Hello! Welcome to Kate’s commentary for the Pre-Indy 500 Lore episode. If you haven’t listened to or read the written version yet, I’d suggest you go do that.
Before I start, I do want to be clear – this is my commentary which means I’ll be giving you my opinions/thoughts on different parts of the episode. My opinion is mine alone and it is okay if your perspective/opinion is different. To me, that’s one of the fun parts about studying and interacting with history/historical research – the same facts can be applied to reach different conclusions. I also recognize that I feel strongly about things that might not be seen as important to other people and that’s okay!
Like I mentioned at the end of the written Pre-Indy 500 Lore episode, I denoted the things I wanted to talk about here with an asterisk.
Paris-Bordeaux-Paris
So when writing this episode I did a quick Google for “first automobile race” and this was the top result and it listed the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race as the first automobile race and I thought “okay, good enough” because I try to have a narrow mind while I’m writing episodes because I am very prone to distraction and rabbit holes.
So then when I was putting the written episode together, I realized that this topic was actually a bit more complicated. You see, there was a race from Paris to Rouen in 1894 that some people consider the first automobile race. Others say that the Paris-Rouen race doesn’t count because it was billed as a contest while the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris was billed as an auto race.
In all reality, the discrepancy probably doesn’t matter that much and I don’t think I would even change the script BUT I did want to point this out because I think it’s interesting and maybe you will too.
Park Taliaferro Andrew
I just wanted to stress how little I could find on this man and it’s very frustrating. I might be the only person who has turned genealogy/historical research into a competition to win but alas. I think a big reason I struggled to find anything concrete about Park is because search engines are non-perfect and every way I tried to search was generally unsuccessful. I was able to find him in genealogical records though so here is a brief biography about him through that.
Park Taliaferro Andrew was born on May 1, 1880 to David Andrew and Keturah Watson in Ohio. He was the elder of two children born to the couple, his sister Ruth was born on June 30, 1889. I’m not sure what was happening in 1900 but David was listed as widowed and living as a boarder while Keturah and Ruth were living with Keturah’s brother while Park was living separately as a boarder too. David, Keturah and Ruth were reunited by 1910, though.
In 1904, Park married Alice Estelle Schade in Beverly, Massachusetts.
It is completely unknown to me how Park was selected to be in charge of designing the Speedway. I would love to know because it seems like this was something he only did once and even though he designed arguably one of the most iconic sport venues in the world, he never seemed to have received any attention from it. Spoiler alert: he lived until 1959 so he definitely lived long enough to see the Speedway turn into something very special but alas. Some questions will remain unanswered.
In the 1910 census, Park was listed as living in Manhattan in a Mills House (a hotel mainly for blue-collar men working in the city) while Alice was living in Pennsylvania with her sister.
In December 1911, he was hired as a carpenter to work on the Panama Canal. It appears that he worked on the project through 1920.
He shows up in the 1920 census, living in Port Deposit, Maryland with Alice and brother-in-law Michael O’Donald. Both Park and Michael are listed as carpenters.
By the time he shows up in the 1930 census, Park and Alice moved across the country and settled in Gardena, California. Also in the household was Park’s mother. I could not figure out what happened to either David. Park’s occupation in 1930 was listed as engineer while the industry was listed as “structural”. It appears that Ruth married John R Schmidt who was, according to the census, an editor for a reform organization and lived in Washington D.C.
I was unable to find Park in the 1940 census, though Alice was living with her sister and brother-in-law and her occupation was listed as a housekeeper. He pops back up in 1950 as a lodger at a hotel in Los Angeles, his marital status listed as “separated”.
Park T Andrew died on May 20, 1959. His obituary was brief, however it did mention his involvement with Indianapolis Motor Speedway. To my knowledge, his death or contributions have never been acknowledged by IMS.
I did manage to find a passport photo of him from Ancestry.com so we can at least gaze upon the man that helped make IMS a reality:
Park and Alice did not have children, nor does it appear that Ruth had children either. Alice’s sister had one daughter, although it does not appear that this niece ever had children. This means that I cannot reach out to see if anybody related has any further information. Nonetheless, if you do have more information about Park Andrew and his involvement with Indianapolis Motor Speedway, I’d love to hear from you! I can be reached at [email protected].
A Note on Billy Bourque’s First Name
I feel uniquely qualified to talk about the phenomenon surrounding Billy Bourque’s name, actually.
I was able to confirm with his death certificate and headstone that his name was Wilfrid. So why do you see people calling him William?
Well, there is this phenomenon that happens where people see Billy/Bill and automatically assume that it’s a nickname for William when that is not always the case. You see, my grandfather goes by the name “Bill” but his full name is not William. It’s not even a similar name like Wilfrid.
In previous generations in my family, legal names and what people were called were rarely the same so it didn’t matter that my grandfather’s name is Howard, he has been called Bill his entire life (we have no idea why). So the instances of people assuming his name is William are numerous. There is really no point to this section other than to explain why Billy was so often called William and how he likely was stuck with it in the first place.
The more you know!
A note on Omar Jolliffe’s First Name
A lot of sources have misnamed Omar, calling him Homer (although I’ve also seen him called Howard too – go figure). The root of this misnaming is very clear – his name was listed as “Homer” on his death certificate.
His name was definitely Omar though. That is the name on his headstone, which reads in part, “Killed at Speedway, August 21, 1909” (although it is incredibly hard to read on the picture on FindAGrave). Not much is known about Omar – he was born on January 27, 1882 to Joseph Jolliffe and Amanda Applegate, the second eldest of at least eight (known) children.
Interestingly, in my research, I found that there was a man who claimed to have seen Omar the morning of the fateful day and he asked Omar where he was going and Omar replied, “I’m going up to the Speedway to watch somebody get killed.”
The more you know?
Newspaper Backlash
It was really important to me to make sure I conveyed the fact that the public did not appreciate the deaths during the opening weekend at IMS. If you follow me on Twitter, I’ve talked about how it seems that people believe that the public were okay with motorsport fatality and that just… was not true.
Here are a few more newspaper articles that didn’t make it into the final version of the podcast episode:
August 24, 1909
A Note on Tom Kincade’s Last Name
I don’t know how name corrections became the Theme for this article but alas. A variation of spelling for Tom’s last name is Kincaid, however according to his headstone, the true spelling of his last name was Kincade.
At this point, you might be like “why do these discrepancies even matter?” and maybe they don’t matter to most people but I think it’s important to use the most correct name we can for everybody. And because they are not here to advocate for themselves, using records or other sources such as headstones feel sufficient to me.
Tom was born on June 20, 1887 to Amos Kincade and Myrtle J Hawkins. Amos was a farmer.
Like many parents of racers, Amos had pleaded with Tom to stop racing because Amos could see how dangerous it was. But to be a motorsport driver, especially in this early era, required a heavy dose of denial and Tom dismissed his father’s concerns. Tom’s mother collapsed when she was told of her son’s death.
Like I mentioned in the episode, Tom was really close with his teammate, Johnny Aitken and Tom lived with the Aitken family. He had lived with them for five years. Johnny’s mother, Mary, was said to have been greatly affected by the news of Tom’s accident and death, refusing to believe that he was dead.
The Indianapolis Star reported that his funeral in Hamilton County, Indiana was the largest funeral ever held in the county. Thirty automobiles carrying more than 100 people came from Indianapolis.
Tom lived a short life – just 23 years. But it seems to me that he was beloved.
Track Surface
I wanted to touch on the original track surface because something I noticed while researching is that there really aren’t that many pictures available on the internet that show what the original track surface looked like. I’m a visual person so that really disappointed me BUT I was able to find these three photos that maybe can give us an idea of what the track surface looked like:
Indianapolis Motor Speedway Image Collection
The track surface looked… really rough. I’m really glad the Founders took the leap and bricked it because if they hadn’t, I don’t think we’d still be talking about it now (much less still going to it for races).
An Easter Egg
In the episode, I put in a very clever (if I do say so myself) reference to a modern day Indy 500 pre-race tradition. Can you find it?
Q & A?
Do you have any questions about Pre-Indy 500 IMS that the podcast didn’t answer them? I want to know! Tweet them to the podcast Twitter account or leave a comment here and I will answer them
Thank you to everybody for their enthusiastic, kind support for the first episode. It means so much more than I ever could articulate.
Kate
