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Jerry O’Brien (ATD File Photo)

Longtime ATD columnist Jerry O’Brien dies July 14, 2025

By Scott Hughes, Publisher

EAU CLAIRE, WI - Jerry O’Brien, a longtime contributor to All The Dirt!, died last week on Monday, July 14 at home in Superior, WI. We have included his obituary in this issue, but I wanted to give you a little more background on Jerry, because he’s been a friend for years and a big part of ATD for so much of our history.

If you’ve been a regular racer or fan at Gondik Law Speedway, Proctor Speedway, Grand Rapids Speedway or ABC Raceway in the last 20-30 years, you probably crossed paths with Jerry and his wife, Joanne. And if you’ve been a regular reader of our pages, you’ve absolutely seen Jerry’s work over the years - hundreds of times.

During the past couple of years, Jerry had some health issues that slowed him down a bit, so he gave up the grind of weekly race reports, but he continued sending us regular columns detailing his dirt track observations well into the 2025 season. He took his job at the tracks seriously, and even though he’d had hip and knee replacements over the years, he just kept going and going and going.

Jerry was like an Energizer Bunny when it came to racing. For years, and years, and years (and then some more years!), Jerry and Joanne - in the early days lovingly and respectfully identified by Jerry as “She Who Must Be Obeyed” - attended races three or four nights a week. He was the track reporter at Superior and Proctor for decades, and in addition to capturing the action at each track, he also hammered out weekly racing columns. He was also the track reporter for Cedar Lake Speedway for many years when it was a WISSOTA track.

For many years, he stayed up half of the night, after the races, to make sure his race reports were filed on-time for local papers, and to make sure trade publications like ours had everything we needed by deadline, too. He went from typing everything on a typewriter and faxing it out, to working on a desktop computer and emailing, and then to a laptop, which he brought along with him so he could file reports from the track at the big fall invitationals.

Jerry’s “North Tundra Racing Beat” racing column was initially a feature in Checkered Flag Racing News. After CFRN stopped being published, Jerry came on-board with us here at All The Dirt. We’d had a lengthy relationship because Jerry was a valued race reporter for several tracks, so it was a natural fit with ATD. Jerry wanted to keep the Tundra aspect in his title, so we called his weekly piece “View From The Tundra” and he picked right up where he had left off with CFRN.

For many years, Joanne and Jerry had a table they set up on the grandstand side to sell racing papers, magazines, yearbooks and track programs - and that gave them the chance to visit with diehard race fans at all of the tracks. I bumped into them all the time on my way into tracks and Jerry was always there with some scoop or upbeat information for me.

Before he was a roving race reporter, though, Jerry was also a racer. His time as a driver ended in the mid-80s, and if I remember correctly, he had a Ford Pinto-bodied Modified back in the early years of the open-wheel class, which was initially called “Sportsman” in our area; the cars were patterned after the IMCA Modified, developed by IMCA owner Keith Knaack. Rice Lake Speedway picked up that class and got it started, then other tracks like Superior brought them on board in the following years, and eventually they became WISSOTA Mods. Jerry was one of the adventurous guys to jump aboard that wave in the early days.

He was also one of the people present at the meeting when the framework of WISSOTA was developed, and he attended every WISSOTA annual meeting and every WISSOTA 100 for decades.

So his perspective was pretty much all-encompassing. He was active as a driver, a track worker, a race reporter, as a super fan and as a historian. Our news coverage of 50-plus tracks and thousands of drivers has been incredibly in depth for decades because of generous souls like Jerry, who often work as volunteers to support our sport.

Jerry and Joanne loved racing people - their people - and for decades also followed them to Florida in the winters. While they waited for the Daytona 500 Sunday, they always took in a lot of dirt track racing in Florida, and always provided reports back to us from the Winternationals at East Bay Raceway and also from Volusia Speedway Park. They had great adventures and made many memories on their annual drives to Florida and back.

Jerry was a driving force behind the development of the Superior Speedway Hall Of Fame and was eventually inducted as a member; he will be inducted into Proctor Speedway’s HOF in just a few days. He deserves those accolades.

I’m going to remember my friend Jerry for all of his valuable work in racing, for that twinkle in his eye, and that little grin he always had when we met up at one of the area’s tracks.

My deepest condolences to Joanne and their family members spread across Wisconsin.