HOT BEHINDS, HOYDENS, AND HOT RODS: 1950 Racing, Romance, and Red Spanked Behinds

It’s 1950, only five years after the war had ended and men, young and middle-aged, having returned home after the carnage of the war were restless, looking for exciting things to do. Drawn by a plethora of inexpensive war surplus motorcycles and automobiles, many men acquired such vehicles and began to ‘soup up’ the engines and race the vehicles on the streets. The sport of drag racing was born.

The first official sanctioned drag strip opened in California in 1950 at the Orange County airport. Men and women, young and middle-aged, were drawn to the new spectacle of drag racing at ‘The Strip’. The noise, the cars flying down the quarter-mile strip, the vendors, and the crowds at the events created an excitement not seen since before the war. Sometimes the women who accompanied the racers overstepped established rules of comportment, mostly back at home, but often, too, at The Strip. Those that did overstep found themselves being corrected by the men in their lives, boyfriends and husbands, who believed in the old-fashioned domestic discipline they had learned from their fathers before they left for the war. The earned and deserved ‘corrections’ of the misbehaving ladies took place over the knees of the men. Arms waved, legs kicked, and opened mouths howled as the upturned, bare behinds of misbehaving women, young and middle aged alike, wriggled and reddened, just like they had ‘back home’ while under the tutelage of their strict fathers, and under the smacking and cracking of stout wooden hairbrushes.

The sternly administered, stinging and burning sessions over lover’s and husband’s knees endeared the women to these strong, decisive men. This is the story of several of them, intertwined and connected by families and friendships, amid the birth of drag racing in 1950.