1931 Indy 500 - Louis Schneider

Schneider and Miller and the 1931 Indy 500 Starting Lineup

 Louis Schneider, Indiana native competed in six Indianapolis 500 races and in 1931 made it to the winner’s circle. He never would win again and in an ironic twist he won driving car number 23 and the next year drove car number 1 and finished 23^rd. Symmetry I guess.

This image of Schneider ran in the February 1932 issue of Popular Mechanics and, having combed the archives for a while, I noticed something interesting. All of the Popular Mechanics issues have been mercilessly marked up with copious hand-written notes on almost every article. The notes deal with the specifics of each article - things like names, statistics, dates, and the like. My junior detective work leads me to think that the archive must have gotten their supply of old Popular Mechanics from an editor or a hopless obsessive compulsive. Whatever the case, the article about Schneider had an associated address that just screamed for a little Googling. Apparently it had some connection with car designer Harry Miller in the 1930s.

The Address

So I fired up Google and did a little checking, as of the writing of this blog post the mysterious address belongs to a faceless distribution center that squats in a neighborhood that could play backdrop to a zombie apocolyps flick. A quick check of Miller’s biography on Wikipedia didn’t turn up a connection with LA. I’ll have to do a deeper excavation someday.

Modern Long Beach Ave.