Indy 500 1915 post 3

I got an amazing email this week from a gentleman whose name you'd all recognize from the world of auto racing regarding the collection.  I never stopped to think that anyone who was really, seriously involved in racing would be reading this blog, for some reason. A stroke of incredible coincidence brought him here to begin with.  I hope he'll continue to follow the blog.  I'm sure he could educate us all on these photos, but I doubt he has the time. 

It left me feeling a little foolish for my flippant comments on the photos here, though.  I suppose I could have spent a greater amount of time studying the history of the race, in order to give an accurate account of what transpired there.  However, as I've said before, I'm not a historian in the sense that I'm doing a great deal of research on the collection, or on racing.  Honestly, I've been pushing through this section since my real passion is aviation, and it's a bit difficult to "gin up" any enthusiasm.  Even when we're finished with the Indy 500 photos, there are ... (one sec, I'm counting) ... well, only four pages of Ivan's racing career in this scrapbook.  If there are more in another, I'll fill that in later.

Well, enough dawdling!  Let's jump back into the photos.  Let's see, I left off with Howdy Wilcox, so next we have a shot of Eddie O'Donnell.  This is another case where there's just not much doubt about who's in the picture.  Ivan also saved me the trouble of looking up his date of death, but I did find an article claiming Eddie's Dusenberg had the largest engine at the track this year, with 299 cu. inches. 

Ivan followed this photo with a somewhat decent photo of the race itself.  Still, it's difficult (for me) to get too excited about this from a photographic standpoint.  It may shed some light on the race for those who are more knowledgeable, so I'll post it.

The next photo is positioned between a couple of photos of car #22, so I'm going to assume this is Ralph Mulford.  Rather than writing a sentence about an article recommending a book (which I just did, to be clear), I highly recommend this article about Ralph Mulford.  I bring it up since there was some controversy surrounding his second place finish of the race in 1911.

Next up is a photo that I've been chomping at the bit to post!  I just love the action in this photo, and the angle!  The thing that baffles me is the car number.  Who drove car number 40?  This was the mystery driver that I mentioned in the last post.  Well, I did a little digging, and the reason I couldn't find this car in the official race records is that it didn't race.  So, as I've speculated in the past, perhaps more of these photos than I've given credit to were during qualifying attempts.  This is Charles Shambaugh, who failed to qualify, but looked ridiculously cool while doing so.  Here's a post found at OldRacingCars.com:

A mechanic, Shambaugh owned a dealership and workshop in Lafayette, Indiana. He was also a carriage builder and a pioneer of the automobile in the area. He was involved in numerous other projects, including cranes, trucking, construction and airport businesses. Died after a farm accident (June 4, 1940).

These candid photos of the drivers in the scrapbooks are pretty fun, and there are a few of them coming up.  This next one is of Bob Burman, who placed 6th this year, earning $2,200 for his team.  Burman has raced in all previous Indy 500 races, and if I'm reading the stats correctly, this is the first time he's finished in the money, and the last time he raced at Indy.  I figure I should include the photo of him in his car as well, as one follows the other in the scrapbook.

Billy Carlson also finished in the top ten at Indy this year.  He raced twice at Indy, and took 9th place both in 1914 and 1915.  In 1915 he actually did not finish the race, but had a relief driver named Hughie Hughes, according to The Old Motor.

The next two photos are probably the highlight of the Indy photos in the collection to me.  I was a WWI aviation nut from the time I was old enough to hear stories and build model airplanes, and I loved hearing about Eddie Rickenbacker.  I'm not sure when I was aware that he was also a race driver, probably not until many years later.  But when I first went through these photos about ten years ago and started to catalog who was in the collection, I was astonished to find these photos.


Ivan has them out of order, of course.  We have a photo of Rickenbacker out of his car, looking really dejected, out of the race after lap 103.  Next we have a photo of him smiling prior to the race, and one pretty unremarkable photo of him on the track which I'll not include.

Just not enough time to finish up the Indy photos.  Next post will finish that section and we'll spend a bit of time looking at Ivan's racing career in 1915.  Still a few great Indy photos left.  

Thank you all for the "Likes", and "Shares"!  This really helps get the word out to others who might be interested in reading the blog.  The other button that I've added called "Send" lets you send the link to specific folks on your friends list or via email, apparently.  The +1 button will recommend the blog on the Google search engine, which would be very nice, if you're so inclined!  Many, many thanks.

A last minute addition!  David Greenlees' excellent website has been a source of information here, and I've invited him to link photos from the collection.  He has some great articles on racing!  I especially enjoyed "Carl Fischer's World Beater". Go check out The Old Motor.

-kpw

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