Ron Mackler

The Los Angeles parks man who ran BMX's longest-running weekly program, arranged the insurance, and handed out the trophies himself

A Legend Bike Co. person page

At a glance

Full name Ronald Steven Mackler
Born and died March 9, 1953 – July 10, 2010
Role Recreation attendant, later park superintendent, City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks
Track Palms Park (Palms Recreation Center), West Los Angeles
Active 1969 into the mid-1980s — roughly fifteen years of weekly racing
Honors National BMX Hall of Fame, class of 2015, Special Recognition

The parks job came first

Ron Mackler did not set out to build a sport. He was a teenager working for the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, assigned to the recreation center at Palms Park on the west side of town, and his job was to keep kids busy. He coached boxing. He put on youth events. He watched the local boys tearing around the park on their bikes between the trees and the footpaths, and instead of chasing them off, he made it into a race.

He was sixteen years old at the time, according to the West Los Angeles accounts, and he had some motorcycle motocross experience of his own to draw on. His brother Eric later said the reason was simple: the races gave the kids something to do and kept them out of trouble. The Hall of Fame citation years later used almost the same words.

Over time Mackler moved up inside the department and became a park superintendent. The racing at Palms kept going the whole while. He ran it from 1969 into the mid-1980s — about fifteen years of weekly events on public land, which makes it the oldest continuously running weekly BMX program anyone has documented.

The insurance is the part that mattered

Anybody can rake a track into a vacant lot. The reason Palms Park lasted fifteen years while dozens of neighborhood tracks lasted one summer is that Mackler did the paperwork.

He arranged the insurance. A city park cannot legally host a competitive event where children fall off bicycles unless somebody has sorted out liability, and in 1969 almost nobody in bicycle-motocross was thinking about that at all. Mackler was a city employee, so he knew the rules he had to satisfy, and he satisfied them. He also handed out the awards himself at the end of each season.

That is the whole story of why he is in the Hall of Fame. Not speed, not style, not a bike brand. A man filled out forms so that kids could race legally on public ground, every week, for fifteen years. Everything the sport later built — sanctioning bodies, membership cards, annual insurance fees, waivers at sign-up — is that same unglamorous work at national scale. Mackler was doing it in a park office before there was a sport to do it for.

How the 1973 season actually ran

By 1973 the program had a real structure, and the numbers survive. Racing ran on Thursday nights in ten-week seasons, back to back through the year. A season cost $4.50, plus a $1.00 annual insurance fee. Trophies went to the top three in each class at the end of the ten weeks.

A flyer still exists for a "Bicycle Moto-Cross" event on May 13, 1973, presented by Palms Park together with Cycle Products West — an early example of a city park and a bike shop putting their names on the same piece of paper.

The Hall of Fame citation describes a twenty-five-cent entry fee. Both figures can be true of a program that ran for fifteen years; a quarter a night sounds like the earliest, loosest version of the thing, and the $4.50 season package sounds like what it became once seasons and insurance were formalized. We have not found a source that reconciles the two directly, so both are reported here as they were found.

The riders who came through

Palms drew from well beyond the neighborhood once word got out. The Hall of Fame citation names Thom Lund, John Palfreyman and Perry Kramer among the early riders who turned up, along with the Rick's Bike Shop team run by Rick Twomey. Several of them ended up in the Hall of Fame themselves.

The Kramer result is the one that is nailed down on paper. On April 24, 1974, in the Palms Park Series, Perry Kramer took second in 12–14 Jr. Expert. It was reported in the very first issue of Bicycle Motocross News — which means one of the sport's first magazines and one of the sport's future stars were both documenting the same Thursday-night city park program.

A rider's account we cannot corroborate

In September 2026 a reader named Kenneth B. McWaid wrote to this library with a firsthand account of racing Palms Park. He says he raced the 9-to-11 Amateur class across three ten-week seasons in 1973, and he remembers Mackler running the events personally — lining all the riders up, calling "T off," and then switching on a flashlight to start each race.

We have found that start procedure recorded nowhere else. No flyer, no magazine report, no photograph we have seen mentions a flashlight start or that call. It is presented here as Mr. McWaid's recollection, attributed to him by name, and it is uncorroborated. If anyone else who raced Palms in the early seventies remembers the same thing, that would settle it.

The oldest argument in BMX

The West Los Angeles sources date the first race at Palms Park to July 10, 1969. If that holds, it predates Scot Breithaupt's first Long Beach "Pedal-Cross" of November 14, 1970 by more than a year, and the accepted starting line of the sport moves.

Breithaupt disputed it. His argument ran from a 1974 magazine piece that covered the awards for what it called Palms' second season, which would put the real beginning closer to 1973. Surviving flyers prove organized racing at Palms by May 1973 and no earlier with the same certainty.

This page is not the place to settle that. We have a chapter that lays out both sides in full at Palms Park BMX. What is not in dispute is the fifteen years, the insurance, the Thursday nights and the trophies — and those are what Mackler was actually recognized for.

The Hall of Fame

Mackler went into the National BMX Hall of Fame in the class of 2015, under Special Recognition, at the thirty-first annual induction ceremony on October 10, 2015, held at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. He had died five years earlier, so his family accepted the honor for him.

The citation is worth reading for what it chooses to emphasize. It describes a park superintendent who noticed kids racing around his park and heard opportunity knocking; who coached boxing and ran youth functions and built bike races through the trees and pathways; who charged a quarter and watched attendance grow. It closes by saying he thought he was just doing his job, and had no idea he was helping form what would become an Olympic sport four decades later.

He was inducted alongside Frank Post, Christophe Leveque, Bob Tedesco, Brian Blyther and Kathy Schachel. A short induction video for him was posted publicly in December 2015.

Where the public record runs thin

For a man credited with the oldest weekly program in BMX, there is remarkably little Ron Mackler in his own voice. We could not find an interview with him anywhere — no magazine sit-down, no oral history, no quoted paragraph. Almost everything written about him was written by other people, and most of it after he died.

Specific gaps:

His own words. None found. If a 1970s Los Angeles paper or an early BMX magazine ever quoted him about the races, we have not located it.

After the mid-1980s. Unknown. The racing at Palms wound down and the trail goes quiet. Whether he kept working for the department until retirement, and what he did with the last twenty-five years of his life, is not in any source we found.

An obituary. There is a death notice for Ronald Steven Mackler, born March 9, 1953, in the care of Eternal Hills Memorial Park in Oceanside, California. It carries no narrative text at all. No published obituary telling his story has surfaced.

The induction video. A 2015 Hall of Fame intro video for him exists publicly. We have seen it referenced but have not confirmed who narrated or produced it, so we are not attributing it.

Two dates that match. The first race at Palms is dated July 10, 1969. Mackler died July 10, 2010 — forty-one years to the day. We report both dates as they appear in the sources and make nothing of the coincidence, but a reader will notice it, and it is fair to ask whether one date was ever copied from the other.

Santa Monica or West Los Angeles. The Hall of Fame citation places Palms Park in Santa Monica. Palms is a West Los Angeles neighborhood and Palms Recreation Center is a City of Los Angeles facility, which fits his employer. We treat the Santa Monica reference as loose regional shorthand rather than a second location.

Where Ron Mackler fits in the bigger story

BMX history usually gets told through riders and brands, and Mackler is neither. He belongs to the small group of organizers, promoters and officials without whom none of the racing happens — the same category as the people who built the first sanctions and wrote the first rulebooks. Palms Park sits at the very front of The Tracks That Built BMX, and the dating fight over it is covered at Palms Park BMX. What Mackler did informally with a city insurance policy, BUMS and then the NBA and the NBL would soon do formally and nationally, on the way to what is now USA BMX. If you want to see how many early tracks came and went in a single season, the Track Atlas makes the point better than any argument can. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Cheviot Hills History (cheviothillshistory.org), Westside Bicycling History / BMX — the fullest account of Palms Park, including Mackler's dates, his parks job, the insurance and awards, the 1973 season structure and fees, and the May 13, 1973 flyer with Cycle Products West. BikinginLA, "Born in West LA," April 23, 2014. USA BMX, "National BMX Hall of Fame announces the Class of 2015," July 17, 2015 — the full Special Recognition citation, the quarter entry fee, the riders named, and the ceremony details. Bicycle Motocross News, first issue, for the April 24, 1974 Palms Park Series result. Dignity Memorial death notice for Ronald Steven Mackler, Eternal Hills Memorial Park, Oceanside, California. Reader correspondence from Kenneth B. McWaid, September 2026, for the racing recollection quoted above. How we work, and what we do with reader letters, is set out in How This Library Is Made; the full chapter list is at the library index.

Notes on uncertainty. The July 10, 1969 first-race date comes from West Los Angeles local history and is disputed; documentary proof of organized racing at Palms begins with the May 1973 flyer. His age in 1969 and the detail that his brother Eric explained his motive both come from those same local accounts and we have not independently verified them. The twenty-five-cent entry fee and the $4.50 ten-week season come from different sources describing different years and are not reconciled anywhere we can see. Kenneth B. McWaid's flashlight start and the call of "T off" appear in no other record and should be read as one rider's memory, not established fact. Nothing on this page is invented; where we do not know, we say so. Corrections and firsthand accounts are welcome and will be credited.