And: “Some heavy contact going into the turn.”

And: “Into the turn, look out, couple of cars get together.”

And: “Three wide, throw a tablecloth over them. Whoa, whoa and whoa!”

As I watched, absorbed, I heard in memory my own father’s voice spilling out of the loudspeakers, the rhythmic roar of the engines. The enchanted evening my father asked one of the champion drivers at Old Bridge Speedway to take me in his stock car for a couple of careful laps around the track, the most amazing moment of my young life. The fury of speed as the scarred modified sucked up the asphalt, controlled by a sun-roughened man with muscled arms who was my hero. I felt as if I might fly away.

My father, Nat Kleinfield, was a racing announcer, too, a career that found him by happenstance. His own father was killed by a horse while he was crossing a street in Philadelphia, and he dropped out of school following eighth grade to help support the family. He worked with his brothers at a deli before landing a job at a television equipment manufacturer. He also installed public-address systems. One evening, he was wiring up a P.A. system at a local racetrack featuring motorcycles when the announcer called in sick. The track promoter, who had heard my father’s mellow voice testing the equipment, asked him to do a favor and fill in. He did, and was on his way.

In the 1930s, well before I was born, he announced motorcycle races on cinder tracks, including at Yankee Stadium, and open-cockpit midget-car races at places like the Nutley Velodrome in Nutley, N.J. It was a steeply banked board track — in effect, a giant wooden bowl — built for bicycle races. Boisterous crowds turned out, but its time as a site for car races was brief, only the 1938 and 1939 seasons, because it proved to be hideously dangerous and was shut down after the deaths of several drivers. My father also announced football and basketball games, boxing matches, bicycle competitions and rodeos, before devoting himself exclusively to auto races.

Sometimes my father would work at four New Jersey tracks on consecutive nights — Pine Brook, East Windsor, Flemington and Old Bridge. Pine Brook was a tiny track that hosted three-quarter midgets. The others were half-mile tracks that held races for modified stock cars, which were old reworked passenger cars. (Today they are purpose-built for racing and look like nothing traveling on a highway.) My father also announced at a mile-long track in Trenton that put on several Indianapolis car races a year. Every February, my parents took my sister, Dawn, and me out of our New Jersey school, and we drove to Daytona Beach, Fla., where my father was one of the announcers. He began there in the 1930s, when races were run on a course that stretched along the highway and passed across the packed sand on the beach. (The storied speedway didn’t open until 1959, the same year the Daytona 500 started.) Racecars that veered out of control sometimes were swallowed up by the ocean.

Beside announcing upward of 150 races in some years, my father also handled publicity for local tracks. He wrote a column, Speaking of Speed, for a racing paper, and hosted a radio show, “From the Pits.” During winters, when the Northeastern outdoor racing season was dormant, he announced smoky, three-quarter midget races inside armories in New Jersey and on Long Island.

From the many races I attended, I came to appreciate the power of voice to the sport — how an announcer could sort out the chaos on the track and turn it into a cohesive narrative for the crowd, interpreting its nuances and significance. Track announcers had been around forever, back before P.A. systems existed, and “leather lungs,” as the announcers were known, called races through megaphones. In the 1930s, Ronald Reagan announced auto races in Iowa. The more I went to races, the more I realized that the announcer was an indispensable talent.