Pat Cross here....Pleasure Island,Interstate Motocross,Rose City,Burtins Shipyard,Bishop Burn,Motoromma,H&B Speedway,Highlands Flat track,Baytown Flat track ,Beaumont Fair Park when it was still a rodeo arena;These were the tracks around the Golden Triangle that i road

I just looked into this old thread. While i didn't get started riding until '79 and that was all woods riding in Boykin Springs, my mentor was my buddy Shane Book out of Orange. he and Curt Hawkins were 2 of the fast guys out of Orange (or at least they claim they were fast)that were my age.

A previous poster talked about Brian Chisum from Orange. Are you talking about Byron Chisum? I know he was part of the riders from Orange along with the Hinds Brothers...David, Doyle, Darren and Richard. I'm not sure if all the brothers rode or not. There were some Parker brothers from Bridge city also.

I went and watched a race over there 1 time and the pic's of the picket fence brought back memories.

Curt and Shane initially were racing 4 stroke Hondas and doing well on them against the 2T's. Curt's dad would pull the flywheel off the 4T's so they could rev and run with the much quicker 2T's. They both morphed into 2T Elsinores when those came out.

While i haven't seen Curt in decades, i see Shane all the time here in Austin and he still talks about Pleasure Island racing and the good times there.

One great story of his was when he and several of the Orange guys went to Whitney for a big race. it rained a bunch and all the orange guys did so well the riders in the class protested, so they were bumped to the next class in which they did very well also. He said the mud was just like pleasure island so they were used to it.

Ah...Boykin Springs, Orange, Port Arthur, Pleasure Island, the Hinds brothers, etc. Does anyone remember the Schmidtkes who owned the Suzuki shop in Port Arthur? They sponsored several guys I knew before I ended up working for them in the early '80s. How about the Welch brothers from Orange. Their dad owned the local typewriter shop in town. All of the Welch boys rode and still get on two wheels from time to time except for Jesse who passed away several years ago. We used to dream about opening up the old track at Pleasure Island. Talk about a bunch of hotrod and motorcycle gear heads! I think it was in the water down there. It was really because it was pretty much the only thing to do there besides play football.

Both Ed and Albert are now gone. Ed and his wife came to a terribly tragic end after a domestic dispute. I bought all my early bikes from them as did my riding friends. Then a couple Buls from Sonny Lawson. I currently own a CR I bought from Curt Hawkins, don't know if he still rides any. Several well known statewide mx'rs came to the pier occasionally and got schooled by a few of the "local yokels". Kinda funny sometimes.

I still have a few trophies from there stuffed away in a closet. They called it Pleasure Island Cycle Park. It was built over an old dump and located right by the pleasure island bridge. That was a great track. It was a lot better than the Beaumont track.

Does anyone rember the car dirt track in beaumont that added the motorcross section on the back side of the track. We would race at night with the bright lights on the main car circle track then jump the east high berm to the motor cross track. The lighting was so bad there you would run over a few tires till your eyes adjusted. Then about the time you could see again you would jump back on the main circle track into the bright lights.