An inebriated Foyt, Unser's first aid with a beer, and other old tales from an old Speedway tavern

Race drivers today make money, live high and go to fancy places, like St. Elmo, the steak house Downtown.

But years ago they made peanuts, often lived hand-to-mouth and went to Mates' White Front Tavern, a sort of Mason's lodge for racing people a few blocks east of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's Turn 2. Each May, they went to the tavern at 3535 W. 16th St. practically every night. Sometimes they acted the fool.

The White Front opened in the 1930s just as Prohibition was repealed. The tavern was in an old house that was painted white (hence the name White Front) a few doors west of its latter-day location.

The party lasted five decades, fueled by inexpensive bottles of domestic beer and 50 cent Manhattan cocktails (Rob Roys were 60 cents; stingers, 75).

The founding Mates family (rhymes with rates) operated the White Front until the early 1960s. The bar was then sold to others who kept the White Front name until the mid-1980s. But by then racers had secured corporate sponsors and were becoming high-toned and were ascending into St. Elmo status. The White Front was fading and is today a windowless gentleman's club called Club Venus.

Its stories are kept alive in the minds of certain old-timers. Here are some of their tales:

Rookie A.J. Foyt gets unwittingly hammered on screwdrivers

A.J. Foyt, who would become one of the greatest race drivers of all time, did not drink much, but in 1958 as a rookie he allowed some of the veterans to drag him to the White Front. "All I wanted was a 'Coc-Cola,'" Foyt recalls, sitting in the garage of the race team he owns, still sort of grumpy more than a half century later. "But they told me, one of the guys told me, 'They don't have no 'Coc-Cola,'' and they give me orange juice."

Except the orange juice had vodka in it. That made it a screwdriver. Foyt, now 80, downed the screwdriver, and then downed another, and then another. At least three he downed, probably more.

In Foyt's version of events, the story's climax is: "I throwed up a couple times."

But his longtime assistant, Anne Fornoro, who was sitting with Foyt in the garage, corrects him. "A.J.," she says, "the way I always heard it, you spent the whole night in the bathroom wrapped around the toilet."

Bobby Unser is attended to, medically, by the bartender

Bobby Unser, who would win the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race three times and become nearly as famous as Foyt, remembers a bartender at the White Front named Audrey.

"I'd run a sprint car race somewhere," Unser says, "and I'd come in at the end of the day with blisters on my hands, my hands bleeding, from the race. Audrey — I don't know if I ever knew her last name — Audrey had a first-aid kit behind the bar. I'd order a beer and lay my hands on the bar, and she'd doctor them up."

Walking on broken glass with championship car designer A.J. Watson

A.J. Watson was a smart, serious person, one of the greatest designers and builders of race cars in the history of the Indianapolis 500. His career spanned four decades. His cars won six times.

But at the White Front, Watson's playful side emerged. John Mahoney, a track photographer and White Front regular in the late 1960s through the 1970s, recalls Watson making use of his trademark flat-top hair style. "You'd hear cheering, and you'd look over and Watson would be balancing a beer bottle on his head. He could balance it pretty well, but it usually fell."

Watson, who died in 2014, demonstrated a fascination with broken glass at the White Front on at least one other occasion. Jim McGee, an Indy 500 crew chief, recalls Watson sitting at a table with chief mechanic Jud Phillips. The two drank cocktails called "gizmos." They would drain them, McGee says, and then hurl the empty glasses against the White Front's cinder-block walls "to see how big a pile of glass they could make."

How to describe the White Front: 'Respectable' is a relative term

The White Front, which began shortly after Prohibition and lasted into the mid-1980s, was different things at different times. Or else people saw it through different lenses. Or both. Probably both.

Bobby Unser says it was "a respectable place, a nice place, everybody's second home, where all the racers hung out."

But one Indy 500 yearbook warned readers that "some of the habitues" of the White Front were "a bit seedy."

Nick Mates, the son and nephew of the owners and grandson of the founder, doesn't dispute the characterization.

But John Mahoney, a former regular, says the reputation was undeserved. "In all the years there I saw just one fight," he says. It involved the sprint car driver Dee Jones and Jones' unidentified opponent in a game of pool.

"It was around '75," Mahoney says, "and it was over fast. No real injuries. It was two guys knocking over a couple of chairs. Lady came from behind the bar and broke it up. It might have been Audrey. The other guy left. Dee stayed."

Clark Gable, a fan of both racing and the White Front

The White Front had a long bar along the west wall, with a black-and-white TV high in one corner that was rarely turned on. Cigars could be bought from behind the bar.

Photographs of race drivers covered the place. Every year they were changed out to reflect the current 33 starters in that year's Indy 500.

Some of the ashtrays were made by Nick Mates' father out of pistons from racing engines, Offenhausers. His father did the work using a metal lathe he kept in his basement at home. He gave away the ash trays as souvenirs. Some of them got swiped. Nick still has one.

Near the bar was a stage for music acts and a dance floor. At the grand opening of the new building, in September, 1952, Groucho Marx (who was in town on an unrelated matter) sat at one of the tables. There are photographs.

Mates says that Clark Gable, a race fan, once had some drinks at the White Front and that Tony Hulman, the beloved millionaire who owned the Speedway, came in with him but didn't drink.

At the White Front, there was such a thing as a free lunch

The White Front was nearly literally in the shadow of the Speedway. If you opened the front door you could hear the race cars.

But Nick Mates' father did not simply wait for racing people to come into his business. He went out and got them. He had T-shirts made up that said "Mates' White Front," and he gave them to racing people. In exchange for being walking billboards for the tavern, Mates gave them a free lunch.

The shirts become iconic. Even some of the drivers wore them. This was before the days of driving suits. Drivers ran the Indy 500 wearing T-shirts.

Decades later, an Indy 500 memorabilia dealer made up a new batch of "Mates' White Front" T-shirts and got $35 apiece for them.

It's all over but the men's room

From the outside, the old White Front building is practically unchanged. Inside, though, the walls have been covered in a dark material and the windows covered over. No natural light gets in. The only trace of the interior of the venerable old watering hole is in the men's room, where the old ceramic-style cinderblock walls (they are apparent in the old photos) are still out in the open and look just as they looked.

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 44-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.