AUTO RACING | 60 YEARS AT ILLIANA

HIGHLAND | Standing in the kitchen of his modest Highland home, Joe Pressnell dons a jacket that no amount of money could buy.

It's black with a stripe of checkered flag running down each sleeve and lettering stitched across the back commemorating the Illiana Motor Speedway's 50th year of existence.

There were only so many of those jackets manufactured in 1997, making each a coveted collector's item. Someone once offered Pressnell $500 for the rare coat.

It wasn't for sale.

You can't put a price tag on memories, and Pressnell has plenty of them dating to 1947, the year the Speedway opened, the year his father first took him to the track.

Except back then it wasn't the Speedway. Back then, when Pressnell would help his father, who lost both legs to diabetes, ascend to the top row of the bleachers, there were no stock cars, no paved track. Back then it was Lucky Wheels Bike Club, and fans paid to see motorcycles circle a dirt track.

Back then Pressnell was 15 years old and about to become enraptured with a passion that has lasted longer than his 39-year stint as a Munster mail carrier. Longer than the 40 years he has lived in his single-story home. Longer than his 49-year marriage to his late wife, Irene.

"You see the look in my dad's eyes -- how much he loves it," Mary Pressnell said.

Sixty years from the spring his dad first took him to the Speedway, Pressnell, 75, is still going back.

Barring the four years he spent performing jet maintenance for the Air Force during the Korean War, Pressnell hasn't missed a Saturday night at Illiana. Not one.

"You know what the definition of a fan is, don't you?" Pressnell said as he drew back the blinds of his kitchen window, motioned at his 1984 baby blue Chevy Capri and explained that the No. 30 on the right side of his license plate is the car number of his favorite driver, Larry Schuler.

"It means you're a fanatic."

It means that simply going to the race isn't enough. Pressnell -- "Papa Joe" as they call him at the Speedway -- arrives early, sometimes as early as 10 a.m. for a 7 p.m. race, to claim the same top row section of the bleachers that he and his dad used to share.

It means going to your nephew's ill-timed wedding and changing out of your suit in the car on the way to the Speedway.

It means keeping parkas in your car, for those nights when the sky opened up, or the time when a 95-degree day dipped into a 50-degree night.

"I can tell you one thing: I was warm," Papa Joe said. "I went to the car and got my parka."

Before 2002, when a noise ordinance was passed and the races began starting sooner, it sometimes meant leaving the track after midnight and having to be up at 5 on Sunday morning to open St. James church in Highland, something Papa Joe has volunteered for the past 10 years.

It means that buying a season pass is no longer enough. The past seven years Papa Joe has been the first to purchase a season pass. Someday -- "but not any time soon" -- Joe III hopes to continue that tradition, because going to the Speedway has become a family practice, passed down through the generations.

Papa Joe started taking Joe Jr. to the Speedway when he was 8. Joe Jr. began taking his sons before they were old enough to walk. When Joe Jr. decided he wanted to race at the Speedway -- which he did in 1990 and 1991 -- Papa Joe and an 8-year-old Joe III helped him build the car from scratch.

"'Isn't it too noisy?' Mary asked Joe III when she found out her nephew was taking his 1-year-old daughter, Isabel, to the Speedway. "They said, 'Oh no, she likes it.' I guess it's in her blood."

It's in the blood of Joe Jr. and Joe III, who are standing in the kitchen with Papa Joe, swapping stories, poring over black-and-white race programs and sifting through old pictures laid on the table in neat rows and columns.

And it will be in Papa Joe's blood "as long as it's there," he said. "As long as I have my health."

"I'll carry you out there," Joe Jr. chimed in, only half-jokingly.

"You never know," Joe III added, "they might even put an elevator out there where you sit."