apparently, the cops weren’t above horsing around on the job. Here’s an excerpt from LeBounty’s recollection of taking his first car, a “ramshackle 1963 Buick Electra” out to the highway for a test run in 1987:

This was not today’s Great Highway. Before the 1980s, south of Lincoln Way meant six lanes of no stoplights, curbs or crosswalks. I think only a couple of dim yellow cobra lampposts stood on the whole stretch to Sloat Boulevard. Driving at night in the fog on the cracked pavement, sand blowing across the road, my Electra topped 100 mph around Pacheco Street. It rattled like a box of marbles the whole time, but I was satisfied.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Great Highway was a popular place for teens to drag race, even if the winner often met a waiting SFPD squad car just past the finish line at Lincoln Way or Sloat Boulevard. Racing began to fade away after the Golden Gate National Recreation Area took over Ocean Beach in the 1970s. When the Great Highway received a shoreline makeover in the early 1990s with a median strip, walking paths, stoplights and crosswalks, dragging for pink slips was gone for good. At least I hope it’s gone, now that I am a sober man of middle years who regrets the reckless ways of his youth.