The month of May. Part the third.

 I wrote this today for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. It's the  third in a series of four columns that will run through the month of May. Because there will be no month of May as we know it, it's my recollections, from 40 years of covering the Indianapolis 500, of four of the more memorable ones. It's also my chance to throw in a plea for all good Blobophiles to subscribe to the JG, on account of local journalism is a vital public service.

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And now the days of the well-thumbed media guide, of Dr. Jack Miller the Racing Dentist, of seeing your puzzled reflection in a pair of mirrored sunglasses as you tried to suss out who on earth was behind them.

That was me one May afternoon in 1996, outside the garages of something called Blueprint Racing. The man behind the glasses was not Emerson Fittipaldi or Al Unser Jr. or Michael Andretti. His name was Jim Guthrie, of Gadsen, Ala., and he was the new face, or one of them, of the New Indy.

Or so I called him.

Probably I was pushing the envelope on that one, but, well … it WAS 1996. It probably gets weirder at Indy, because at least Steven Tyler wasn’t there to draw and quarter the National Anthem. But it was still pretty weird.

It was the year of Jim Guthrie and the Racing Dentist and Brad Murphey the Racing Cowboy, and of a guy (Racin Gardner) with Racin’ actually in his name. It was the year of Blueprint Racing and Loophole Racing and half a dozen other Racings unheard of before or since.

It was the year when a dead man spoke to me from the tape recorder in my hand. And it was the year of The Split -- the year when Speedway president Tony George’s pet project, the Indy Racing League, cleaved the sport in two and left us with dueling 500s 225 miles apart.

Which left us with no 500s, essentially. As we shall see.

In any case, booming NASCAR was the happy beneficiary of this grudge match between George and the ruling body of IndyCar, Championship Auto Racing Teams, whose stars bailed on Indy to run their own 500 at Michigan International Speedway. That left the Greatest Spectacle In Racing with something less than a spectacle – and with one supremely dark tragedy.

Which brings us to the dead man speaking from the palm of my hand.

Scott Brayton hailed from just up the road in Coldwater, Mich., the son of a renowned engine builder and a man with a ready smile and joy in his heart. And he never smiled broader nor felt more joy than he did that May, when John Menard put him in a guided missile and Brayton put it on the pole.

Six days later he was dead.

Six days later he was running laps when a tire went down and his car swapped ends and slapped the wall beneath the suites in turn two. Brayton’s head hit the concrete, and he was gone.

 I was in Fort Wayne the day it happened, but not long thereafter I was back at the Speedway. Menard was still so shaken he could barely speak. An American flag fluttered lazily at half-staff outside the Menard garages; a few feet away, piles of flowers wilted in the warm May sun.

We all wilted a little, in the days after Brayton’s death. If there was any joy to be found that month, it was gone. And one day, skimming through a mini-cassette, a snippet from Scott Brayton’s news conference the day he won the pole popped up.

Suddenly there was his voice, giddy and joyous and alive, so alive. Try that sometime if you’re looking to feel a chill.

The chill lasted the rest of the month, regrettably. If the Racing Dentist and the Racing Cowboy and Jim Guthrie of Gadsen, Ala., all had their stories – mostly they were a bunch of dreamers scuffling around in sprint cars or support series – a lot of them had no business within fifty nautical miles of the Indianapolis 500. Combine that with the hand-me-down gear everyone was running, and the whole thing had a bush-league feel even Tony George’s good intentions couldn’t obscure.

Come Race Day, off the dreamers went. And some three-and-a-half hours later, a grand total of three of them actually completed 500 miles.

One was your winner, Buddy Lazier, a 29-year-old from Vail, Colo., who’d qualified for only three 500s in seven previous tries and had never before finished higher than 14^th. Someone named Davy Jones was second. Someone else named Richie Hearn was third.

Beyond that, it was a demolition derby. The fourth, fifth and sixth-place finishers all crashed on Lazier’s last lap. Arie Luyendyk crashed. Scott Harrington crashed. There were five engine failures and an engine fire and a coil pack fire, and assorted issues with suspensions and gear boxes and transmissions. Only nine of 33 starters were still running at the end.

Up north, meanwhile, the Other 500 had its own problems.

As all those used cars crashed or blew up or just flat died at Indy, in Michigan the alleged stars of the sport didn’t even make it through the pace lap without bending up the merchandise. Adrian Fernandez ran into polesitter Jimmy Vasser as they came to the green, triggering an accident that took out 10 cars.

There were more than a few snickers – and some outright guffaws -- when the news hit the media center at Indianapolis. It was, however, only a brief moment of levity.

May 1996 simply wasn’t built for laughs. It just wasn’t.