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The only time Anton Hulman Jr. ever circled the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in a race car, in 1950, hard-charging ex-driver Wilbur Shaw was at the wheel, according to Sonny Kleinfield's book ``A Month at the Brickyard.''

Approaching the first turn at 120 miles per hour, as Kleinfield tells it, Hulman started yelling for Shaw -- who'd won the race in 1937, 1939 and 1940 -- to slow down.

He even knocked Shaw's foot off the accelerator at one point, the story goes, and he never wanted to race around the track again.

Despite his aversion to 120 miles-per-hour turns, speed also fascinated Hulman. Growing up, he'd watched fancy cars zoom along the National Road in his hometown of Terre Haute. As a boy, he'd first been part of the Indianapolis 500 crowd in 1914, five years after the speedway was built.

Days after World War II, Hulman, then 44, ended up smack in the middle of the straightaway at the speedway. The only crowds this time were of weeds stubbornly blocking every grandstand entrance and the cracks zigzagging the track surface.

Ten days later, Nov. 14, 1945, he and right-hand man Joe Cloutier met with Indianapolis attorney Paul Davis, who represented speedway owner and famed flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, a man more at ease with speed than Hulman but so unenthused about the speedway he planned to close it for good.

In a posh private room at the Indianapolis Athletic Club, Hulman bought the speedway for $750,000. He said he was buying the track to resurrect a Hoosier tradition. The grandson of dry-goods merchants who came to Terre Haute to make money and who had pushed the empire those merchants founded before the Civil War to the national level said he wasn't interested in making money at the track.

He is the bridge between those dry-goods merchants and the current Hulman generation. It's appropriate that speed fascinated him but scared him because the men who founded the family empire rarely traveled faster than a horse-drawn wagon; the man now atop the empire, his grandson Tony George, revels in speed and the money it can bring.

Yale-educated, Hulman had inherited a multimillion-dollar company when his father died in 1942. He had married the heir of an even richer fortune, Mary Fendrich, of the Evansville cigar-makers; both would become famous for saying ``Gentlemen, Start Your Engines.''

He would become Terre Haute's most prominent Hulman patriarch, the one at the helm as the Hulman name made its way onto a municipal airport, a private engineering college, a city golf course and a state university's civic center through gifts of millions.

He gave and gave locally, and many look back nostalgically to his patriarchy. But his purchase of the speedway -- his fascination with speed and move to preserve a Hoosier tradition -- irrevocably turned the focus of the family empire to the east.

Despite his wealth, power and influence, influence very alive today, some who knew him say he was plain in many ways -- a man's man. In his hometown, where his name is still the one many city residents associate with the family empire, he was known simply as Tony.