The first race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was held on this date in 1919. Nearly three decades later, The Nation published a dispatch from the Indianapolis 500:
When the boys go whirling around the Indianapolis motor speedway every Decoration Day, they do it, most of them, for coffee and cakes. Most of them know they can't win. They know, because they are shrewd judges of mechanical performance, that the cars they have managed to draw haven't a chance….
At about 300 miles drivers get so tired that they can hardly bear it. One old driver said that he raced for 50 miles once crying like a baby. “I couldn't stop,” he said, “and I was so tired. I wanted to go to the pits.” Someone in the pits, he said, sensed the crisis and marked on a blackboard a huge dollar sign.
