D.I. COLUMNIST
On the Road
with Van Abernethy
I
’ve had some pretty surreal
moments in drag racing over
the years, but spending half a
day with “Big Daddy” Don Garlits
at his Ocala, Florida-based Museum
of Drag Racing was simply on a dif-
ferent level of amazing.
There’s not too much that hasn’t
been written about Garlits, who
ranks No. 1 on NHRA’s 50 Greatest
Driver’s list, although he’s much more
than a driver. Garlits is also a legend-
ary tuner, innovator, car builder and
all-around iconic figure in drag rac-
ing. He’s won no less than 144 major
events and 17 championships from
the sport’s three major sanctioning
bodies. His Swamp Rat 30 dragster
was eventually enshrined in the
Smithsonian Institute in Washington
D.C., which also houses the Spirit of
St. Louis and the first manned space
capsule!
I arrived at the museum right after
it opened at 9:00 a.m as Garlits had
instructed over the phone the day be-
fore. “You’re right on time!” he smiles
as his staff ushers me into his office.
Garlits was sitting in a leather chair
autographing a stack of hardcover
books. “These have got to be shipped
out today,” he says as he scribbles a
message on the inside cover using a
Sharpie marker. He invites me to sit
in the matching chair beside him and
chat for a while. Three hours later we
hadn’t moved.
Garlits turned 87 years old earlier
this year and amazingly, we have
much more than racing in com-
mon. His stories were fascinating,
and his interests and passions are
quite broad. His museum has even
been described as “a car museum
for people who don’t usually like car
museums.”
I ask Garlits if anyone famous
outside of racing had ever been here.
“Oh yeah,” he replies, reaching behind
him into a display case and pulling
out a black wooden bat that had a
noticeable dent, caused by direct
contact with a baseball. He places
the bat in my hands and tells me to
read the inscription, so I read the fol-
lowing words aloud: “To my friend
‘Big Daddy’...the greatest.” signed,
Reggie Jackson. My heart starts
racing slightly as I realized what I
was holding in my hands. “That’s the
sweet spot,” Don says, pointing to the
dent in the bat where Jackson had
connected with a home run. Jackson
is a car nut who’s visited
the museum on a number
of occasions. Amazingly,
famed boxer Muhammad
Ali was also a fan who vis-
ited Garlits.
As far as we know, a
world leader has never
been to the museum, al-
though former President
Richard Nixon once called Garlits
to ask if he’d go to Vietnam in 1971
along with Richard Petty to cheer up
the troops, a proposition he readily
agreed to. Nixon explained to Garlits
that he and Petty could fully expect
to be shot at while in the jungle. “Can
we shoot back?” Garlits asked. There
was a pause. “Well, if you want to,” the
president replied. “We didn’t want
to!” Garlits
assures me.
No visit
with Big
D a d d y
would be
complete
without
hearing the
story of his
fi r s t - e v e r
race in 1950,
and the
subsequent
beating
he nearly
received...
not by the
competition
mind you,
but rather from his mother! “And I
was 18 years old...I should have been
able to do what I wanted!” he laughs.
His mother was sitting on the
front porch that fateful day when
Don came driving his 1940 Ford
convertible up the driveway with a
number painted on his car, after an
informal race at an Army Corp. train-
ing field in Seffner, Florida. “What’s
that number on your car...you been
racing, boy?” Don just stood there
in silence, paralyzed with fear. “Yes,
ma’am,” he finally answered.
His step-father, Alex, came to
the door and said, “Helen, if the
boy wants to race, let him race.” She
never mentioned it again, because
as Don puts it, “Back in those days
the woman didn’t sass her husband.”
She never warmed up to racing,
though. In fact, she despised it. Even
as Don became the most iconic racer
the sport had ever known,
his mother only came to
just one of his races. “It
wasn’t even a big one ei-
ther...it was in Miami and
a guy beat me,” Garlits
remembers. “My mother
put three husbands in the
ground and after the last
one died, she came to live
with us here at the museum.”
She was completely blown away
when she finally saw the place, be-
cause in her mind she thought it was
a bunch jalopies sitting around, simi-
lar to the one Don was driving the day
she nearly beat him for racing. “The
highlight of her entire life was when
this family visited the museum who
were from the exact town in Hun-
gary where
she was
born and at-
tended the
same Cath-
olic church
where she
was chris-
tened as
baby. She
had a good
time living
here at the
museum
talking
about my
childhood,
and telling
stories of
the things
I’ve done,” Garlits recalls. She passed
away in 2006, shortly before her 96th
birthday.
As bustling and successful as the
museum is, that hasn’t always been
the case. Not everyone is aware of
this, but the current location in
Ocala wasn’t Garlits’ first attempt
at a drag racing museum. The first,
which opened in 1976, was on the
grounds of his childhood home in
Seffner. Only non-paying custom-
ers ever visited this location: friends,
family, sponsors, etc. “In 1982 while
having coffee with my wife, Pat, I told
her we needed to move the museum
to the interstate.”
They found the current property
off I-75 while out driving one day.
Don called the number early one
morning to inquire about the parcel
of land, and things got shaky right
from the start. “The woman on the
other line snarls, ‘This is Shirley...
what do you want?!’” Garlits remem-
bers. “I come real close to hanging up
the phone, because another Shirley...
the Shirley was kicking my butt in the
AHRA championship at that same
time,” Don laughs.
He asked how much the land cost
and she quickly shot him a cash price.
“I’ll take it,” he replied. “By the time
she arrived at the real estate office 20
minutes later she had had her second
cup of coffee and she turned out to be
a real nice lady...Shirley Spires was
her name.”
Even though he had some real
tense moments with the “other”
Shirley, the two eventually became
the closest of friends. While we sat
together that day in his office, Garlits
whipped out his iPhone and read to
me a recent text from Muldowney
regarding a potential piece for his
museum. She closed the text by writ-
ing, “Love, Shirley.”
Garlits actually has the largest
Muldowney collection in the world
on display here at the museum. He
got a call once from 20th Century Fox
when the studio was getting ready to
junk the “movie car” used in the 1983
motion picture Heart Like a Wheel.
“When I arrived at the studio, the car
was sitting out in the rain,” Garlits
says. He brought the pink dragster
back to the museum where it’s now
the centerpiece of his vast Shirley
Muldowney collection.
Additionally, Garlits displays some
of drag racing’s most historic hard-
ware, including the very first Swamp
Rat constructed in his home garage
in Tampa in 1956. Among my other
personal favorites include Jungle
Jim’s Vega Funny Car, a Candies and
Hughes Trans Am, Darrell Alder-
man’s Pro Stock Dodge and the “Blue
Max” Mustang of Raymond Beadle.
Garlits’ futuristic Swamp Rat 34 mo-
no-wing car is also on display, along
with many others from every era of
drag racing. He even has a copy of
Drag Illustrated with his face on
the cover displayed in the museum!
“I’m so proud of that,” he tells me.
Garlits and I talked about a lot
of things that day, everything from
UFOs to his life in drag racing to
the stock investments that made his
grandfather rich. I left Florida that
day thinking we should have done
this a lot sooner...and hopefully, this
won’t be the last time!
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52 | D r a g
I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
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Issue 143