The world took little note last Thanksgiving when American auto racing turned 100 years old. NASCAR, racing’s largest sanctioning body, didn’t even take a Post-it. In Chicago, where it all began, there wasn’t much more than a sparsely attended reenactment of the first race–no hype, no commemorative T-shirt marking the centennial. If fans did something special that day they did it in private, perhaps with a piece of cake or an extra lube job for the pickup.
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Andrew Huckman was sitting a few miles away from the starting line of the first race, facing north to Evanston, when he learned about the anniversary in the New York Times. Though looking north, Huckman was thinking south. Auto racing, it had seemed to him, was a southern sport, a southern, mostly white male sport whose participants had “Junior” somewhere in their name. While it was the most popular spectator sport in America–300,000 people go to the Indy 500 every year–northern intellectuals hardly pay any attention, he thought. Well, he was a northerner and something of a goddamn intellectual himself. Maybe he could do something about that.
Huckman found and studied a map detailing the route of the first race, which was sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald. It took six cars ten hours to complete the course from Jackson Park to Evanston and back through the snow-covered streets of Chicago. Frank Duryea was the winner, driving a car that he’d built with his brother. There was one accident, when R.H. Macy’s Benz hit a trolley and a sleigh. Huckman estimates that the race passed within “a block and a half” of Kafein, an espresso bar in Evanston. Kafein’s proximity to the original racecourse made it Huckman’s first choice for the exhibit. “I believe it’s near the only point at which two of the cars were neck and neck, as they raced along at ten miles per hour.”
