Baseball has Ruth and Aaron. Football has Montana and Rice. Stock car racing has Richard Petty. And the sport of drag racing has one: “Big Daddy” Don Garlits. Ask anyone that’s ever followed the sport and even those who haven’t and they will likely sound out Garlits’ name. Long before the innovator from Ocala, Florida was a drag racing legend, those he competed against and those who watched him terrorize strips across the country already knew the legend that was to come.

All the way back in August of 1964, the 31st to be exact, Sports Illustrated writer Mark Kram shared the story of Garlits in a piece coined, “Fame And Terror At 200 MPH.” This mesmerizing tale of the golden years of Garlits’ Hall of fame career tells of making a living on the quarter mile and the danger that came with it. Below is a snippet of Kram’s piece from the aforementioned August 31, 1964 issue of SI.

“For doctors and lawyers and engineers and people like that, drag racing is release, and one day a week on a ribbon of black asphalt in a field somewhere on the perimeter of a town is like a day spent under a billow of sail. For the others, the ones with that Rock Around the Clock gleam in their eyes and combs forever swishing through their hair, it is “full of kicks, man.” For spectators, who pay for the privilege of inhaling exhaust fumes and having their ears buffeted by painful, unceasing noise, it is the promise of the macabre and the vicarious thrill of speed. But for a slight 32-year-old Floridian named Don Garlits, who has driven the recognized quarter mile faster than anyone ever before, it is sweet misery: a $70,000 income, mushrooming business prospects, recognition and a deep longing to be someone else, somewhere else. All from a sport associated in the public mind with the psychologically scarred.

“Mention drag racing,” says Garlits, “and right away people look at you kind of queer, and you know what they’re thinking: ‘Poor boy. He was promised a pony one year for Christmas, and he didn’t get it.”

To read the entire article in SI’s vault, click here.