Don Garlits has two daughters with Pat, GayLyn, and Donna. Unfortunately, Pat died in year 2014 and Don said to Hemmings.com, “My beloved wife and partner for almost 61 years has gone to the other side.”
I will miss her very badly, will be with her soon than I even start thinking of it because here time is very different than over there. In 1994, Garlits tried to get elected to the US House of Representatives for Florida’s 5th Congressional District as a Republican, but failed to be elected by Democrat Karen Thurman.
Don Garlits Net Worth?
He is the professional drag racer. Don Garlits net worth is about $15 million. He is also known as “Father of the Drag Racing”. He soon started drag racing in the middle of the 1950s’ and has been using his personal self-built car.
With parts from a 1927 Ford Model “T” Roadster, a 1948 Mercury, a 1939 Ford, and a 1948 Ford, that car would assist him to win his first NHRA championship race. He went pro three years later, and over the next few years he really brought drag racing onto the Eastern seaboard and to England.
Early Life
Don Garlits was born on the 14th January 1932 in Tampa, Florida. He was the fourth child of five children raised by an electrical engineer father who later ventured into the business of running a health food restaurant and his mother, a cashier, at the restaurant business.
When Don’s parents got a divorce, his mum remarried a dairy man and in 2012 Garlits was to state to Florida Trend, “They put up a dairy in north Tampa by Lowry Park. My brother, I and my stepdad milked those cows seven days a week.
In high school, you wake up at 4:00 in the morning to milk the cows, clean up, start going to school, come back home to milk the cows again, do the homework, sleep only to wake up and do the same thing again in the morning. That’s how it went.
Career
Garlits constructed his first drag race car in 1954 in the yard of the North Tampa home where he grew up and were achieved with a 1927 Ford Model T Roadster with the help of a cutting torch as well as an arc welder.
He installed a floor shift transmission from a 1939 Ford, an engine block from a 1948 Mercury, the axle and differential also from a 1948 Ford. This was the successful, formative roadster that would become
the germ of his first rail job dragster when the body was removed, the engine moved back and the seat placed behind the rear end, by Don.
This was the 12.1 seconds 108 mph early slingshot dragster with which big daddy would participate and win the first NHRA race when the NHRA safety safari arrived in Lake City- Florida. But in just three short years, he would become a ‘paid’ drag racer.”
