Robert Frost said, "Good fences make good neighbors." My neighbor has a fence … I don't. But last week he was very good.
An evening phone call. "Could you use a couple of tickets to the 500?"
Is bear tea a brewin'?
Start/Finish line, under the overhang, on the aisle … and free.
So Son One and I will be making the trek this weekend, along with about 300 thousand close friends to the event that calls itself "The Greatest Spectacle in Racing." It will be the first trip there for him. For me, the third … sort of.
I had been a fan of the race, since I was a child. In fact my interest in it led me to violate convention a couple of times. Not much else could do that in those days.
I first put myself at risk because of the race in 1964. Tiffin's annual Memorial Day race was, rightly enough, on Memorial Day, May 30th, as was the race. That was back before these things were scheduled on the nearest Monday for convenience.
The hitch was that the Columbian band, in which I proudly played the baritone, was to march in the parade.
Oh, the wonders of early 60's technology. Radios had recently been made battery powered, portable and small enough to be hidden inside a band uniform with one of those flesh colored (if your flesh happened to be pink) wires leading to an earphone. Problem solved.
March to the beat, play the music, listen to the pre-race activity. All before anyone invented the term multi-tasking.
At the end of the parade route, the monument along Frost Parkway, the band had to wait quietly as various dignitaries gave their annual Memorial Day speeches. I sat quietly listening to Sid Gilman and his crew describe the start of 33 open wheelers … front engined roadsters and rear engined "funny cars."
Mr. Hawk, however, noticed the pink earpiece. Rather than disturb anything during the speeches, he asked me about it afterward. Just my luck, some big mouthed piccolo player blabs, "He's listening to the Indianapolis 500."
Mr. Hawk was not happy.
The next time the 500 led me to challenge the system was in 1968. I was a student at Bowling Green University. A friend of mine from England had an American girlfriend whose family attended the 500 each year. In '68, the race started and ran for a few laps before it was rained out and rescheduled for the next day. The girlfriend's family could not return for the rain date and offered their three tickets to my friend.
All we needed to do was skip classes that day. Life was much simpler then.
Three of us jumped into a Volkswagen Beetle early the next morning and off we headed. We watched from seats three rows up from the pits as Parnelli Jones drove the first Turbine car far away from the rest of the field, only to break down a couple of laps from the end and give the victory to A.J. Foyt.
My next trip to Indianapolis Motor Speedway was not for the race itself. It was back when I was working at WTTF. Tiffinite Dick Routh was the owner of The Routh Packing Special. The driver was SuperModified veteran Todd Gibson. So I drove to the track to do a couple of garage interviews from Gasoline Alley. It was strange to see the stands empty and most of the garages closed. So this has been a long week, longer than the week before Christmas. Maybe we should decorate.