Another history lesson on Chicago-area racing deals with the subject of early-day midget racing in and around the “Windy City.”
Midget auto racing, which was first introduced in California in 1933, made its first appearance in the Chicago area Oct. 28, 1934 at the Calumet Speed Bowl, located near the present-day intersection of 170th Street and Torrence Ave., in what is now considered Lansing, Ill.  
An exhibition program, featuring only a few cars and put on by Milwaukee’s Mike Popp, saw Ralph McDaniel, another Milwaukee resident, score the win in the 15-lap feature that night.
Less than a month later, the first indoor midget-race program in the country was presented at the 124th Field Artillery Armory at 52nd Street and Cottage Grove Ave., with Harold Shaw of Indianapolis, defeating Chicago’s Jimmy Snyder in the 15-lap main event.
The Armory, which would become the scene of weekly Sunday-night racing for years to come, kicked off the new year Jan. 1, 1935 and hosted indoor meets until mid-May. A reported 26 racing programs were held and Tony Willman of Milwaukee was crowned the Armory champion for the 1934-35 season.  
In 1935, a number of scattered indoor events were held at the Chicago Riding Club, the Chicago Stadium and at the International Amphitheatre near the Chicago Stockyards.
Chicago’s mammoth Soldier Field was the scene of the first “outdoor” event after the busy 1934-35 indoor season.  Hailing from California, Marshall Lewis was the winner of the main event held on the stadium’s cinder running track. 1935 saw all kinds of tracks popping up to hold midget auto races — some successful and some not. The Chicago Midget Speedway in Evanston, under the direction of Len Bernard, was probably the most successful during the area’s inaugural outdoor season. Some 4,000 fans saw Ernie Carlson win the inaugural event at Evanston June 5, 1935.
Other tracks seeing competition in 1935 were Sparta Stadium, Shewbridge Field, Gano Field, Wolf Lake in Hammond, Ind., DePaul Field and Chicago’s White City — an amusement part on the city’s south side.  
Sparta, a baseball park located at 22nd Street and Kostner Ave., held the area’s first 100-lap midget race in late-September of 1935. A lot of confusion with the scoring found Snyder, Willman and Curly Mills, along with a few others, all thinking they had won the big race.
Another busy indoor season was again planned for the Armory in the Fall of ’35 and into 1936. A couple of races were attempted at the historic Chicago Coliseum, but the results were far from successful. Snyder, a product of Chicago’s “rough and tough” south side was the 35/36 Armory champion. Snyder enjoyed a rather successful career at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, making five starts in the Indy 500, scoring a second-place finish in 1939. Snyder was also the fastest qualifier at the speedway in 1939, but lost his life in a midget accident at Cahokia, Ill., in June of that year.  
The new Riverview Speedway located in the shadows of Chicago’s famed Riverview amusement park, held its first midget-racing program on May 24, 1936 with Mills taking top honors in the 40-lap headliner.
Riverview was the first facility in the Chicago area built especially for midget racing. The track would enjoy a good run during its years of operation and was one of the last tracks locally to hold a midget-racing program before World War II activities halted all racing in the U.S. in the summer of 1942.
Torrence Midget Speedway enjoyed a short run that only lasted two months in 1936. The fifth-mile dirt speedrome, built on the site of the old Calumet Speed Bowl, hosted midget racing from mid-July through mid-September of 1936.
Chicago’s Wally Zale, nicknamed “the Human Cyclone,” was almost unbeatable at Torrence, wheeling a couple of different cars to victories.
Considered by many as “one of the most elaborate midget tracks in the country,” the speedway was nothing more than a fire-ravaged scene after a mysterious, late-night fire destroyed the property after the last night of racing was held on Sept. 17, 1936. It was long rumored that a driver had set the fire.
The third and final history column will deal with midget racing, pre and post-World War II, and early stock-car racing in the area.