BOUND FOR GLORY,
AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Drag Sport Illustrated liked one of Wallace’s signature “ladder” photos enough to enlarge a small print into a tabloid-sized cover shot, much to the photographer’s surprise. Nearly four decades later, Dave’s “career shot” was honored in the prestigious Leslie Lovett Memorial Photo Contest.

8/8/05

overing a 1960 drag race on deadline was nothing like doing the job today. What an army of people and equipment do now — shooting pictures and writing words, armed with laptop computers and digital cameras — was often accomplished by a single photojournalist. Accurately recording elapsed times and speeds was, in itself, a major challenge. Apart from class records and final-round times, nothing was recorded for posterity at many tracks. The only place that an ET or speed was written down was on a time slip — which went home with the racer.

Beyond the obvious abilities to write and shoot, this job further required good ears and strong legs. Imagine sprinting from the starting line to the nearest speaker pole at the conclusion of every qualifying run or race, ballpoint pen and clipboard in hand, straining to hear the numbers announced over primitive PA speakers. Missing a garbled ET or speed meant sprinting to the time-slip booth — dodging the next pair of hot cars pushing down the fire-up road — to copy the time slip before it rode off in a push truck.

Now, picture our hero loading short rolls of black-and-white Polaroid film between runs; hand-cranking each exposed sheet out of a primitive, 1950s-vintage camera body; waiting a full minute for the image to form; peeling off the film’s protective cover sheet; swabbing the fresh print with smelly goop (to prevent the fragile image from fading away); then finding someplace clean and safe to store it while the sticky “fixer” dried.

At San Fernando (Calif.) Raceway in the early Sixties, that busy guy on the starting line was my dad. During the three hours of weekly open-header time allowed by the young sport’s first noise curfew, Dave Wallace, Sr. juggled all of these duties, and more. Anytime the action stopped after an oil-down or accident, he picked up a broom. Prior to 12:30 p.m. and after 3:30, he handled trophies for about 40 classes and typed up track-record certificates, right on the spot. He seldom left the strip before 6:00 p.m. — and his workday was far from done.

Once home, after the dishes were done and three kids put to bed, Dad would organize a large stack of trophy winners’ final-round time slips, then type up a list of class winners and their respective ETs and speeds for Drag News. Then he’d bang out an entertaining story, detailing round-by-round action in Top Fuel, Top Gas and Little Eliminators. Thus did a part-time job that began with unpacking trophies at 11:00 a.m. extend until midnight, or even beyond — a lot of time and effort for 20 bucks’ pay!

“I got the job because I could use a typewriter,” he explains. “I’d been taking money at the front gate for a couple of years, so I got to know quite a few of the regular racers and their families. But the only racing I saw was when I relieved other people for lunch. Around 1960, whoever’d been handling record certificates and typing up the list of class winners went away. They needed someone who could type, and I did a lot of that at my real job [as a postal clerk].