Out for a Sunday drive one month after they were married, Garlits “inadvertently” passed the Lake Wales Drag Strip. When he began accumulating speeding tickets from illegal races, his wife first dismissed them as his sowing wild oats, but that all changed when he told her he was going to upgrade the camshaft in their new Ford. His passion for racing could not be cooled, though. While courting her, Garlits left racing, going to work for American Can Company. Taking a break from racing in 1952, he met Pat Bieger, an eighteen year old from Kentucky, while waterskiing. Later he switched to a 1940 maroon Ford convertible with a Cadillac V-8 engine. Beginning in 1952, Garlits raced others on Tampa’s deserted back roads, using a souped up 1927 Model T. Rather than enthusiastically embracing drag racing, he began doing it because it was the thing to do. He worked for body shops, then for a radiator shop, but Garlits seem to have hit on something when he began working as a race car mechanic. After only six months, he walked out of the office, never to return.įrom there, he returned to his first love, working on cars. But Garlits was not meant to be a bookkeeper. Garlits graduated from a Tampa public high school in 1948, and his grades were good enough to get him a position in a bookkeeping office. When he was fourteen, he pulled engines out of cars and worked on them with his friends. Like his father, Garlits had a knack for tinkering with machines. They moved to Tampa, Florida, where Garlits was born. As part of his newfound health food religion, he divorced his first wife around 1925 and married Helen Lorenz, a sixteen year old who worked in his store. When his health began to fail, he left Pittsburgh for El Paso, Texas, then later opened a health food store and restaurant in New Jersey. In collaboration with others in his laboratory, he invented both the electric fan and the electric iron. Garlits’ father, Edward Garlits, was a Westinghouse engineer in the 1920s. 14 January 1932 in Tampa, Florida), legendary drag racer who won the American Hot Rod Association (AHRA) Championship fourteen times and the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) Championship three times, and is also known for his work to make drag racing a safer sport. Learn more about that and why his dragsters carried the Swamp Rat name in this article from :ĭon Garlits ( b. His innovative dragster pushed the limits thanks to a secret weapon, extra large fuel lines. He did so at a race in Great Meadows, New Jersey behind the wheel of Swamp Rat VI. On this day in 1964 legendary drag racer Don Garlits become the first drag racer to break 200 miles per hour in the quarter mile.
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