(The Purdue University Marching Band with their giant bass drum prepare to kick off the 1963 Indianapolis 500. Dad had a gang of like-minded car guys who would go to Indiana for the Race, and sometimes to the time trials that set the position on the grid. When he did not go in person, he would sit on the patio with the radio, graph paper and stopwatch and chart the race as it progressed.)
I had not thought about Parnelli Jones in a long time. I think he is still alive, some place.
Here is how he came to mind: I have had one of Raven’s plastic storage boxes with me since last week. I thought I might get to it during the week, but no soap. I threw it into the boot of the Panzer along with the laundry and got out of town under gray skies and temperatures that threatened to get above freezing for the first time in days. The roads were white with salt. The only traffic was around the big Fairfax Mall, where people could walk around unimpeded.
For a minute, anyway. The radio was bombarding me with news of the triple shooting at the Columbia Mall over in Maryland.
No one on the radio seemed to know much about it, though the reporting was breathless. When I hit the farm I turned the coverage off and switched over to classic alt rock on the satellite radio and let the news of the Imperial City fade away.
It faded so thoroughly that I got caught up in the events of 73 summers ago, interspersed with the graphic recollections of a race that marked the turn of technology a half-century ago.
OK- complex, I know. I bothered you with some articles about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor this week. Old news, I know, but there are still some loose ends that cry out for tying up. I was on the phone for three hours as the late afternoon passed into darkness, and my porch dwarf became a beacon of light on the front porch, bravely holding his lantern against potential Zombie attack.
I will bore you with the topic of the conversation one of these days- it may mean a trip out to Pearl to ravel some of the raveled threads, and see about properly memorializing the place where our pal Mac Showers worked with the code-breakers in The Dungeon at the Naval Base HQ. The topic of the conversation was complex, and call was long, so I started feeding Kodak slides through the little yellow box that converts them to digital images as the call went on.
The first box of slides was unlabeled, and contained 36 slides. Like the trip Dad took to London and Brussels in 1968, this one had to tell me the story all by itself, no script. The time stamp on the back of each little cardboard square indicated the moment in history that they were developed, sliced and inserted into the cardboard squares: May, 1963.
JFK was President. The war in Vietnam was just a glimmer. There were cars and crowds in the images, and a vast speedway.
It was the Indy 500 Race, Memorial Day, 1963.
The spectacle was amazing- the crowd in their early ‘60s race finery. The front engine Offenhauser-powered cars were having their last hurrah. Parnelli Jones won the race, contested by the slim and elegant Scotsman Jim Clark in his rear-wheeled Lotus.
I have discovered I have a real knack for getting the slides scanned in backward, and having to do the scanning and digital manipulation over and over. Eventually, I got them all right as we hammered out a campaign that might- just might- get a suitable memorial to the crew that contributed so much to the defeat of Imperial Japan.
The more I looked at the images of the race, the more it came back as memories of Michigan transitioning from the late winter through the lens of Memorial Day, and the coverage of the race on the radio- WJR, I think, was the AM channel that had the voices and the roar of engines. If the weather was good (it wasn’t, always, Michigan being what it is) Dad would set up shop on the patio with a cooler of beer for the neighbor guys, and his tools of the trade: stop watch, graph paper and pencils of differing colors.
1963 was the last hurrah of the front-engined American iron at the brickyard. I could identify some of the cars: Parnelli (Rufus Parnell) Jones, the legendary race driver was going to win this one as the last gasp of the old technology.
Opposing him was the uber cool Jim Clark from Scotland in that amazing Lotus: rear engine, wide wheel base and European cool.
There was a controversy, too. Parnelli could not have been more old school, right out of the heart of the American Century and the Moonshine Express pantheon that spawned NASCAR. In 1962 he became the first driver to qualify for the race at a speed of over 150 miles an hour. He only won one race at the Brickyard as a driver, and 1963 was it.
I don’t know if you can sense the speed in the pictures- they are all on Facebook, if you care- but what is missing is the distinctive high-pitched roar of the engines. Here was the controversy that is not apparent from the pictures: Parnelli’s victory came despite the fact that he probably disqualified. Jim Clark and the Lotus were dogging his heels, and Parnelli’s car (Old 98, nicknamed “Calhoun”) hiccupped and began spewing oil from a broken tank. The film of oil on the track caused several drivers to spin out, either wildly into the infield or the abruptly into the wall.
Race officials put off black-flagging him after the 98-car’s owner J. C. Agajanian raced down Pit Lane and convinced them that the oil leak was below the level of a known crack and would not leak any further. Colin Chapman, the British owner of Clark’s Lotus accused the Indy officials of being biased towards the American driver and car.
Duh. There is no doubt in my mind that had it been an American driver and car in second place instead of Clark in the British-built Lotus, officials would have black flagged him.
The names came back, and the memories. Dad took me to one of the races- later than this one, and the images from that one may be lurking in the footlocker of Kodachrome moments.
The boxes are in no rhyme or reason, a jumble of disconnected events worth getting the camera out for, back in the time that capturing a photo meant being prepared for it.
Beyond the history of this particular race, I can give you little context. I know the little motel where the guys stayed, and the diner where the guys liked to eat after the trip from Detroit to Speedway, Indiana. But shorn of that, and the images of the Purdue Marching Band and the tank-like Chrysler pace car, these images stand in lonely isolation.
Thank God these images pre-date the invention of the video camera, in which we attempted to capture life in real time.
Hell, we don’t have time to live it fully even once, much less watch it over and over. So, for what it is worth, one afternoon in 1963, when the world looked a lot different than it does now.
I kept feeding slides through the machine. I am not going to trouble you with the details of my 7th birthday party, Raven and Big Mama’s 1982 trip to Bermuda, the placid waters of Martin Lake, where the cabin was located, nor the amazing Playboy-style bachelor kitchen (“The Rogue’s Galley”) that was the flower of Dad’s styling shop at Kelvinator Appliances. Well, maybe I will.
But not today. Life threatens to go on.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303