HOPE — The week leading up to Memorial Day weekend is always a highly anticipated one for Bruce Neal. Besides celebrating his birthday, Neal gets to make his annual pilgrimage to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Indy 500.
Sunday will mark the 59th time that Neal gets to see the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing” on race day. Neal has missed just two races since his first Indy 500 in 1963, with memories of that initial experience still vivid today.
Parnelli Jones won from the pole position – his only Indy 500 victory – after qualifying fifth and finishing 12th in his rookie year of 1961, then winning the pole in 1962 and settling for a seventh-place finish in Jones’ second try.
When he closes his eyes, Neal can hear the low rumble of a Novi engine powering the Indy 500 car driven in 1963 by Jim Hurtubise, who started in the middle of the first row before exiting on lap 102 with an oil leak.
“It made the hair on your back stand up,” Neal said of the loud Novi engine, even from the track’s infield where Neal was sitting.
“I got bit by the racing bug early,” Neal said.
Neal can recall his first visit to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway as a 3-year-old, watching Indy 500 qualifications in 1952 from the track’s infield with his mother and maternal grandparents.
Freddie Agabashian earned the pole that year in the Cummins Diesel Special, the fifth entry from the Columbus-based automotive supplier in the prestigious race. Its 430 horsepower was courtesy of an Indy-first turbocharged induction system.
“I remember it,” Neal vowed.
As a youth growing up just east of Columbus, Neal was taken by the roar of airplane engines at Bakalar Air Force Base, which would become Columbus Municipal Airport in 1971.
A military airplane engine sounds a lot like race car motor, he said.
“There’s something about the Speedway,” Neal said. “It’s really hard to explain.”
The sights? The sounds? The speed?
“I like the history more than anything else,” said Neal, who will attend Sunday’s 105th running of the Indy 500 – as always – with his wife of 52 years, Nancy, from their seats in Grandstand G near the second turn.
But the Neals are never far from the race the other 364 days of the year.
“Every true-blue race fan has a race room,” said Neal, who has two – one inside his Hope ranch home and the other in one of two attached garages.
One is a collector’s area in a former bedroom, where some of Neal’s racing memorabilia and Chicago Cubs collectibles share space on walls with Nancy Neal’s Mail Pouch chewing tobacco barn signs and Patsy Cline posters.
The other room is considerably bigger and devoted entirely to racing.
Neal’s 10-foot by 32-foot man cave, sandwiched between his two garages, includes a library of racing books and magazines, photographs and other race items, with a black-and-white checkerboard tile floor giving it additional racing flair.
A small corner is dedicated to Columbus native Tony Stewart, including a nearly life-size, stand-up cutout of a young Stewart in a driver suit holding a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli for a grocery display.
But the garage’s focal point is a 4-foot by 8-foot blowup of a 1916 portrait of Wilbur Shaw, a young teenager at the time who became Neal’s Indy 500 hero.
Shaw, a Shelbyville native, won three Indy 500 races (1937, 1939 and 1940), the second driver to accomplish that feat, and finished second three more times (1933, 1935 and 1938).
Shaw drove his Boyle Special Maserati to victory in 1939 and 1940. During his interview for this story, Neal wore a T-shirt that celebrates the car.
“He was just a regular old guy like me and you,” Neal said of Shaw, whose final race as a driver was in 1941.
However, recently retired Indianapolis Motor Speedway 55-year track historian Donald Davidson – who Neal considers a good friend – refers to Shaw one of the most important people in Indy 500 history.
Shaw is credited with saving the track, closed during World War II as motor sports were shut down by federal mandate during the wartime high demand for rubber, fuel and other supplies.
After his driving career, Shaw worked as an executive for Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, heading up the new aircraft division for company then based in Akron, Ohio.
During the war, Firestone received government permission to conduct testing at the Speedway on a new synthetic rubber tire that could be used safety at higher speeds and for longer distances. Shaw personally conducted those tire tests in late November 1944, when he found the speedway in significant disrepair.
Soon afterward, Shaw met with the track’s owner since 1927, WWII flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, who was considering selling the property to developers for post-war housing.
Shaw dabbled with the idea of purchasing the track with several different investors, but none of those plans materialized. However, Shaw learned of a Terre Haute businessman with a history of rescuing businesses that had fallen on hard times. Shaw was able to convince Tony Hulman, whose family would own the speedway for 74 years, to purchase track in 1945.
Shaw was rewarded by being named president and general manager of the speedway, a job he held until his death in a 1954 airplane crash.
“If it hadn’t been for Wilbur, they wouldn’t have had the 500 (after 1945),” Neal said. “Rickenbacker would have sold it to anyone.”
Although Shaw died at age 52 just nine years later, before Neal had a chance to meet him, the Hope resident has become friends with his hero’s son, Warren Wilbur “Bill” Shaw Jr. The two talk on the phone every few months and Neal has visited Shaw at his Indianapolis area home.
Neal became more than a fan of the Indy 500, spending 25 years as a part-time employee.
With five weeks of paid vacation time through Cummins, his employer of 32 years as an engine assembler and machinist, Neal would schedule two of them to work at the Speedway each May, when he was assigned to a race crew. From 1986 to 1994, Neal worked in the pits as a fireman for Mario Andretti, who won the Indy 500 in 1969.
Neal’s years of service as a speedway employee enabled him to become a member of the International Association of Indianapolis 500 Oldtimers, founded in 1961 to bring together people with the deepest ties to the 500-mile race to promote the event and the sport.
Although close friends know of Neal’s ties to the Indy 500, most people know him for his commitment to small town of Hope as a firefighter.
Neal has been a member of the Hope Volunteer Fire Department for 47 years. He is the department’s current treasurer and served as chief three different times, most recently about five years ago when the new fire station was being planned.
Aside from a modest clothing allowance, volunteer firefighters work without pay.
“It needs to be done,” Neal states matter-of-factly.
He was seriously injured once, falling off a fire engine tail board in November 1977 as the vehicle was leaving the station, spending five days in the hospital in a coma.
Even so, Neal loves to be around fire vehicles and apparatus.
Neal owns two antique firefighting vehicles. He expanded a second garage to 80 feet deep and 2,496 total square feet to house them bumper-to-bumper.
His 1947 American LaFrance fire engine was purchased at a 1977 auction after having been in service 30 years with the Marion, Ohio, Fire Department. Neal drove the engine to the monthly Cruise-In to Hope on May 7. A photograph of the two-tone-gray engine fills the front side of Neal’s business card.
Two decades later, Neal bought a 1953 Ahrens-Fox four-way combination fire engine.
Neal is a member of the Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of Antique Motor Fire Apparatus of America and participates in parades and car shows through its Indiana chapter.
Neal has lived all but eight months of his life in Hope. The exception was in 1969, when the newlyweds lived in a Columbus apartment to be close to their jobs.
His boyhood house is just four blocks from the Hope home he and wife Nancy have shared for the past five decades.
After all, Hope offered a chance to be close to the family’s base. Neal’s great-grandfather, George Washington Schafer, was a blacksmith in a shop and livery stable in the early 1900s at the site of the current Hope Town Hall.
Two barns that stood just south of Hope featured signs for the Mail Pouch chewing tobacco company. In a shared interest, the Neals have gone barnstorming in 12 other states to see and take photos of Mail Pouch barns.
They have also made a handful of trips along U.S. Route 66 between Chicago, Illinois, and Santa Monica, California, although never along the entire route in one trip. One favorite stop is Ted Drewes Frozen Custard on Chippewa Street in St. Louis, along Old Route 66 (now State Road 366), about four hours from Hope.
In fact, they made a run to Ted Drewes last summer for custard, stored in a cooler filled with dry ice to keep it frozen during the ride home.
“It’s something to do,” Neal said.
Having owned only Chevrolet cars since 1966, Neal’s current lineup of vehicles includes a red 1990 Corvette roadster convertible purchased in 2000, the year before he retired from Cummins. He drives it in parades and to car cruise-ins but has not yet taken it on a Route 66 trip.
“That’s the dream,” he said.
