Tribune-Star photo/Bob Poynter

Click here to take a look at the Hulman family tree.

Above the red brick church his family helped build, the bells tolled for Tony Hulman as a curtain of rain fluttered against a steel gray sky on Halloween 1977.

The haunting bells also tolled for Terre Haute.

The community that greeted its first Hulman more than 125 years before and shared the family's prosperity was changing as jobs moved to the Sunbelt and traffic moved away from downtown to the interstate.

But Tony was a fit and trim 76 and still wore those perfect size 42 suits. He controlled millions and millions of dollars of business and real estate and had for decades. He'd given millions to the city's civic institutions. He had the ear of the state's most important politicians. Just 10 days before, he had hammed it up at his annual dinner for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway press corps.

The man who inherited an empire immigrant dry-goods merchants founded and made it a bigger empire, a national empire, would go on forever. He believed that as much as anyone with his unspoken rule to never mention his age, never discuss his aches and pains.

He died of heart failure on an operating table at St. Vincent's Hospital in Indianapolis at 9:45 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 27, 1977.

Terre Haute City Hall closed the Monday of his funeral. The crowds entered the Patrick J. Ryan funeral home on South Seventh Street, where tiers of flowers reached the ceiling for the biggest funeral in the history of Terre Haute, bigger than his grandfather Herman's, bigger than Chauncey Rose's, bigger than five-time mayor Ralph Tucker's.

It all happened so fast. Nobody expected the most important man in Terre Haute and at the speedway to die now. And now that he was dead, nobody knew who would replace him or how to replace him.

His wife had devoted much of her time to family and social life. His daughter wasn't ready to take over, she would later say, because her father hadn't prepared her because she was a woman. Besides, she and the family had just endured the shooting death of her husband by a man she would later call her boyfriend. His grandchildren were too young; his only grandson, Tony George, had just graduated from high school.

What would happen to the speedway Tony Hulman had saved from destruction, probably his best-known legacy? Would the family sell it to a big corporation?

What would happen to the family business? There was no Yale-trained heir-apparent already in the business as Tony was when his father died. What would happen to the company's foundation, the wholesale grocery business?

What would happen to Terre Haute? The downtown, which had been home to a Hulman business for more than a century, was in decline. A significant portion of it was Hulman property. If the family was indecisive, what would happen to downtown?

Hundreds of people stood in the pouring rain outside St. Benedict's that Halloween nearly 20 years ago, waiting to get inside for Tony's funeral Mass; 900 listened as six priests assisted the Rev. Hubert Kobunski in celebrating it.

Then car after car left the church and traveled north, turning east on Wabash Avenue and passing Hulman & Co.'s brick building, empty of employees; the cars followed Tony's lead for the last time, toward Calvary Cemetery.