In the 1920s, Edward Garlits, the father of Garlits, worked as an engineer for Westinghouse. He co-invented the electric fan and the electric iron at his laboratory with others. He moved from Pittsburgh to El Paso, Texas, as his health started to deteriorate. He later established a restaurant and health food store in New Jersey. About 1925, he divorced his first wife as part of his newfound health food religion and married sixteen-year-old Helen Lorenz, who worked in his store. They relocated to Garlits’ birthplace of Tampa, Florida.
Like his father, Garlits had a knack for tinkering with machines. When he was fourteen, he pulled engines out of cars and worked on them with his friends. 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. But Garlits was not meant to be a bookkeeper. After only six months, he walked out of the office, never to return.
After that, he went back to working on cars, his first love. Garlits had jobs at body shops and radiator shops before he seems to have found success as a race car mechanic. He started drag racing because it was the thing to do, not because he was passionate about it. Starting in 1952, Garlits used a modified 1927 Model T to race other people on Tampa’s abandoned back roads. Later on, he moved to a 1940 Ford convertible with a Cadillac V-8 engine that was maroon in color.In 1952, while taking a vacation from racing, he went waterskiing and met Pat Bieger, a Kentucky native who was eighteen. Garlits left racing to work for American Can Company while he courted her. The couple tied the knot on February 20, 1953. However, his enthusiasm for racing remained unquenchable. His wife initially wrote off the speeding citations he was getting from illegal races as his wild oats being sown, but that all changed when he told her he was upgrading the camshaft in their new Ford. A month after their marriage, Garlits “inadvertently” passed the Lake Wales Drag Strip while out for a Sunday drive. He assured them they would merely observe. Garlits had earned his first award before the end of the day,
Editor of Hot Rod magazine Wally Parks encouraged Garlits to compete in legal drag racing events in the Tampa region, where he soon started to win races. Garlits constructed Swamp Rat I, his first dragster, by the late 1950s. He was dubbed Don Garbage since it wasn’t as well-built as other of the vehicles used by his rivals. That credit quickly vanished, to be replaced by the 1962 moniker Big Daddy, which was bestowed to him by a track announcer. His dragster quickly outperformed all rivals and set records, covering a quarter mile in 12.1 seconds at 108.17 mph and setting a record in 1957 at 176.4 mph.
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