Larry Lawrence | October 30, 2018
Archives: 40 Photographs – A Tale of Survival
It was with great anticipation that I waited for a box of photos being sent to me from 1980s racing photographer Randy Marrs. I’d reconnected with Randy, thanks to Facebook, after one of those online discussions of “whatever happened to.”
Archives: 40 Photographs – A Tale of Survival
Randy Marrs shooting at Road Atlanta sometime in the early 1980s.
When the post office worker turned the corner to hand me the package sent from Randy, she must have wondered what was wrong with me. I’m sure the color was going out of my face. The excited anticipation at getting a first look at Randy’s long-lost collection, turned to concern. This wasn’t a big box as I had pictured in my mind, but a flat padded ready-post envelope. I’ve digitized several photo collections before and I instinctively knew that there were not many photos in this package. What was going on?
Randy Marrs came into racing photography at first just to get pictures of a buddy who was racing.
“I had a good friend named Dave Stanton (not to be confused with the multi-time AFM and pro racer Dave Stanton) who worked with me at a foreign car shop and he raced in WERA,” Marrs recalled. “He was going down to Savannah to race one weekend and I told him I’d go down to take pictures of him.”
When Randy got down to Roebling Road, he found out the person who was supposed to cover the race for Cycle News never showed up.
“So, I took pictures and wrote a little story,” Randy explained. “At the time the Cycle News East office was in Tucker, Georgia, which was close to where I lived in Atlanta, so I ran my story and film over and they published it. They asked me if I wanted to keep doing this and I said, ‘Yeah, I really had a good time.’”
And with that Randy was a Cycle News contributor. He covered more club events and then got the call to cover his first pro race, an AMA Road Race National in Talladega, Alabama.
“From there they had me cover motocross and Daytona and it just kind of moved up the ladder,” Randy remembers. “That’s how I got started and this was 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 Olympus cameras, which made him unique in my mind.
There was a pretty large contingent 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 covering AMA/CCS Endurance races with Lynn Miller and Keith Perry of Team Ontario.
Cycle News cover photos by Randy Marrs.
“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 fortunately 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. 40 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 precious 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 negatives 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.
You can see Randy’s surviving photos here: https://riderfiles.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/randy-marrs-racing-photos/
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