2 weeks Ago By Greg Williams
Article content With 70 years in the rearview mirror the Calgary Sports Car Club (CSCC) continues to adapt and remain relevant for the local automotive enthusiast scene. That’s thanks in part to the CSCC’s current president, Jamie Gray, who was handed the keys and slid into the driver’s seat in April of this year. “My personal focus is on growing the club, especially post-COVID and amidst various oil-and-gas crises, and emphasizing inclusion of young people and women, who are in the minority at around 13 per cent,” Gray explains.
“To that end, I am involved in an organization called Women In Motorsports, which promotes the sport to women and girls.” According to an early CSCC scrapbook, the club held three meetings in 1953 but didn’t formally find traction until March of 1954. That’s when, during a meeting in the showroom of Jaguar, MG and Morris dealer Cooke Motors, discussions were held about the vehicles that would be eligible to participate in CSCC events.
These competitive events included wheel-to-wheel road races on airport tracks together with gymkhanas and hill climbs. The cars included most foreign brands, such as those sold by Cooke Motors, as well as Austin-Healey, Auto Union, DKW, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Triumph and Volkswagen. Also discussed at an early meeting was the building of a clubhouse.
Supplies were purchased, and a sturdy wooden structure was built on a small corner of a farmer’s field north and west of Calgary, near what is now Dalhousie. In April 1958 the club hosted the first European and Sports Car Show at the Jubilee Auditorium. During the show’s second year in 1959 attendance broke the auditorium’s record with 12,430 visitors paying admission to see the new sports cars.
In the late-Fifties the CSCC clubhouse burned to the ground and a new structure was built. But by the mid-Seventies, the land on which it sat was required for city expansion. Calgary offered the club a land swap and the building was moved to where it is still located, near the airport at the corner of 80 Ave.
and Metis Trail Northeast. Gray found herself becoming loosely involved with the club in 2003 when she purchased a membership for her husband, David. “He’s the car guy,” Gray admits.
“I’m car-adjacent, as regards racing. I’m more into an appreciation of automotive design and engineering, as I’m a sculptor in real life.” In October 2021, Gray says she and David attended a monthly CSCC board meeting at the clubhouse, “for the purpose of learning how we could volunteer administratively.
” She became club secretary, and about a year into the role says she, “got annoyed enough about a pile of books and documents in the corner of the main floor of the clubhouse that I wanted to clear it up.” The books and documents were the club’s archival scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, Broken Spoke newsletters and other ephemera. “They were disintegrating,” she continues, “And I took the next year to clean, sort, catalogue, and archive all the documents I could find, both in that corner and stored away in boxes here and there.
” Gray scanned the information and sent the digital files to the Canadian Motorsport Historical Society (motorsporthistory.ca) where she says they sit on their website, accessible to anyone with internet connectivity. “The total number of documents archived at the end of the project is 2,278,” she explains.
Gray then became vice president and helped improve clubhouse maintenance and upkeep. The tongue and groove milled cedar log structure with clear span arched cedar trusses was more than 60 years old, and Gray thought the architecture was interesting. Because of this, she applied to Calgary’s department of Heritage Planning to see if the clubhouse could be added to the city’s inventory of heritage buildings.
Thanks to her diligence, the structure was listed in April 2024. Long-time member Shawn Bishop got involved with the club in 1976 after hearing a radio advertisement about the CSCC. “Prior to that time, I’d never even changed the oil in a car,” he says.
“But it flipped a switch for me, and I began competing in time, speed, distance (TSD) and stage rally events in Toyota Corollas and Datsun 510s.” He went on to volunteer and help organize several Rocky Mountain Rally events, and is now spending his time acting as the club’s photographer and archiving his own boxes of materials. And he’s appreciative of the current president.
“Jamie has been giving the club, which celebrated its 70th anniversary this year, a lot of effort these days,” he says. “She has been instrumental in helping to increase the Calgary Sports Car Club’s presence amongst auto enthusiasts.” The CSCC holds meetings on the first Thursday of every month, and visitors are welcome to attend.
Learn more at www.cscc.ab.
ca . Greg Williams is a member of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC). Have a column tip? Contact him at 403-287-1067 or gregwilliams@shaw.
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