Fast Cars
Fast Cars and times
in
Atlanta, Georgia
Both Johnny and I had a great work ethic and saved up money
to buy our first cars, a Plymouth Fury and a Ford Mustang.
I worked at the Colonial grocery store in Skyland shopping
center and pretty much did it all. I
started out as a bagger and the ladies liked me since I did not put the heavy
items or can goods on top of the bread.
I also double sacked everything as this was when you used paper bags to
put the groceries before plastic bags came out for use. I stocked shelves at night and worked every
two weeks on a crew who stripped the wax off the floors then refinished them
before morning. Two things that paid
better was being a cash register checker and working in the produce
department. I became assistant manager working
there while in high school as the manager had a little drinking problem and
management could not get rid of him because the union always stepped in. I placed all the orders and received much of
the stock so I worked hard and saved money to pay for a car.
Johnny did the same thing, working hard so he could afford a
nice ride. He bought a 1966 Plymouth
Fury with a 318 cubic inch V8 engine. It
had a 3 speed manual transmission was Dark Blue in color with mag wheels. It was a beautiful car and it could go fast
when we took them out to several places to drive them full speed. Johnny took the 383 emblems off his dad’s
station wagon to put on his Fury. It
looked great and people thought his car had more horsepower than it actually
had but Johnny could drive it fast as any other like vehicle out there. His dad discovered the emblems were missing
off his car and got after Johnny about pulling them off his car and swapping
them. We thought it was funny but his
dad was not amused in the slightest.
There were a couple of places the kids from different high
schools would meet up to race cars either against each other or in timed
runs. One that was close to us was in
Brookhaven on the road that went around Silver Lake by Oglethorpe College. It had several dozen sharp curves and wound
its way through a nice neighborhood. The
people that lived along this road hated all of the teenagers who drove it,
especially at night. We both loved it
day or night as it had a nice groove and feel to the road with all the
curves. There were two outlets that led
you out of the neighborhood if the home owners called the police. I think the name of the road was Inman Drive
which came off Lanier Drive by Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic School which
was at the end of Lanier. The trick was
to start at Lanier Drive and make your way through to the end of Inman and
Woodrow Way, turn around and haul it fast back out to the starting point. Many times there would be several cars
running the road approximately 30 seconds apart. Everything worked pretty well if you were in
the first three or four groups but if there were more you would meet them on
the way out and that was where the real danger came in with the blind curves and
meeting another fast car head-on could mean disaster. If you made it back to the starting point,
you left the area before the police came in to check it out. If the police came then you scrambled to exit
from one of the two ways out of the neighborhood. Everyone would meet up at the Shoney’s Drive
in Restaurant parking lot and plan out the next time the gauntlet would be run. I think the police knew what we were doing as
they made several drives through the Shoney’s parking lot on the weekends and
would look at our cars and let us know they were watching us.
I bought a 1965 Shelby Mustang 2+2 fastback, blue with hood
lock pins which were cool. Ford marketed
it as the “Pony car” and I bought it for $ 2,200.00. It had a 289 high performance engine, 4-speed
on the floor transmission and the rally-pac instrumentation package. Both our cars gave the Pontiac GTO’s and
other muscle cars of the day a run for their money. When the 67 Camaro and Firebirds came out
both the Fury and Mustang kept them in check in performance and a good driver
could make the cars sing.
People would meet up after midnight on Friday and Saturday
nights, bypass the barricades and go to the Hill Street ramp to coordinate the
speed runs. We ran pretty well but the
Corvettes with their 427 cu in engines would out run most everyone. Johnny and I would take our date’s home then
head out after midnight to downtown Atlanta and the closed highway. It wasn’t long before I-20 opened and
everyone could drive that highway.
There was another road close to Piedmont Park that had a
great hill for jumping your car through the air like Steve McQueen’s 1968
Mustang in the movie Bullitt. My sister
showed me the road while she was out with her boyfriend and occasionally Johnny
and I would take turns driving our cars down there to jump the hill. Once you did it a couple of times the thrill
was gone but it was pretty neat to race up the hill or down the hill with the
car coming off the ground for a bit.
My senior year a small group of friends got together and
bought several $ 75 cars which we used for partying so no one damaged their “real”
car. There may have been drinking
involved on occasion so there was a need for a trash car. Someone’s dad worked for an insurance company
and we would buy totaled out cars from the insurance company for seventy five
bucks and drive them till they either quit or were further damaged hitting mail
boxes or trees while off road driving. We
were in good hands with Allstate, lol.
Once the cars were either trashed or no longer needed we would give them
proper burials. If the car could still
make it to Lake Lanier we would drive them down boat ramps. There were several cars that made it to
different boat ramps on the lake. One vehicle
was T-boned on the driver’s side door and we had to use bungie cords to tie the
door closed so you didn’t fall out of the car.
You had to get in on the front passenger side and crawl over to drive
it.
There was a girl in my home room Lynette, whose dad and his brother
were well known in the drag racing world with Hubert Platt driving his Ford
Mustang “Georgia Shaker -The Going Thing” and Huston Platt driving his
Chevrolet Camaro “Dixie Twister”. After
I got my Mustang Lynette introduced me to her father Hubert and his brother
Huston who took an interest in my Mustang. Hubert put one of the older blueprinted
engines in my Mustang that he couldn’t use to race. It ran like a scolded dog with all the new
power. It was a Stroppe-blueprinted 428
Cobra Jet engine that had been bored out and could easily beat any Corvette.
Hubert and Huston were kind and generous with me and I hated
when Huston had the tragedy at Yellow River.
Here is an old account of that spring day.
Huston Platt and his
Dixie Twister – Yellow River Drag Strip
In spite of many years
of flawless career service, the impact of a few errant seconds can forever
shadow a life, and that’s exactly what happened to Huston Platt on March 2,
1969. A split-second intervention by
fate’s darkest hand over shadowed his lengthy and admirable career as a
builder, tuner, and driver. Fate forever
tagged him as the man at the center of the deadliest accident in American
motorsports.
The incident weighed
heavily on Huston Platt until the day he died. His family and friends said he struggled with
the tragedy, overcame the events, and finally moved on to regain his life. That he was able to rise above the tragedy
will remain a testament to the man’s fortitude and courage.
His date with destiny
came as he made a run at the Yellow River Drag Strip, east of Atlanta. Closed for many years now, the track became a
mobile-home park, located off Interstate 20 at Exit 88. In the 1960s, Yellow River was well known for
staging F/X and Funny Car match races. It
was also notorious as an outlaw track. No
national sanction. No rules. Yellow River was always a substandard facility
that, without major improvements and investment, would never have satisfied the
minimum requirements for sanction. Its
inherent danger aside, Yellow River attracted a steady stream of race cars and
spectators who ignored the obvious danger and were eager to flirt with
disaster.
Time Bomb Ticking
The lanes were narrow
and the shut-off area short, requiring good brakes and an early parachute
release. The track was barely capable of
accommodating 150-mph speeds, let alone 190. The River was a sort of drag-racing bullring,
a term commonly applied to sub-basic dirt circle tracks that dotted the
Southern landscape. Its inadequacies
were well known, but the track paid well, consistently booked top traveling
pros, and was a favorite of Atlanta-area drag-racing fans.
The spectators were a
core problem. Save for a few strands of
farm barbed wire drooping from weathered posts, there was no fence and the fans
crowded perilously close to the action. These
hard-core whoopers bolstered their courage with cold beer often combined with
white liquor, gulped from brown paper sacks. It was not uncommon for hydraulically
emboldened spectators to run out to the edge of the track to experience a
190-mph rush within arms-reach proximity. Such antics usually earned the applause of
colleagues followed by an unheeded, “Get back, dammit!” warning from the
announcer.
Huston’s Dixie Twister
1969 Camaro was current by all standards. A dedicated hands-on racer, Huston built the
car and the blown 427 Chevy in it. Many
other Funny Cars had gone to the 426 Hemi or 427 SOHC, but Huston’s loyalty and
parts bin remained with Chevrolet. His
engines were powerful and reliable. Traction
at most tracks in the Southeast was marginal, but Huston’s tuning and wily
driving allowed him to master sandy, slippery surfaces while opponents
helplessly spun their tires.
Like many of his
peers, Huston’s chassis was built by Mt. Clemens, Michigan’s Logghe Stamping
Company. Its cars had a great reputation
for being fast, well-handling, and safe. Logghe pioneered the modern chassis and
fiberglass flip-top body that dominated the Funny Car ranks.
The Dixie Twister was
running against Frank Oglesby, a journeyman driver, in “Dyno” Don Nicholson’s
Cougar. Oglesby had only recently taken
over for Nicholson, who had moved to a SOHC-powered A/MP Maverick. After several close calls, Dyno had called it
quits in the increasingly hazardous nitro Funny Cars, so Oglesby was driving to
fulfill Nicholson’s prior match-race commitments. Also on hand was Malcolm Durham, Jungle Jim,
Arnie Beswick—all of them Funny Car vets.
Huston and Oglesby did
the usual smoky burnouts, followed by a couple of dry hops. Both cars were off
on the green. At the 1,000-foot mark,
Huston heard what he thought was a “bang,” and lifted off the throttle, at the
same time deploying the parachute. The
preliminary pop chute was quickly followed by the main chute, which filled
quickly. Witnesses reported that a
spectator ran to the edge of the track and was swept up in the fully blossomed
chute. Some reports had him trying to
retrieve a beer can from the track. He
was killed instantly. The car jerked to
the right and into a group of spectators sitting or standing just 20 feet away.
There was no time to escape. Police
reports said that 11 spectators died at the scene and that 40 more were
injured. A 12th victim died a few days
later in an Atlanta hospital. The Yellow
River incident remains the deadliest accident in American motor racing history. (Taken from Hot Rod Network)
Fast cars and good times, we were so innocent back then.
Ice
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