The Memorial Day weekend has always been an exciting one for me.

I learned at an early age that Memorial Day was a day set aside to remember those who gave their all so that we could be free. When I was little, I didn’t really know what that meant. It didn’t take me long to find out as I watched the nightly news during the Vietnam War and later talked with friends and family who served in the military during that long and drawn out unpopular conflict.

For anyone, however, who lived anywhere near Indianapolis, Memorial Day also meant another running of the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”

I grew up close enough to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that any time the drivers were practicing, qualifying or racing on the famed 2½-mile oval, I could hear them and it got into my blood.

I attended my first 500 in 1968, thanks to my grandparents, who had 20 seats near the start-finish line. People dressed up then and made a day of it.

Bobby Unser picked up the first of his two wins that year. I was 10 and was hooked. I would only miss three races over the next 30 years until just after the IRL/CART split that just about destroyed open-wheel racing. I even went to a dozen or so races after that debacle but quit going in 2007 when rain delayed the race for hours and then more rain and the threat of a tornado on the west side of the city ended the race.

I think the main reason I quit going was my sister and her husband had recently divorced and he got to keep the house just a few blocks away from the track. So my easy access to the track and avoiding the traffic before and after the race also came to an end, so I found it much easier to stay home and watch the race on TV.

Although the 1968 race might have been the first one where I had a seat, my brother has a photo of all of us sitting on a car in the infield of the track in the mid-‘60s. My sister was 2 or 3 at the time, so it must have been about 1966 0r 1967.

At that time, my dad was a guard — or yellow shirt — as they have more commonly called over the years. It was a job he held with the exception of a few years until his death in 2013. I also was a yellow shirt for a few years in the late 1970s, but that came to an end when I had to go to the upper deck on the front stretch and kick a fan out because he had launched a bottle into the lower deck where I was stationed.

In later years, Dad would tell us he wasn’t going back to the track in May, but he always did. With his gift of gab — the fact he was working at Gate 9 where everyone who was anyone came in each day — he couldn’t pass up the chance to talk to Tony George, all drivers and their crews, media personalities and others, including Jim Nabors.

Speaking of Nabors, me and a buddy who went to the race together for years ran into him riding his golf cart somewhere along the backstretch one day after most of the crowd had left the race.

“How you all doing?” he asked us.

One of my fondest memories of my younger years was getting up with my dad well before the crack of dawn on race day, eating breakfast in the restaurant of the motel down the street from our home and heading to the track. The yellow shirts always had to be in place before the gun went off at 6 a.m. and people started pouring in.

So Dad decided he was going to take a quick nap and told me I could just go walking around as long as I stayed out of trouble and didn’t get too far away. It still sends chills down my spine when I think about how cool it was to walk around the cathedral of racing listening to concession workers and vendors getting ready for a busy day. I was in heaven, and the race was still five or six hours away. I didn’t have a seat and could not have cared less. What an experience.

Back in those days, access to the drivers was much easier, and I spent one May patrolling the areas outside getting autographs and picking all of those free decals automotive parts companies were giving away.

The 1973 race, which took three days to run, also stands out in my mind. I was a sophomore at Ben Davis at the time and always looking for extra money, so I sold newspapers to the fans. My dad got me in for free on race day (a Monday because the race wasn’t run on Sundays back then).

There was a major wreck at the start of the race, which delayed it until Tuesday. Because of that, schools on the west side of Indianapolis canceled classes, so I went back that day, but the race was delayed again because of rain. School also was canceled Wednesday.

The race ended at 133 laps that day because of, you guessed it, rain. You didn’t even need a ticket to get in that day, and the crowd was pretty sparse. By that point, the infamous Snake Pit was being described as a “bog.” I think a lot of the newspapers I sold wound up as head coverings for protection from the rain.

I could write a book about my memories of the Indianapolis 500, as so many other race fans from Indiana and other places near and far could. Mine, however, would probably need to be heavily edited for content considering some of the things I have witnessed there over the years, so I think I will leave it alone — at least for now.

Aubrey Woods is editor of The Tribune. Send comments to [email protected].