J.C. Agajanian died in 1984, but by then sons — Cary, J.C. Jr. and Chris — had served every apprenticeship available from parking cars and selling tickets. They also strove to keep midget racing afloat in Southern California and found it to be tough sledding.
“We were running midgets typically on Sunday night or during the week,” Cary Agajanian said. “Just some place where we could get a bit of a crowd at Ascot. When my dad was alive, we would have just a few hundred fans in the grandstands, and it was really going downhill. He would work at it and pay the purse, but it was a losing proposition for a long time. The sprint car races were helping to finance it.
“Then my dad passed away, and we tried to keep running them and we kept losing money,” Cary Agajanian continued. “One day in the middle of all of this I got a call from Jim Naylor. He asked if it was possible to run a few midget races at Ventura. Now, I wasn’t a USAC official, but I said let me think about that. So, I’m thinking if you promote a midget race, that’s a race we won’t lose money on. He picked up a few dates and it lessened the burden on us financially.”
Naylor is now the promoter of the annual event that has been run at Ventura Raceway since 2016.
Naylor’s desire to promote the Turkey Night Grand Prix at Ventura was not motivated by the bottom line. He was drawn by the same cause as J.C. Agajanian in 1955.
“It is my favorite race,” Naylor said. “It is a big deal for me to have it. I try to honor J.C. Agajanian. That’s my goal. He was the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey on this coast. He was a man who had a lot of resources, and he chose to put them into motorsports, which was his passion. He just loved to promote.”
So does Naylor. He devotes hours to building a special one-of-a-kind trophy. This year, the Turkey Night winner will receive a replica of Parnelli Jones’ 1963 Indy 500-winning car known as Ol’ Calhoun.
Teams receive special jackets, and the winning banners are proudly displayed in race shops. For many it is a reunion with old friends, and a time for drivers to reminisce. Naylor embraces all of this.
“Just doing all of these things is good enough for me,” he said. “I don’t make a ton of money because I don’t have a big enough grandstand. All I want is for people to have fun. I want people to show up and see that we care about this race and get the very best racers, which we have done for years now.”
It is impossible to overstate how important this single event is to midget racing, but it is particularly so for California open-wheel participants.
Tom Malloy is a man with deep racing roots. His father, Emmett Malloy, an excavator by trade, built the famed Carrell Speedway at 174th and Vermont in Los Angeles and owned one of the most beautiful and successful sprint cars in America.
When he needed promotional help, he called upon J.C. Agajanian. The families have been intertwined ever since. As a young man Tom Malloy cleaned up the parking lot after races, while Cary Agajanian remembers catching frogs and crawdads with the Malloy children under the grandstands.
There may have been no greater thrill for Malloy than the night he watched his car pull into victory lane at the Turkey Night Grand Prix.
“It is just something that has been around forever and I remember my dad talking about the old days at Gilmore Stadium and Ascot,” Malloy said. “The funny thing is I never attended the race until I put a car in the damn thing. I always celebrated Thanksgiving with my family. It was a pain in the ass until they changed the date.”
Traditionally run on Thanksgiving night, Turkey Night moved to the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2021.
That same year, Logan Seavey put Malloy’s car in victory lane.
“Right before the race I told Logan if you win this thing I will give you the whole purse,” Malloy said. “And I did.”
The crew chief, Jerome Rodela, was an outstanding driver in his own right, and for him Turkey Night is far from just another race. He was on the same wavelength as his car owner.