On July 10, 1969, a group of boys riding their Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycles in Palms Park in West Los Angeles wanted to race.  A park attendant, Ronald Mackler, a teenager with motorcycle motocross (MX) experience, helped them organize.  Palms Park became to BMX as Elysian Fields is to American baseball, for at that moment Bicycle Motocross racing was born.  By 1973, entrance fees of US $4.50 (which included a US $1.00 insurance fee for the year) for a 10-week season of Thursday-night racing was charged, and the top three racers in the season were given trophies.  Then a new season of 10 weeks would start the following Thursday.  The track operated well into the 1980s largely unchanged, including the lack of a modern starting gate.

Wikipedia’s BMX racing page (October 2017)​​

In nineteen-seventy when I was five years old my father would drive my brother Devin and myself on Friday nights to begin competing on a new kind of race course at a neighborhood city park. Ron Mackler was putting on the twenty-inch BMX bicycle races at Palms Park on Overland Avenue in West Los Angeles.  The course was a combination dirt and cement race track that had six berm turns that were built around tall Douglas Fir trees and a small jump at the bottom of a hill. At the start of the race, you had to be the racer in front first into the turn if you wanted to win. 

Bart de Jong, “In The Beginning” True Story by Todd Bank, BMX Freestyle in the Making (Feb. 12, 2008)

Whether it was coaching boxing, putting on youth functions or creating off-road bike races around the trees of Palms Park, Ron Mackler was all about helping out the local kids, giving them something positive to do and keeping them out of trouble. As park superintendent, working for the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, Ron Mackler was the man in charge of Palms, and held some of the first organized BMX races ever.

USA BMX Hall of Fame (July 18, 2015)