Jim Kelly
“Diamond” Jim Kelly was one of the sport’s first full-time photographers. Jim got his first taste of drag racing in 1958 as a spectator at Lions Dragstrip after his good friend Don Gregory talked Jim into going with him to see what it was all about. Shortly after that, Don convinced Jim to become a competitor with his Austin Healey at Lions, where he promptly won his class the first time out. After that, he was hooked on drag racing forever, but a couple years after his first when, his car was destroyed by a drunk driver. Still wanting to be involved in the sport, Kelly started taking photos at the race tracks. Early in his career as a photographer, Jim had the good fortune to become friends with Al Johns, the track photographer for Lions. AI passed along some tips on what to do, and Kelly was soon excelling in his new hobby.
About this time, Al introduce Kelly to Doris Herbert, who owned Drag News, and shortly thereafter he was selling his photos to Doris for the paper. With the number of racetracks running every week in Southern California, it wasn’t unusual for Jim to cover over 100 races a year. Why Kelly was selling a lot of photos to Drag News, he had dozens more that were just piling up in his office, so he soon teamed up with Phil Bellamy and founded Drag Sport Illustrated. From this point on, his career as a professional race photographer skyrocketed. His photos started appearing in all the national magazines covering the sport in addition to the weekly papers.
In 1964 at the NHRA US Nationals, the publisher of Super Stock and Drag Illustrated approached Jim with the idea of accompanying the newly formed United States Drag Racing Team on its upcoming tour of England, and a few days later he was on his way across the pond. Later that year Jim moved from California to Virginia and took on the job as full-time photo editor of SS&DI. Not long after this move, the publishers of SS&DI started a new magazine, Stock-Car Racing, and Kelly was off to the stock car races. SS&DI was the magazine that gave the East Coast racers the best shot of national exposure during the beginning of their careers, and it was Jim’s coverage of such regular features as “Match Race Madness” and other such promotions that put them into the spotlight. It was Jim’s coverage of this type a special promotion that help popularize this form of showmanship, bringing the likes of “Grumpy” Jenkins, “Dyno” Don Nicholson, Sox and Martin, and Gapp & Rausch into thousands of homes each month.
Jim was one of the truly professional photographer was willing to attend the smaller backwater facilities that didn’t get a lot of publicity but were the early match races spent most of their early careers. This was one of Jim specialties, covering the racetracks that most people didn’t even know existed. Using gems photos of side-by-side funny car racing at the AHRA and outlaw tracks to demonstrate to NHRA the popularity of these cars, the funny car racers were able to convince NHRA of the value of a separate class just for them.
In 1969 Kelly was offered the chance to work for Peterson Publishing on Hot Rod Magazine. This is a dream come true, and soon Kelly was off to California again, where he went to work at PPC in their photo lab providing photos for all of its magazines. While it appeared to be a dream come true, it wasn’t long before Jim Tice, president of AHRA, made Kelly another offer that was too good to pass up. Shortly after Jim joined up with AHRA, the association launched its own weekly paper, Drag World, with Kelly as its editor.
As Kelly’s talents became even more renown, the job offers can you come in, and in 1976 the new publisher of Super Stock Magazine enticed Jim back to Virginia again, where he became the publisher of the magazine. 1979 brought another call from Jim Tice at AHRA, but this time it wasn’t just to edit the paper. Tice wanted Jim to learn the business of managing the association. Kelly stayed there until the early 1980s when Jim Tice passed away in the Association was sold. After 25 years on the circuit, Jim decided to retire from the sport. Not willing to watch the world from a rocking chair, Jim was involved with cars as the owner of a business that supplied new cars to electronic and print media automotive journalist for road test evaluation.