[News clippings related to automobile racing]

Collection consisting of a photograph album, loose photographs, and other material chiefly created and compiled by Louis H. Collins, circa 1930-1949. The album consists of eighty-six photographs chiefly created by Collins, as well as eleven associated newspaper clippings, which document automobile races at the Thompson Speedway in Thompson, Connecticut, during its first two summer seasons, July 1940 to August 1941. Thirty-six loose photographic prints and seven newspaper clippings that were formerly laid in the album document other racetracks, including the Readville Race Track in Boston, Massachusetts; the Roosevelt Raceway in Westbury, New York; and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Indiana. There are also two complete issues of automobile racing newsletters consisting of Auto Racing History, circa 1941, and the National Auto Racing News, November 19, 1942.

Photographs depict automobile races and accidents, as well as portraits of drivers and the photographers who documented the races. Identified drivers include Frank Beeder, Fred Frame, Russ Green, Rex Mays, Frank McGurk, Verne Orenduff, Bernd Rosemeyer, Dick Seaman, and Wilburn Hartwell "Stubby" Stubblefield. A photomechanical print depicts Mays at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway after winning the Indianapolis 500 in 1940; an accompanying newspaper clipping documents Mays's death in an accident at a racetrack in Del Mar, California in November 1949. The album includes a group portrait of racetrack photographers, including Collins, created by Donald E. O'Reilly of Plainville, Massachusetts, as well as a press card for the Thompson Speedway affixed to the album cover.

The collection includes a loose photograph of the gravesite of Lieutenant Commander Harold Earle MacLellan at Arlington National Cemetery. MacLellan was originally from Westerly, Rhode Island, and he died aboard the naval airship USS Akron that crashed off the New Jersey coast on April 4, 1933.