Cycle News

VOL. 55 ISSUE 43 OCTOBER 30, 2018 P127 1980 or '81, I guess." By the time I met Randy at Road Atlanta during the 1983 WERA Grand National Final, he'd been covering races for several years. I'd seen his byline in Cycle News and was happy to finally get to know him. The one thing that stuck in my mind was the gear Randy was shooting with. While the majority of racing photographers in those days were using Nikon or Canon, Randy was shooting with Minolta cameras, which made him unique in my mind. There was a pretty large con- tingent of road racers based in the Atlanta area, and those were Randy's buddies and travel mates. Riders like Deano Swims, Donnie Rowe and Kevin Eby. Then Randy traveled around the country cover- ing AMA/CCS Endurance races with Lynn Miller and Keith Perry of Team Ontario. "I guess the highlights of covering races were the friendships I made with the guys like Kevin Rentzell, Bob Applegate and David Graham, the Ontario guys, and all the Atlanta gang," Randy said. "That's what meant the most to me." While he loved covering races, the constant travel grind began wearing on him by the late 1980s and after a decade or so of covering races, Randy decided to go back to school and get his degree. He then began photographing the Blues music scene for several magazines. His photographs of Blues musicians and concerts have been featured in galleries and won awards. Today, Randy is living in North Carolina and after his ill-fated first relationship, is fortu- nately now happily married. Randy told me the brutal details of what had happened to his once extensive motorcycle racing photo collection—a first marriage gone bad. The ex, for whatever reason, pitched Randy's original racing negatives. For a racing historian, who loves to preserve history, it was tough to hear that years of work and racing history had been lost to an ugly divorce. But there was hope. While the negatives were gone, Randy still had prints that he'd managed to hold on to over the years and he was going to send those to me to digitize and preserve. I was pumped! But when I got home from the post office and opened the package, the brutal truth set in. Forty photographs. That's all that survived. Now I understood why Randy was so cautious about sending the photos to me, why he'd called several times to make sure I'd received the package. These pre- cious few photographic prints were all that remained of his decade- long life on the racing circuit. What once probably numbered in the tens of thousands of racing nega- tives were down to these precious 40 images. For a moment I lamented the loss and pondered all the great photos Randy had taken, that now are somewhere buried deep in a landfill. Then I began to look at the precious 40 images that survived some 30-odd years. A few wonderful photos of 1980s racing legends like Kenny Roberts, Mike Baldwin, Dale Quarterley and Doug Brauneck, and more still of lesser-known club and endurance racers who were likely friends of Randy's. Then I recalled my own brief foray into road racing and how I didn't have a single photo to commemorate that time and how there were images in this small collection, in this precious 40, that would likely mean the world to a rider who was captured on film all those years ago. And now these 40 photos would get a second life, bringing back those long-forgotten memories. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives Cycle News cover photos by Randy Marrs.

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