The Wreck at Yellow River Drag Strip Covington, Georgia 1969 | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Forty-Six years ago, 11 were killed at a local Georgia dragstrip. I was there.

    When I returned from Vietnam in February 1969, I wanted to get back into a normal life back in "The World". My cousin and I were helping Mark, one of my old grammar school friends, with his drag car. It was a Henry J.

    I have known Mark since kindergarten. He is just shy of a year older than I am and always tells people the reason we were in the same class is that he failed kindergarten. To steel a phrase from the remake of "True Grit", we have had some lively times together.

    Mark got into organized drag racing early in high school. We would work on his Henry J well into the night and then trailer it to the local drag strips on Sunday for match races. Most of this was when drag racing was largely unsponsored for local participants. Later on, in the mid to late 60's drag racing became a full sponsorship profession for many drivers. The locals still raced against themselves but the big buck boys had taken over the top of the ticket.

    Most of the sponsors were local auto dealerships or garages with a few trucking companies thrown into the mix.

    On March 2, 1969, we went to Yellow River Drag strip in Covington, Ga. Yellow River was no more than a strip of asphalt in the country, but they were part of the early history of drag racing in Georgia.

    The day we were there, they were just starting to introduce the "Funny Car" to drag racing. They are fiberglass-bodied racecar, but built to resemble muscle street car of the era.

    The facts are listed in the links below. Frank Oglesby, the driver of Dyno Don's Cougar that was racing Huston Platt in his Dixie Twister. Huston's car lost control and jumped the barrier and landed in the seating area killing eleven people and injuring many more.

    Art and I were about 20 feet from where the car landed and had been previously sitting in the old metal stands where it landed. That was the last race ever run at Yellow River. Today it is a trailer park or as some more gentrified people say Mobile Home Community.

    I told Art, "Let's get the hell out of here; I just spent the last year dodging bullets and I come back home only to almost get killed at a drag race".

    This past weekend (April 2015) my old buddy, Mark's son Brent was racing at Road Atlanta in an old NASCAR racecar. This is vintage racing called "The Mitty". Just like the days of old, the car is sponsored with nothing but the love of cars and whatever assets that are not devoted to family and living.

    As old farts often do, Mark and I reminisced about the good old days and Yellow River eventually came up. Mark says that Ford flew a bunch of executives down to buy up all the movie footage of the event. The Blown Nitro Funny Cars of those days were not factory backed and the NHRA did not have a class for them. The Nitro Funny Cars were big crowd pleasers and track promoters would book as many as they could afford for match races. That allowed them to bypass a sanctioning body like the NHRA, which required some safety precautions to prevent what happened at Yellow River. The tracks that did not have NHRA races were known as outlaw tracks.

Mark and Bobby Tony Friends for 65 years
    Forty-six years later, the old love affair with cars is still alive and both Mark and I have sons inoculated with the "Hot Rod" serum.

    Here are some links about the tragedy:

    Huston Platt Remembers
    Flashback to Yellow River