Gentlemen, Start Your Engines, Part Two
All the way from the beginning, the signal to start the engines had been the latest in a morning-long succession of aerial bombs exploding at various intervals. The sound of a starting bomb had apparently been the only signal until perhaps the last of the 1940s, when it is understood to have been accompanied by the visual gesture of flagman, Seth Klein holding up a green flag, still furled, and then twirling it, furled, above his head.
In 1948, a friend of track president Wilbur Shaw's named John "Irish" Horan had come onto the public-address system staff. A longtime showman who had once been a circus barker and had recently formed a traveling auto thrill show, Horan was approached by a number of participants who had been feeling for quite some time that this dramatic of moments at which the engines fired really "needed something". Irish Horan agreed with them.
Although he may have complied as early as 1949, he is credited for the first time in Floyd Clymer's Indianapolis 500 Yearbook in 1951 with having made an announcement over the public address, believed to have been little more than "opening the mike" upon the sounding of the bomb and uttering quietly and almost as an afterthought, "Gentlemen, start your MOTORS". Whether he actually said "motors" or was misquoted and really said "engines", he definitely said something! In 1952, a command definitely was delivered, but it clearly was not yet an established tradition because one version states the final word as being "engines", while another records it as "motors".
The first time that the term, "Gentlemen, start your engines" appeared in print on the race morning "countdown" schedule was in 1953 and while the claim in Wilbur Shaw's memoirs is that he had said it every year since 1946, it appears that he did not do so until 1953.
Shaw definitely issued the command in 1953 and in 1954 with Tony Hulman assuming the duties and making it his own in 1955 after Shaw perished in a private-plane crash on October 30, 1954.
Pat Locke, Maestro Muse
