BMX Racing History · Track File · Legend Bike Co

Palms Park: Ron Mackler's Track, and BMX's Oldest Argument

Every origin story in this sport starts with a grown-up making a decision about a bunch of kids tearing up dirt they weren't supposed to be tearing up. Most of the time the grown-up ran them off. At Palms Park, the parks man watched the kids launch their stripped-down Schwinn Sting-Rays over the mounds at the edge of the property, and he did the opposite. He got a clipboard, set a start time, charged a quarter, and put trophies on a table. That decision — organize instead of evict — is why Palms Park is in the argument at all.

The Decision That Made It a Track

The raw material was everywhere in Southern California in the late 1960s. Kids too young for a motorcycle license were watching motocross on the weekends and going home to the only machine they had — a Schwinn Sting-Ray, fenders off, chainguard off, seat slammed — and finding whatever dirt was closest. Palms Park had dirt mounds. The kids found them.

What Palms had that a hundred other patches of dirt didn't was Ron Mackler. He worked for Parks and Recreation, he had motocross in his own background, and when the riding started turning into a crowd he treated it the way a race organizer would rather than the way a groundskeeper would. Saturday mornings. A quarter to enter. Names written down. Motos called. Trophies handed out at the end.

That is the whole difference between kids messing around and a sport. It is the same difference Scot Breithaupt would make at the BUMS lot in Long Beach — structure, repetition, a reason to come back next week. Mackler got there with a public park behind him and a paycheck from the parks department. Breithaupt got there at thirteen with his own trophies off his own shelf. Which of them got there first is the fight this page exists to lay out.

Bill Ryan's account of Palms is the one this library carries as firsthand: Mackler as a Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation director, noticing the Sting-Ray kids on the mounds, and turning it into structured weekly Saturday-morning racing with trophies, clipboards and entry fees — running from the middle 1960s into the early 1970s, with the organized racing starting somewhere around 1969 or 1970. He also notes what the Hall of Fame side of the record says: that Palms is widely recognized as the first organized, regular BMX race program, ahead of the formal sanctioning bodies. (Bill Ryan, 2026.)

What the Hall of Fame Says

The National BMX Hall of Fame put Mackler in with the Class of 2015, under Special Recognition — a separate category from the Pioneer inductions — at the induction ceremony in Chula Vista that October. He was honored posthumously; he had died in 2010.

The Hall's own announcement text names July 10, 1969 at Palms Park as the day, describes Mackler as the park superintendent working for the Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Department, and credits the quarter entry fee with pulling in a crowd that grew week over week. It lists the riders it drew: Thom Lund, John Palfreyman, Perry Kramer, and the Rick's Bike Shop team — the shop crowd that shows up again and again in the bike shop chapter of this series. Britannica carries the same date and the same job title, and adds that Mackler kept the races going through 1984.

Worth knowing before you take any of it as gospel: the Hall of Fame's own paragraph names the Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Department and the city of Santa Monica in the same breath, which are two different governments. That sentence is the root of a lot of what follows.

Argument One: What Year Did the Racing Start?

July 10, 1969 is the date you will see everywhere. It traces back through the sport's own literature to Bob Osborn's The Complete Book of BMX, published in 1984, which is where a lot of BMX's founding dates were first written down and hardened.

The loudest objection came from the person with the most to lose by it: Scot Breithaupt. Writing corrections into Gerrit Does's University of BMX archive years later, Breithaupt said flatly that he had no proof of the 1969 date, that the article he had in hand from 1974 showed Palms handing out awards for its second season, that he raced some of Palms' first races himself in 1974, and that he therefore believed Palms actually started around 1973 — by which point, he pointed out, several tracks were already running.

That objection has teeth, because the surviving paper backs the early-1970s end of the range and nothing backs 1969. What exists: a Bicycle Moto-Cross flyer for Palms dated May 13, 1973, reproduced in the Cheviot Hills History archive. A Pedal Pushers clipping from May 1974. And a June 1974 race report in the So. Calif. Motocross Newspaper covering a ten-week Palms Park series and naming Perry Kramer, John Palfreyman, Thom Lund, Dave Clinton, Brian Ramocinski and Marvin Church. Real, period, checkable.

What does not exist, at least not anywhere we have been able to reach: a single newspaper item, flyer, results sheet or photograph from 1969, 1970 or 1971 that names Palms Park or Ron Mackler. People have referred to a Herald-Examiner piece on the race. Nobody has produced it.

So the honest position is this. Palms Park almost certainly ran the first regular, repeating, organized bicycle race program in Southern California — that part of the claim holds up across every source. The year it started is not settled. 1969 is the traditional answer and it is the one the Hall of Fame and the encyclopedias use. 1973 is the answer the other principal in the story gave, and it is the one the surviving paper is closest to. We are not going to pick for you.

Argument Two: Which Palms Park?

Three cities turn up in the record, and they are not variations on a spelling. They are three different places.

Santa Monica

This is the entry in our own hub chapter, The History of BMX, and it is the version the sport itself repeats. The USA BMX Hall of Fame announcement says Santa Monica. Britannica says Santa Monica. Perry Kramer, who actually raced there, has described Palms as his home track growing up in Santa Monica. The University of BMX archive heads its 1969 entry Santa Monica. This is not a careless claim from a bad blog; it is baked into the sport's foundational literature going back to 1984.

West Los Angeles

City records point somewhere else. The City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks operates the Palms Recreation Center at 2950 Overland Avenue, in the Palms district of West LA — bought by the city in 1959, sitting right at the interchange with the Santa Monica Freeway. Local Westside history work, including the Cheviot Hills History archive that holds the 1973 flyer and the 1974 clipping, places Mackler's races at that park on Overland Avenue. The University of BMX archive contradicts its own headline one sentence later and says West Los Angeles. Wikipedia says West Los Angeles.

The most likely explanation, and we offer it as an explanation rather than a verdict: the park sits on the Santa Monica Freeway on the western edge of the city, in a stretch of LA that everyone from outside it calls Santa Monica anyway. Shorthand became the record. Our own tracks chapter, The Tracks That Built BMX, already says West LA — so this library currently disagrees with itself, and we would rather say so than quietly fix one page and hope nobody notices.

Lakewood

Bill Ryan's records give a full street address: Palms Park, 12305 207th Street, Lakewood, California 90715. (Bill Ryan, 2026.) That is a real park with that exact name and address — the City of Lakewood's Palms Park and Community Center, next to Palms Elementary School, about 25 miles southeast of Overland Avenue and in a different city under a different parks department. Anyone who grew up in the Long Beach and Lakewood corner of the county knows it.

The complication is the calendar. The City of Lakewood's own listing for that park dates its dedication to 1978, which sits badly against a 1969 race and badly enough against a 1973 one. We are printing the address because it is in our records and because it is the only account here that comes with a street number instead of a city name. We are printing the dedication date because it is in Lakewood's. If somebody has a Lakewood Palms flyer, a results sheet, or a photo from the 1970s, that would change this page in an afternoon.

What Mackler's Track Actually Produced

Set the argument aside for a second, because the part nobody disputes is the part that mattered. For something on the order of fifteen years, one public park in Los Angeles County ran bicycle racing on a schedule, with a fee, with results, open to any kid who showed up. That is longer than most tracks in this series lasted, and it started before the sport had a name that anybody agreed on.

The riders it produced are all over this library. Perry Kramer went from Palms to a name on the side of the frame that defined an era. Thom Lund raced Palms and then rode into the Saddleback Park pro purse story, where the record gets just as slippery. Dave Clinton came out of that same crowd. The Rick's Bike Shop team was one of the first real shop teams the sport had, and Palms is where a lot of it was tested.

And the program itself outlived its founder's involvement. Mackler eventually handed the running of the races off to Rich Lee, who by several accounts kept them going for years after. That is the sign of a track that had actually become an institution instead of a guy's side project.

Where the Record Runs Thin