I’ll throw an image out there and see if this provides any flashbacks for our Refugees.
What context, if any, could you add to this? Some of us may be too young to know what is happening here, others might have some fond memories rekindled from this photo. Feel free to reminisce in the comments.
GTP Refugees 
The view from the tracks. Spent the entire night up there prior to the Georgia- Bama game in 1976. As Otis said yesterday, fucked up as a teenager’s checkbook. A train was trying to pass through and I don’t think 1 person moved.
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was there with you
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Oh my Lord, the railroad track crowd! For those too young to know, and I’m barely old enough to know, the east end of the stadium used to be open. Folks that couldn’t afford a ticket used to sit up there around the tracks and watch the game. Theus drag chairs and sofas and whatever out there. Erik Russell once said if the railroad track crowd, “Those are my people.”
These weren’t your Sanford wine and cheese types. These are the fans a certain element of the IGA fan base has always liked to pretend didn’t exist when they weren’t speaking of them like they were some unusual species of vermin.
I’m a Southwest Georgia boy. Born and raised and I’m still here because I like it here. The railroad track crowd are my people too. And I’m proud to say so.
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Erk not Erik. Damn phone.
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Me too Mike. Actually live about a mile from a young whippersnapper who goes by Otis that you might have heard of. 😉
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We oughta get us up a Refugees hunting or fishing trip.
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1978 vs nerdfootball, ya never know whut ya just saw, lived, breathed till it’s gone…..kudzu hill and that crowd….GO DAWGS!!
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How Southwest? My daughter started her extended college career at Andrew and I have a good buddy in Cuthbert.
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I’m not far from Cuthbert. And my wife grew up close enough to there you could throw a rock and hit it.
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My cousin went to Andrew and my only remaining Aunt still lives in Cuthbert. My uncle was a GSP trooper based out of there so some of the older crowd from that area may have had the opportunity to make his acquaintance along the side of the road back in the 70’s
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Well before my time but I love to see old pictures of Sanford.
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I saw UGA play Cal while sitting on rhe tracks in 1974 maybe. We were anazed at how Joe Roth could throw a football. Everybody was used to seeing three yards and a cloud of dust.
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It was the 1976 opener. You are correct about Joe Roth. His passes to Wesley Walker
gave us fits until Walker got injured and had to go to the St. Mary’s radiology
department for x-rays during the game. The stadium did not have
an x-ray machine so St. Mary’s provided that service.
Joe Roth had suffered from cancer and this was to be his comeback season.
It came back during the season and he died.
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That may have been my first game attending in Sanford. I remember the next year’s opener (Oregon?) where the PA announcer called for a moment of silence for Joe Roth.
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Joe Roth was the best college QB I ever saw in person as I watched that day from the student section. Apparently an even better man. A life ended way too soon.
A 1973 graduate of Granite Hills High School in El Cajon, Roth led Grossmont College of El Cajon to an undefeated season and state title in 1974, and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley in 1975.[6] Originally a back-up, he started the fourth game of the 1975 season, and led the Golden Bears to the Pac-8 title as co-champions.[7] Cal led the nation in total offense, gaining the same yardage both passing and rushing with 2,522 yards each.[8]
In 1976, Roth was a pre-season favorite for the Heisman Trophy. The season was more tumultuous, and towards the end of the year Roth’s performance started to drop, but he was named an All-American and finished ninth in the Heisman Trophy voting.[9]
After the season ended, he revealed that halfway through it he had been diagnosed with terminal melanoma – apparently the metastasis of a mole removed from his face several years earlier. Despite his deteriorating physical condition, he honored his commitments to play in both the Hula Bowl and the Japan Bowl. According to a friend’s reminiscence, during the Japan Bowl festivities Roth had agreed to sit for a thirty-minute autograph session; but finding, at the end of the scheduled time, hundreds of children still waiting, he continued to sign until every child had an autograph, after which he left the building and vomited.[10]
By mid-February he was in the hospital, where (in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle)
Roth died at age 21 on February 19, 1977.[4][5]
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First game to open the season in 1976, my first game as a Dawg fan and student of UGA. I was in the stands with my roommates. I wouldn’t have fit in with the crowd on the tracks, then or now, but I damn sure respected them.
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Even when I could get student tickets, sitting on the tracks was more fun – and for about half the game you got a better view than in ticketed seats Bathrooms were no worse, either. Some clown brought a gun one day and that ended it for me. Not long after that, they closed that end of the stadium in and tickets had to be obtained. I will say I don’t recall us actually stopping a train, but we did slow it down. At the time, UGA needed that track to get coal delivered to its power plant, but I always thought the only reason for the train on a Saturday afternoon was to piss us off.
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Stopping a train really happened. I saw it.
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Me too Gaskill. It happened 3 times if I remember correctly for that ’76 Bama game. The train pulled up close and laid down on the horn all 3 times. No fukn way were we moving. Before the game started a Bama fan drove by in front of us and a single piece of gravel hit his car. Well, the dumbass threw one back at us. Big fukn mistake. Almost instantly several hundred pieces of gravel hit that car and shattered every piece of glass on it except the stadium side. Must admit I nailed it with a few myself, had a strong throwing arm back then. 😁
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i lived in River Mill in the fall of 76, 2d floor, facing the tracks. That 76 Alabama game was the wildest week I ever saw. I will note that about noon on Friday, I was on my balcony and noticed some people dragging lawn chairs and coolers down the tracks towards the stadium. What? It was pretty full by evening. Early Saturday am, a train came along. It stopped. Nobody would move. It was an awesome experience that I truly doubt would be allowed to occur now.
I sat on the tracks once, didn’t really care for it, but those people were hard core. Athens was a much more interesting place when it had students from all over the state, from varing backgrounds, and intellectually diverse. You learned a lot about people who were differe4than you, including how to respect the differences. It wasn’t an echo chamber for lemmings. But, what do I know?
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”intellectually diverse”…I think he’s calling some of y’all stoopid.
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Na. I think he’s saying UGA was a little better when it wasn’t just a school for Atlanta rich kids and out of state rich kids. But that was just how I read it.
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you are correct, Mike. I learned a lot about people from all over the state. Some were really smart. Some were not necessarily the 99th percentile academically, but had tons of common sense. A lot of those small town folks were different than me, had really different experiences than me growing up, and exposed me to the possibility that it was a big world. I didn’t love everyone I met, but I learned how to get along with different kinds of people. It seems now that the suits at UGA are much more interested in wowing their fellow academics with credentials and stats. They don’t have time for regular people, they can all go someplace else. Is it really the University of Georgia if people from all over Georgia aren’t there? I could be wrong, i guess. There are many fine things about UGA, and I’m glad those things exist. But it isn’t all seashells and balloons.
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Good post and good thoughts. Something has happened to people over the last twenty or so years. I guess it would be too easy to blame it own social media. Somehow it’s like most people think they’re supposed to pretend they don’t know any normal people. Statistics and common sense say they’re lying. I mean there just aren’t that many rich people and there aren’t all that many intellectuals in the world let alone a single state. I went to college later on in my twenties but the experience you described is the one I had in the Marine Corps.
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The origin of “ What’s that coming down the track?” or so I shall always believe.
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Every time I drive by that part of campus, I try to imagine that view.
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less than 1% of UGA students and probably faculty would approve of anyone from the railroad tracks today. It’s sad how Athens has turning into San Francisco east.
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Yeah. I’m good with letting people just be whatever they are. But that is becoming unheard of anymore. It’s like if you didn’t grow up in a suburb to a family with money and didn’t spend your vacations on Sea Island there’s something wrong with you. All I know is, there’s a lot more ordinary people than there are of the other kind.
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