By Dick Mittman
indy500.com
Tuesday, November 5, 2002
Ron McQueeney pulls on white gloves when he sets aside his cameras and begins browsing the film archives of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Nearly everyone in the racing business knows McQueeney for the thousands of photos he snaps each year of the Indianapolis 500, Brickyard 400 and SAP United States Grand Prix at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the other Indy Racing League venues. But few know that he also is in charge of a library crammed with photos and negatives taken at the Speedway dating back to 1909.
"In the archives, we have over three-and-a-half million negatives," said McQueeney, whose job it is to ensure the negatives survive for future generations to view.
The photo shop is on the second floor of the Hall of Fame Museum. Fans can visit there and purchase pictures of recent racing activities or, if they choose, a photo of Ray Harroun, winner of the first Indianapolis 500-Mile Race in 1911.
McQueeney's office is down a hallway at the rear of the photo store. The archival picture and negative library is directly behind the back wall of shop. In it resides photographic history - mostly in black and white -- of the world's most famous racing facility.
"The value of them is priceless," McQueeney said.
The room is protected in the best fashion possible. It has a four-hour burn wall surrounding it and a gas fire-extinguishing system to protect the valuable files. The gas system was installed a few years ago to replace the water sprinkling system.
"We had a sprinkler system in the room, and if the room caught on fire, water probably would do as much damage as the fire would do," he said.
When McQueeney took over as director of photography in 1977, this irreplaceable collection had been stored in an unheated, un-air-conditioned area under the grandstands. He said this took its toll on some of the negatives.
He and his assistants, including Jim Haines, Dan Helrigel and Mary Ellen Loscar, have worked tirelessly at saving the fading negatives by making copies. It's an ongoing process.
"As we go through these drawers on a daily basis and see something deteriorating, we'll make a positive of it, make a print and do a copy negative of it. Now sometimes we don't even have to do that. We just digitize the negative and save it like that."
Actually, the plan eventually is to have every negative in a digitized status. It originally started as a 5-year plan, but McQueeney expects it may take up to 10 years to get this huge cache of pictures on digital discs. He said this will make it easier for photo retrieval, although he hands kudos to his predecessors for the fine job they did in marking negatives and keeping them in a certain order.
McQueeney allows only certain people within his staff to remove and return a negative. And they must wear white gloves to prevent fingerprint smudges.
"You want to make sure every negative you pull to have a print made, or have a slide made, or to do a story with, that it returns to its right place," he said. "And in the past, we've had some problems with that.
"It's like any other business where you have to do some tedious and technical work if somebody gets sloppy or just by accident. If a negative goes in the wrong place, it may take a year to find it, where you put it, if you have to find that negative one more time."
In the negative files can be found transparencies of most of the drivers who ever competed at Indianapolis, famous people like industrialists Henry Ford or Harvey Firestone, aviator Amelia Earhart, movie stars Clark Gable or James Garner, mechanics, officials and fans.
"We have all but 12 car-driver (qualifying) combinations," McQueeney said of the entire history of the Indianapolis 500.
He pointed out that in earlier times drivers were more superstitious. Qualifying often happened very early on race morning, and a driver didn't want to have a posed picture taken just before the race. McQueeney noted that the story goes one driver relented and then went out and lost his life in an accident.
"Those things are kind of legends around here," McQueeney said. "Somebody says that, and I pick it up."
McQueeney doubts the Speedway will find the missing pictures. The Speedway keeps in close contact with collectors, and thus far none of the photos has shown up. The superstition factor is one reason. Another is that in the early days, often there may have been only one or two photographers on hand, and they were tied up elsewhere snapping with their bulky cameras of the day.
"The chances are maybe somebody got them, but we haven't found them yet," McQueeney said.
That doesn't mean he won't keep searching.
Who knows, maybe one of these days someone will walk into his office with a box of racing pictures, and it would become a treasure chest of sought-after photos.
Just like taking the perfect racing picture, that would make McQueeney's day.
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