Tommie Irvin of Baldwin, Georgia, poses next to his racer at the Greenville-Pickens Speedway in the early fifties. Photo courtesy Tommie Irvin

By Eddie Samples
Posted in Feature Stories 7/23/09

Tommie Irvin is a former soldier, race driver and speedway owner.  Thirty-four years he worked for the State of Georgia Agriculture Department, and at a much younger age, against the State of Georgia playing in the white liquor business.  (His cousin Tommy Irvin is the longtime commissioner of the Department of Agriculture.)

Irvin has fought game roosters in far away places such as Louisiana and raised national championship dogs.  Today for the most part he is retired, running a general store near Baldwin, Georgia with his two sons and playing around on their 700 acres in the North Georgia mountains of Banks County.