The Roar at Indianapolis

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 24, 2026 — 23:05 PHST

Every Memorial Day, my mother and I went to the cemetery.

That part of the ritual never changed. Flowers, driving across Chicago, searching for graves, trying to remember where flat markers disappeared beneath the grass. My mother took the day seriously. She believed the dead should be visited, and because of that belief, I spent much of my childhood walking cemetery rows beside her.

My father usually was not there.

For years, I thought that absence meant less than it really did. I understand it differently now.

My father’s Memorial Day ritual was the Indianapolis 500.

The Race

For Americans of my father’s generation, the Indianapolis 500 was not merely another sporting event. It was part machine worship, part engineering spectacle, part national ritual. It belonged to an industrial America that still believed speed, machinery, and technical skill represented progress itself.

This was before endless sports channels, before internet streaming, before every race on earth became permanently available on demand. Indianapolis stood alone in the American imagination in a way younger generations may have trouble understanding now.

There was one race.

This was the race.

My father liked Le Mans and Formula One well enough, but those always felt foreign to him. Indianapolis was American. Loud, dangerous, mechanical, Midwestern, and unapologetically industrial.

He did not care much for NASCAR. Too Southern for his tastes. My father had Southern roots he spent much of his life trying to outgrow. Indianapolis felt different to him. Cleaner somehow. More technical. More Northern. More modern.

Closed-Circuit America

People forget how differently major events once worked in the United States.

Today, nearly everything arrives instantly through phones and television screens. But for years, the Indianapolis 500 existed partly through delayed broadcasts and closed-circuit screenings. Fans would gather in theaters, auditoriums, and special venues to watch races transmitted from Indianapolis itself.

Whenever he could afford it, my father went to those screenings somewhere in Chicago. I say “somewhere” because the locations changed over the years and I was too young to remember the details clearly.

He usually went alone.

Partly because of the expense.

Partly because, I suspect now, it gave him several uninterrupted hours away from work, responsibility, family obligations, and ordinary life.

I understand that better now than I did when I was young.

Memorial Day Before the Monday Holiday

People also forget that Memorial Day itself once worked differently.

Before the Uniform Monday Holiday Act shifted several American holidays to Mondays during the early 1970s, Memorial Day was observed on May 30 itself regardless of the day of the week (U.S. Office of Personnel Management, 2025).

The Indianapolis 500 traditionally aligned closely with Memorial Day culture. Blue laws and older social norms complicated Sunday racing for many years, and the race schedule evolved alongside broader changes in American society, television economics, labor schedules, travel patterns, and commercial broadcasting priorities.

Eventually, Indianapolis moved toward the modern Sunday-before-Memorial-Day structure Americans know today.

That change sounds minor until you think about what it represented culturally.

America itself was changing from a country organized around fixed civic rituals into a country increasingly organized around television scheduling, long weekends, and consumer travel.

The race changed because the country changed.

My Father’s Holiday

While my mother and I walked cemeteries, my father listened to engines.

That sounds colder written down than it actually was.

He was not ignoring the dead. He was participating in his own version of American memory. The Indianapolis 500 belonged deeply to the generation that fought the Second World War and built postwar industrial America afterward. The race carried with it ideas about machinery, progress, engineering, danger, courage, and national confidence.

For several hours each Memorial Day, my father disappeared into that world.

In his own way, he was a good man.

I understand him more sympathetically now than I once did. Age does that sometimes. You eventually realize your parents were not symbols or permanent authority figures. They were simply people trying to survive their own lives while carrying histories you only partially understood as a child.

The Roar in the Distance

I sometimes think Memorial Day in our family existed as two parallel rituals happening at the same time.

My mother and I searched for the dead among cemetery rows.

My father sat somewhere listening to the roar from Indianapolis.

One ritual centered on stillness. The other centered on motion.

One dealt directly with memory. The other dealt with escape, machinery, and the surviving mythology of mid-century America.

Looking back now, I think all three of us were participating in Memorial Day in our own way.

If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews

For more from Cliff Potts, see https://cliffpotts.org

References

ESPN Front Row. (2016). ABC’s first Indianapolis 500 broadcast in 1965. https://www.espnfrontrow.com

Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (2025). History of the Indianapolis 500. https://www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com

U.S. Office of Personnel Management. (2025). Federal holidays and the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. https://www.opm.gov

Photo by Adriaan Greyling on Pexels.com

#AmericanCulture #autoRacingHistory #ChicagoHistory #familyRitual #Indianapolis500 #MemorialDay #WPSNews

The Tree by My Parents’ Graves

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — May 24, 2026 — 23:05 PHST

Every Memorial Day, my mother and I went to the cemetery.

Not occasionally. Not when it was convenient. Not when somebody remembered at the last minute. We went every year. It was simply what we did. By the time I was old enough to understand what was happening, the ritual already existed. Memorial Day meant flowers, driving across Chicago, walking through rows of graves, and stopping to remember people I never really knew well enough to remember on my own.

We visited her parents. We visited her aunts and uncles. Uncle Louis. Eventually Aunt Augusta too. The dead slowly accumulated over the years the way they do in most families if enough time passes.

My sisters usually were not there. My father usually was not there either. This was mostly something my mother and I did together. Looking back now, I understand it was less about obligation than continuity. She was making sure the dead remained visible to somebody.

The Problem with Flat Headstones

I have never liked flat headstones.

Cemeteries prefer them because they make lawn maintenance easier. The grass can be cut evenly. The grounds look orderly. Maintenance becomes efficient. Administratively, flat markers solve problems.

Humanly, they create others.

Flat stones disappear.

Grass grows over them. Dirt settles into the engraving. Leaves collect across the surface. Time presses them downward visually until they stop standing out from the landscape around them. Eventually, unless someone already knows exactly where to look, the dead become difficult to find.

I could never reliably find Uncle Louis’ grave.

That bothered me even when I was young. It still bothers me now.

My parents both have flat markers too. I dislike that immensely. A flat marker slowly turns memory into geography homework. You begin searching for landmarks instead of names.

In my parents’ case, there is now a tree growing nearby. It was only a sapling when they died. Now it is large enough to serve as the real marker. I locate my parents less by the stone than by the tree beside it.

The tree grew while they were gone.

What Memorial Day Actually Was

People often describe Memorial Day in patriotic terms. Flags. Veterans. Military sacrifice. National remembrance.

For my mother and me, it was quieter than that.

It was walking.

It was looking for names.

It was making sure people who once existed still occupied physical space in the world.

The older I get, the more I suspect many family rituals operate exactly this way. They are not merely traditions. They are systems for resisting disappearance.

The dead vanish physically first. Later they begin disappearing socially. Eventually they disappear historically as well unless somebody keeps repeating the names.

Memorial Day, in our family, was one method of repeating the names.

The Dead Should Remain Findable

One of the things that unsettles me most about modern memorial culture is how efficiently it sometimes hides the dead in the name of convenience.

A cemetery optimized entirely around maintenance eventually starts resembling a park where names accidentally happened instead of a place of remembrance.

That strikes me as backward.

The point of a grave marker is not landscaping efficiency. The point is visibility.

A grave should remain findable.

A person should not visually disappear because maintaining visible markers requires slightly more work from groundskeepers. That is what weed whackers are for.

Perhaps this sounds overly emotional to some people. Maybe it is. But I have spent enough years walking cemeteries to know the difference between remembering someone and merely storing them.

Those are not the same thing.

What I Remember Most

Oddly enough, I do not remember every conversation my mother and I had during those cemetery visits. Memory rarely works that cleanly after enough decades pass.

I remember movement more than dialogue.

Walking across grass. Looking down at names. Trying to locate flat stones hidden beneath overgrowth. Holding flowers. Listening to traffic somewhere beyond the cemetery walls. Chicago heat beginning to arrive by late May.

Mostly, I remember the fact that we went.

Every year.

Without fail.

That consistency mattered more than I understood at the time.

The Tree

The tree beside my parents’ graves may eventually become the thing I remember most clearly.

Not because it was planted as a memorial. It was not. It simply happened to grow there while time moved forward.

The tree became a witness.

It marked the passing years while the people beneath it remained still.

In a strange way, it now performs the job the flat stones were supposed to do.

It tells me where they are.

And perhaps that is ultimately what Memorial Day always was for my mother: making certain the dead did not become impossible to find.

If this work helps you understand what’s happening, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews

For more from Cliff Potts, see https://cliffpotts.org

References

National Cemetery Administration. (2025). Memorial Day history and traditions. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. https://www.cem.va.gov

Sloane, D. C. (1991). The last great necessity: Cemeteries in American history. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Tarlow, S. (2000). Landscapes of memory: The nineteenth-century garden cemetery. European Journal of Archaeology, 3(2), 217–239.

#cemeteries #ChicagoHistory #familyRitual #grief #MemorialDay #remembrance #WPSNews