It was September 30, 1961. The opponent was Rice University for the home  opener. For the first time, the official Rambling Wreck car was unveiled to 43,501 fans at Grant Field, leading the Georgia Tech football team onto the field. It has happened at every home game since.

The event did not establish a new tradition at Tech, but it cemented one. The vehicle, a restored 1930 Model A Ford Sport Coupe, was Tech's first official Rambling Wreck car, and it was an instant success. 

Since that time, the Rambling Wreck car has joined a much older tradition-the Yellow Jacket-as the official school mascot. The current Wreck is the latest in a line of distinctive white and gold cars on campus. While there was no official Rambling Wreck before 1961, several fraternities took turns driving various such vehicles.

The first reference to a Rambling Wreck vehicle on campus was applied to a 1914 Ford owned by Floyd Field, Dean of Men. The Technique student newspaper was the first published reference to the car as the "Rambling Wreck" in 1927. The paper spoke out against Field when he considered trading the car that year, but he disposed of it anyway.

The Technique, however, continued the tradition by sponsoring a yearly collegiate auto race from Atlanta to Athens, beginning in 1929, known as the "Old Ford" race or the "Flying Flivver" race. As the years went by, though, the race became too dangerous, and it was discontinued.

In its place, the school instituted the familiar Rambling Wreck Parade, which is still held every year on the campus during Homecoming Weekend festivities. The event challenges students to produce outlandish "mechanical monstrosities" capable of traversing a short course on campus.

Tech officials decided in the late 1950s that the school needed an official car that would be known forever as the Rambling Wreck.

Vice President and Dean of Students James Dull began a search for a pre-1940 vintage model, and finally found one-parked in front of his apartment building. The owner, Capt. Ted J. Johnson, a Delta Air Lines pilot, had just finished restoring the 1930 Ford Cabriolet Sport Coupe, which he intended to give to his son as a gift.

Johnson decided to let Tech have the car for $1,000 in May, 1961. He later returned the purchase price of the Wreck to the Athletic Association in the form of a contribution to the Alexander-Tharpe Fund, fulfilling a desire to go on record as having given the Rambling Wreck to Georgia Tech. The Wreck was completely restored again in 1982, under the supervision of Tech alumnus Pete George, manager of the Ford assembly plant in Hapeville, Georgia.

Ramblin' Wreck Song
It is doubtful that anything has ever meant as much to an American college as has this Georgia Tech fight song, a curious mixture of words and music that grew out of an old folk ballad, "The Sons of the Gamboliers." Since the early 1900's, it has been one of the most important vehicles in making Georgia Tech's name known around the world and in the development of the school as one of the most cosmopolitan institutions of higher learning in America.

Howard D. Cutter, a member of the first four-year graduating class who earned his mechanical engineering degree in 1892, wrote in the November-December 1942 issue of the Georgia Tech Alumnus that the "Ramblin' Wreck" had its beginnings during the first two years after Tech opened in 1885, specifically inspired when almost the entire student body traveled to Athens to see Tech's baseball team defeat Georgia. By the early 1900s, "Ramblin' Wreck" was an established tradition. The earliest existing published version of the song appeared in the Blueprint, the Institute's yearbook, in 1908.

In 1910, Michael A. Greenblatt, Tech's first bandmaster, discovered the band playing "Ramblin' Wreck" to the tune of "Sons of the Gamboliers," and made his first arrangement of the song in the form of a handwritten manuscript. When Frank Roman succeeded Greenblatt as bandmaster in 1911, he wrote a new adaptation of "Ramblin' Wreck," accompanied by many trumpet flourishes, that was played by every name band in the country and became nationally known on radio. His is the version that continues to be popular today.

The fame of the song spread to such proportions that in 1959 it was sung by Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev at their historic meeting in Moscow.

In 1984, the law firm of Newton, Hopkins & Ormsby investigated the copyright situation as it applied to "Ramblin' Wreck" and found that a number of people have various versions of the song that have been copyrighted. The original version of the song, however, is in the public domain and can be played by anyone without the payment of royalties.