It was fifteen minutes before the start of the 1997 Indianapolis 500 and then-National Speed Sport News Editor and Publisher, the gnome-ish seventy-something Chris Economaki, took me on an impromptu tour of Pit Lane. Moments earlier, in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway press room, I cornered Chris and asked him to tell me about Troy Ruttman, the winner of the 1952 Indy 500-the event’s youngest winner ever-and a man who died just a week earlier. “Come with me,” Economaki said. “I want to show you something.”

So we walked through Gasoline Alley and onto Pit Lane. It was friggin’ pandemonium. The place was buzzing like butterflies on Benzedrine, a beehive of activity as race-car drivers, wrenches, sitcom celebritroids, camera operators, yellow shirts, millionaires and mistresses jostled and caromed for their designated perch before the commencement of “the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.” I had never been sucked into anything so hectic and just felt I was in the way. People in creased clothes bumped into me like I wasn’t there, but the fragile if not brittle Economaki was never touched by the madding crowd, protected by a bubble, a force field built up from covering motorsports weekly for his venerated no-nonsense NSSN since the 1940s and its predecessor, National Auto Racing News since the 1930s.

“See that guy over there?” he asked, pointing to IndyCar driver Dennis Vitolo, who was within earshot. “He’s a stiff.”

I was incredulous. Whatever Vitolo’s dubious credentials and whatever the circumstances-this was the second year of IndyCar’s notorious, debilitating “split” with talent, money and resources diluted and segregated into two separate-but-not-so-equal sanctioning bodies-the fact remained that Vitolo was about to strap himself into a monocoque missile, mash the pedals and hurl himself at 225 mph into the Indianapolis Motor Speedways’ notorious and deadly right angle called Turn 1. If not performed with some skill, Vitolo could easily be classified as a “stiff” all right, but more along the word’s connotation given by the coroner.

Still, the avuncular and grousing Economaki was unimpressed.

He said this guy “is everything that is wrong with this series.” Something to the effect of how he had bought that ride and didn’t earn it.

“When I first started coming here there was nobody like that in what we called the ‘Big Cars.'”

Chris then told me about the 1940s and 50s when drivers from all over the country would enter races in Champ cars and midgets and earn enough prize money to put together an entry here. Troy Ruttman was one example. Out of Mooreland, Oklahoma, he was a local luminary first and an Indy 500 winner later. “The fans from their hometowns would charter busses carrying banners about the driver from their home town and drive to Indy to support their local heroes,” Economaki said. His implication was clear: Fans had lost their emotional attachment to motor racing.

“Nobody cares about this guy,” Chris said, still within earshot of the object of his ire.

Honestly. I almost felt sorry for the poor stiff in the firesuit.

Moments later the balloons went off, Jim Nabors sang “Back Home in Indiana,” Florence Henderson warbled the National Anthem and the race started, only to be stopped after two laps when AJ Foyt’s driver crashed and then it started raining.

Meanwhile through the gloom, back in the press room, using an upright blue-ribbon Olivetti typewriter, Economaki hunt-and-pecked out elliptical tidbits and micro-truths for his Dead Sea-screed of a must-read column, “The Editor’s Notebook,” which at that time had no paragraph breaks and separated each newsworthy item by a series of dots.

“Hey Shav!” Chris yelled over the press room clatter and hullabaloo, to his peer Shav Glick from the LA Times. “What’s another word for ‘sagacious’?”

In the intervening years Economaki’s thick-as-a-brick column was broken down into actual paragraphs. Proper punctuation replaced the quaint dot-dot-dot ellipses. It kind of lost its identity, and was eventually subsumed by his daughter Corrine and rechristened “Speed Sport Notebook.”

Like the Indy 500, as the years cascaded National Speed Sport News lost its essence and vitality. But racing fans patronized it out of tradition and to show their appreciation for what it once meant to them.

Last month, NSSN came in the mail just like it did every Wednesday, and out of habit and ritual, I went straight to page six and sought out what used to be “The Editor’s Notebook.” There the “Speed Sport Notebook’s” headline read “End of An Era,” with a sub-hed of “March 23, 2011-The Last Issue of NSSN.”

Like Troy Ruttman, National Speed Sport News is gone forever. Because of the inevitability-and the modern world’s accelerated rate-of change, its passing is not unexpected, perhaps. Nobody can tell me that is a good thing. Or that it bodes well for motorsports. Just ask the Ghost of Troy Ruttman. Or even Dennis Vitolo.