Customer Reviews

The Indy 500: 1956-1965 (IN) (Images of Sports)

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I must have missed something here? This is a "scrap book", with NO detail or verbage of the time?? If you want to look at pictures with little information about them, this is your book!

The "Images of Sports" series is intended to be a scrapbook history of a team, or in this case of an event.

This 127 page book is comprised of photographs taken by Ben Lawrence, a photographer for the now-defunct Indianapolis Times from 1956-1965. This book is not a comprehensive history of the Indy 500, but rather a photographic scrapbook, a yearbook, if you will.

In a way, it was also a Golden Era for the Speedway with the new (also now defunct) scoring tower and the arrival of mainstays such as A.J. Foyt, Parnelli Jones and the Unsers. There are captions for all pictures and a few introductory paragraphs for each new section.

Not only does the reader get pictures from the race but also from the first 500 Festival parades, shots of the fans, candid shots of the drivers, track workers and even celebrities (the Jayne Mansfield shot is something else!). The race is more than just a race, it is an event, the biggest thing that happens in Indiana all year long and the book gives us an idea what it was like 50 years ago.

The best shot in the book is the one on the cover! The rest appear pretty amateurish and many are even out of focus. A disappointment for this 500 fan....