in part from a column at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution : The 1975 Talladega 500 was only seven laps old when a multicar crash began to unfold on the backstretch. Tiny Lund spun around and came to rest with the driver’s side of his car exposed to oncoming traffic. As Lund sat in his disabled car, it was hit in the left door by the car of Terry Link. Lund died instantly, while Link’s car, its driver unconscious, came to rest near the inside wall on the backstretch. Flames began to show under the hood of Link’s car, but there was no rescue team in sight. David Garmany and Richard Simpson, two brothers from Rossville, Ga., were watching the race from the infield near the spot where Link’s car came to rest. “When we saw the car on fire and nobody helping [Link], we jumped over the fence and started getting him out of car,” Garmany, now 58, said this week from his home in Lakeland, Fla. But a track worker, apparently upset that the two fans had scaled the fence, began beating them with a stick as thousands of horrified spectators looked on. “He hit me on the shoulder and the back of the head, so I took that stick out of his hand and threw it over next to the dirt bank,” Garmany said. Then driver Walter Ballard, who also had slammed into the wall, staggered to Link’s car and persuaded the track worker to let Simpson and Garmany continue their work. Ballard said the two fans were Link’s only hope. “I had to have some help because I wouldn’t have been able to get [Link] out of the car by myself,” Ballard, the 1971 rookie of the year, said this week from his home in Charlotte. Garmany said Ballard, staggering from his own injuries, pleaded with the track worker to leave them alone. “Walter Ballard said, ‘He’s trying to save the man’s life, for God’s sake,'” Garmany said. Finally, Garmany and Simpson were able to cut Link’s seat belts and remove him from the car. Still, the only official rescuers in the area were attending to Lund. “We stood there a long, long time,” Ballard said. “They finally got another ambulance back there, but it was quite a while.” Garmany burned his hands in the rescue, so he was carried to the track’s infield care center in the same ambulance as his hero, Lund. “We tried to massage his chest in the ambulance, but there was no response,” Garmany said. “At that time I was just focused on Tiny, hoping he’d live through that.” Simpson, who is now 59 and living in Chattanooga, and Garmany never received any formal recognition for their heroics. “We asked one of the policemen to take us back to where we were,” Simpson said at the time. “He told us we would have to get back the best way we could.” An unidentified racer overheard the conversation and offered the brothers a ride in his personal car. “I don’t even remember who he was,” Garmany said. “But he apologized for the ignorance of the people we’d dealt with and said he hoped that if he ever got in a bad crash that someone like us would be there for him.”( Atlanta Journal-Constitution ), all I can say is wow.(9-28-2003)
