Wallace “Wally” Parks is accredited at the father of modern drag racing in America, being the one who organized drag racing into a formal sport. During the late ’40s and early 1950s, Parks was America’s most influential player in the sport of drag racing. Not only instrumental in drag racing’s formation as a motorsport, but Parks was also the key player in the founding and formation of both Hot Rod and Motor Trend magazines, and was Hot Rod’s first editor.

Young Wally spent most of his youth in Southern California, and it was there where he acquired his undying love for the drag racing hobby while watching salt bed racers driving as fast as possible in the desert regions of the Muroc Dry Lakes. Parks’ first direct involvement with drag racing came in 1937 when he became a member of the “Roadrunners,” a racing club that would eventually join with other Southern Californian groups to form what would become predecessor to the NHRA and the Southern California Timing Association. The creation of the latter two organizations birthed Hot Rod magazine in 1948.

As first editor and co-founder of Hot Rod, Parks was the first motoring enthusiast to promote safety in drag racing. He accomplished this through his traveling “Safety Safaris,” the first of which went on tour across America in 1954. Parks’ “Safety Safaris” were held at dragstrips throughout different parts of the country, and they were designed to teach not only driver safety, but methods of organization within the sport of drag racing itself.

Parks taught hot rodders how to race not only through the “Safaris,” but through the Hot Rod magazine as well. He would eventually go on to be the founder of the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA). Founded by Parks in 1951, the NHRA stands today as the largest sanctioning body in motorsports, and for years after he left the magazine business, Parks worked as head of the NHRA. His wife Barbara, who passed in 2006, worked as NHRA’s chief secretary during its “formidable years.”

(Right to Left) Actor Roy Rogers, National Hot Rod Association founder Wally Parks, publisher Robert E. Petersen and a unnamed attendee of the lake bed races.

Parks was also the key player in bringing drag racing to places outside of the States. For example, Parks organized drag race tours in England from 1964-65, along with Sydney Allard, and toured again in 1966, this time in Australia.

In 2007, Parks died at the age of 94 from complications related to pneumonia, but for years prior to his death, he served as founder and Chairman of the Board of the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum in Pomona, California, at the historic Los Angeles County Fairplex.

A long-lived vision of Parks’, the NHRA Motorsport Museum in Pomona was opened to the public on April 4th, 1998. Enclosed in a 28,500 square-foot building on the Fairplex grounds, the NHRA exhibit took years to organize, and it stands both as a testament to Parks’ contribution to American motorsports, as well as a testament to the city of Pomona and the dragstrip’s historical significance to drag racing and hot rodding in Southern California.

Wally Parks’ museum celebrates the “impact of motorsports on our culture” by not only housing some 50 vintage and historic drag cars, but also by housing and displaying the photos and artifacts that correspond with them. Along with the cars and artifacts, and the stories and memories that back them up, Wally Parks’ NHRA Museum celebrates 50 some-odd years of an American drag racing heritage.

Today, the NHRA has 85,00 members worldwide and sanctions over 4,000 events annually. For this, Wally Parks will always be remembered, by the International Motorsports’ committee and by the motoring community, as the “godfather” of the NHRA and of professional drag racing.