Drawing on original research into newspaper archives, oral histories, and the margins of the official record, Will Higgins, an award-winning journalist, assembles the stories that didn't make the monument: the "hillbilly machine gunner" who charged race fans 25 cents to see Mrs. Adolph Hitler’s underpants; the French race driver who drank six pints of wine mid-race — and won; the race fan who mooned fifty thousand people and then personally delivered the photographic evidence on his paper route the next morning.
The Speedway's Attic brings this research into physical form through objects, photographs, illustration, and text. The result is less a sports history than a portrait of American appetite — for speed, spectacle, and spectacle's underbelly. These stories are funny, and some are damning, and a few are quietly moving. Together they map what a city chooses to remember, what it lets fade, and what keeps surfacing anyway.
