WALLY PARKS: 1913-2007.(Competition)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

Wally Parks, the visionary Southern California hot rodder who founded and nurtured the National Hot Rod Association as well as a host of racing institutions that flourish to this day, died Sept. 28 in Burbank, California, at age 94.

Parks was one of the first racers on the dry lakes of the Southern California desert in the 1930s and was a founder of the Southern California Timing Association in 1937. The SCTA still sanctions land-speed racing at the lakes. He served in the South Pacific in World War II and was known at the time to have "the fastest Jeep in the Philippines.''

In 1948, Parks was part of a small contingent, including future publishing magnate Robert Petersen, that persuaded the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce to let hot rodders run on the Bonneville Salt Flats, which they still do today. Petersen subsequently turned to Parks when he needed an editor for the newly founded Hot Rod magazine. That same year, Parks and Petersen organized a motorsports industry show in the Los Angeles Armory that became the massive SEMA show now held annually in Las Vegas.

In 1951, Parks, Ak Miller and Marvin Lee founded the NHRA, with Parks, naturally, its first president. The NHRA's original goals were very close to today's: Adopt and maintain the strictest safety standards in motorsports, establish rules governing the sport and educate the public about drag racing.

The NHRA took a dangerous and illegal nationwide activity and molded it into something safe and presentable, without removing any of the elements that made it so much fun in the first place.

"Nobody had any illusion it would become as big as it has,'' Parks said in an earlier interview.