Ralph: Now it's the Fifties, and here we are at Gilmore Stadium, where we can find... well, almost anything.

[Lively music playing] This wonderful old adobe is the last memento we have to a big, tall, husky tycoon named Earl Gilmore.

Gilmore owned 58 acres between Third and Beverly in Fairfax, and underneath those 58 acres was a big puddle of oil, and he used that oil to really make his mark on the city of Los Angeles.

Now, there really ought to be a bigger monument to this, to the guy who was behind Gilmore Field, Gilmore Stadium, Gilmore Bank, Gilmore Drive-In, Gilmore Gasoline, the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, to say nothing of the Farmers Market, which is still very much here.

[Music playing] Gilmore Stadium was not a perfect little football stadium.

It was primitive and not that successful.

But around the edge of the field ran an oval race track, and that's where Earl Gilmore struck oil again.

[Music playing] Danny: These midgets had just started then, and it was an exact copy of the Indianapolis engine, only it was half the size.

Boy, that was the greatest thing that ever hit racing.

But anyway, the first races I was in, I enjoyed driving so much that I never paid any attention to anything, and after the race was over, I just loaded up my car and went home, back to Santa Barbara, at first.

And after about the third or fourth race, the fella that paid the prize money said, "I wish you'd come by "after the race is over today, "because I have quite a bit "of money sitting there, "waiting for you.

"You're never here "to collect the money when the race is over."

And I said, "I didn't even know I was getting paid for this."

Barbara: Well, I remember being there at night and being very cold and being all dressed up in a gorgeous white outfit or a summer outfit while the boyfriend went around and around and mud splattered all over you, and I was just always annoyed, wondering when in the world we were gonna get out of this place and go down to the Palomar and dance, because that's what I thought we ought to do.

[Music playing] Ralph: Midget autos roared onto the quarter-mile oval in 1934 at the bottom of the Depression and provided enough spills and chills to stay alive until the postwar years, when the Offenhauser cars really went big-time.

[Music playing]