TIDA Late Model drivers, Meeks, Denman, injured in fiery wreck

[NickHolt]

[NickHolt]

I happen to have the qualifying times from on a printout I made on from my ancient Tandy 100 on race day. 

1. Hubert Bean,19.35

2. Greg Davidson, 19.38

3. Rick Rapp, 19.44

4. Jay Watson, 19.47

5. Larry Schild, 19.47

6. John Kelly, 19.50

7. Tommy Grothues, 19.53

8. Mike Denman, 19.62

9. Ken Neal, 19.69

10. Ervin Breiten, Jr, 19.73

11. Tommy Grimes, 19.70

12. Beaver Stelzig, 19.75

13. Leroy Farmer, 19.76

14. David Umscheid, 19.80

15. Russell Dechert, 19.84

16. Steve Smith, 20.09

17. Tommy Davis, 20.12

18 Steve Wagner 20.12

19. Jimmy Parks, 20.25

20. John Walker, 20.26

21. Mike Meeks, 20.29

22. Scot Sullivan, 20.47

23. James Taylor, 20.56

24. Buck Borlace, 20.88

25. Curtis Christian, 20.93

26. Ward Heinrich, 21.55

27. Raymond De La Houssaye, 21.74

28. Bobby Blake, 22.09

29. Lance Gaither, 23.32

 

[txtom]

This night that Dave Despain was at the track doing a story on Neil Upchurch and the TIDA series. Apparently made quite an impression on him....Thankfully, all drivers came back to race again. 

[NickHolt]

I wrote a long, detailed piece about that night for the paper, but by then I had learned that I'd better put all the important stuff up front because the sports editor was not a racing fan and would give much more space to the running writer and even the bowling guy.  Sure enough, all the quotes and narratives about what people in the stands experienced, etc, ended up on the cutting room floor.

And in those days you wrote your stuff at the newspaper downtown and not on your own computer so whatever you wrote was either published or you never saw it again since no one except the editors had their own storage areas. The computer was huge and took up most of one floor.  Those were the days.

I owned one of the earliest laptops - a Tandy 100 with 26 KB of memory - which had about enough memory for three pages of text.  I was only able to use it when I covered high school football games using an acoustic coupler. It took about 15 minutes to download  a page of text!  

Nick