With the Centennial of the Indianapolis 500 this month, what is your Indy memory?

This month marks the 100^th anniversary of the Indianapolis 500, which was the greatest American race decades before Ken Squier tried to claim that title for Bill France’s sedan show. Indeed, decades before there even was a Daytona 500, the Indy 500 was the greatest race and not just in America but on the entire planet.

That no longer is true, but we’ll ignore that for now as we celebrate the history of the race and of a race track that has modernized nicely while clinging so tightly to its own history that it still has a brick-paved finish line.

Looking back at one hundred years of Indy 500s got me rooting around in the archives – O.K., I just the shelves out in the garage -- where I found a scrapbook that preserves the full-page 500 preview I wrote for the Joliet (Illinois) Herald-News on Sunday, May 25, 1969.

I was still in college, though just days away from graduation, but worked weekends and summers as a sportswriter for my hometown daily newspaper, covering everything from high school sports to the United Auto Racing Association, which staged midget races on the paved quarter-mile track that surrounded the football field at Joliet Memorial Stadium. This was back in the day when Indy racers raced several nights a week, driving sprints and midgets, and occasionally one of the Bettenhausens from nearby Tinley Park or maybe Mel Kenyon would come from Indiana and bring their midgets to race when there was an open date on the USAC schedule.

Occasionally, one of our local drivers would be invited to take a run around Indy, either in testing or to attempt a qualifying run. UARA racer Roger West went to the Brickyard in 1969 and 1970 but didn’t make the 33-car grid either time.

With money I made writing about sports, I’d bought a brand new fastback Ford Mustang, sort of a college graduation present to myself, and my editor at the newspaper and our wives got up at o-dark-30 on race day and drove down to Indy for what would be the first of many 500s I’d cover at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, that year for the Herald-News, and later for newspapers in Michigan and eventually for AutoWeek magazine.

“Granatelli and Andretti have a history of being snake bitten at Indianapolis,” I wrote in my preview story in 1969, “so this year they’re teaming with hopes that ‘Italian power’ will cure their Indy ills.”

However, I added, those ills appeared to have continued so far that month of May: “Andretti walked away from a fiery crash last Wednesday that destroyed the fastest of Granatelli’s cars.”

I don’t have a copy of the story I wrote after the race, though we all recall how, after crashing Andy Granatelli’s fastest car, Mario Andretti started the race in the team’s backup car, a Brawner Hawk, and drove it to a victory celebration that included a big kiss on the cheek from Granatelli.

Well, that was my first Indy experience. What was yours?