1914 Indy 500

I finished up my studying today a bit late, and started in on the album at 6:00 p.m.  It's winding up to be about three to four hours work to finish a post!  I noticed this evening that I've stopped sneezing, too.  I guess that having the scrapbooks out in the fresh air has done them some good.

As I started digitizing what I felt were interesting photographs, I began to realize that this race may take more than one or two posts.  There are just some great photos here, and a lot of interesting stories to go with them!  So let's start off with a little fanfare.

Hopefully, we all have the theme from Rocky and Bullwinkle playing in our heads.

I thought this was a fun photo, since I had mentioned the marching band in a previous post, and it appealed to the little kid in me.  I've always loved listening to a brass band at a parade, and I can imagine Ivan running out there to snap a photo with his camera, although he was actually more like 20.  I don't have a clue what he used, but I do have a couple of his cameras as part of the collection.  It was actually a bit of an ordeal, not like snapping a digital photo with your cell by a long shot.  So this shot would have had quite a bit of planning before releasing the shutter.  Unfortunately, they all stopped playing just as they got to his position.

Ivan wasn't really careful about the order he put photos in, so I'm not going to try and guess the series of events, but the upcoming photo of the drivers did come after the band.  I thought it built a good sense of tension in the scrapbook, so I included it here.

Now it starts to get more interesting.  The cars are on the track and we get to walk down and see them in their starting order, sort of.  For whatever reason, there are only 4 photos of the grid.  It's possible that the photos just didn't come out, but we start with starting position 4, 5, and 6.

Mulford-23, Carlson-25, Chandler-38

Positions 9-12.  Bragg-21, Duray-14, Guyot-10, and Knipper-31

I promised in my goofy pre-post to this race that we'd see a famous WWI aviator in this round of photos, and here's our ace.  Eddie Rickenbacker, (from Stephen Sherman's great site) who changed his name from Reichenbacher, so Americans wouldn't confuse him with one of the German aces.  My son and I have read his autobiography a number of times and loved it.  This was one fascinating man, and I really love the parallels, however few, between him and Ivan. I promise to post a couple of great photos of Rickenbacker at the 1915 race.

Positions 22-26.  Burman-17, Rickenbacker-42, Disbrow-1, Wishart-19, Grant-27

Positions 13-17.  Mason-13, Cooper-2, Thomas-16, Anderson-24 and Dawson-26

For this post, I'll leave with this final photo of the pace car and the start of the 1914 Indianapolis 500.  Notice the driver and the observer looking back over their shoulder's to get a good look at the start.

I had a major shift in my understanding of the time frame of Ivan's life tonight.  I had been working on the incorrect belief that he was much younger when he started flying.  I thought he was around 19, when it turns out he was more like 22.  This actually answers some perplexing questions I had regarding his military service.  I only mention this to point out that it's fun going through this material, and being able to reconstruct facts about a person's life that were misunderstood previously.  I'm excited to dig into the collection more as a result.

There are a number of outstanding photos in the next batch coming up.  I have a couple of wrecks, breakdowns, and more track-side photos of racers and cars.  I also wanted to mention that I'm not doing any photo retouching at all, so far.  There may be some that I need to mess with the exposure, just so they're view-able, and I have done a number of photos that I have reprinted with really good results that I hope to frame, soon.

-kpw