The Lady Arrives

Denise McCluggage, trailblazer on a whole bunch of levels

How much fun is it to race? Denise wheels Briggs Cunningham's small-displacement O.S.C.A.
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Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

July, 2012 - Jim Donnelly

Focusing solely on Denise McCluggage's career as an American sports car racer sells her short. Going out of your way to remind everyone it was a manly exploit would terribly diminish her. She had impressive gifts to explain her personal experiences as an athlete, world traveler and teacher in words and photos. We would argue that no racer, of either gender, has been so fit to archive her experiences as Denise McCluggage.

She has lived in a world that few people could ever imagine. The stars of motorsport are today cloistered away from intruding fans, their motor coaches secured in tight, protected compounds like prairie wagon trains. When Denise was getting known, she would sidle up to a dimly lit table somewhere on the Continent with Stirling Moss, Phil Hill, Denis Jenkinson, Jo Bonnier, Peter Collins, scratching occasional notes. A long, hazardous day would melt into the pleasantness accompanying wine, victuals and conversation. The racers didn't hide. Denise was one of them.

"I grew up in El Dorado, Kansas, but primarily grew up in Topeka. My father was a lawyer. There were three of us sisters to begin with, all within three years and three months, and we lost the middle sister to pneumonia and mumps," she said. (Another sister arrived six years later.) "My father was a very good driver, but not what you would call a car buff. We were a GM family, Buicks and Oldsmobiles."

An interest in racing cars came almost immediately. "After we had moved to Topeka, when I was maybe 6, we would go to Colorado for a week or two in the summer to get away from the Kansas heat. At that time, the Pikes Peak hillclimb was held on Labor Day weekend and would close out the season. Louis Unser was my hero, 'Uncle Louis.' I later met Bobby and Al and told them they weren't real Unsers, that only Louis was. I was fascinated by the technique of the open-wheel cars slinging wide with the tail way out and the steering crossed up."

That's how a pre-teen girl from the prairie got into American short-track racing. Here's how she ran with it, a little-known tale from the McCluggage Files. Denise left Kansas at 16, went to college in California and then got a Sunday magazine staff job at the San Francisco Chronicle, then one of the best newspapers on the West Coast. She fell in with a cohort from the competing Oakland Tribune named Jack Menges, who was deeply into Midget racing, which was huge in California during the 1950s. One of the local shoes, Eddie Bennett, was doing a driving school for Midgets.

"I thought, I'll do a story on it. That's the journalist's way. It turned out I had a knack for dirt tracking, and I really liked it," she said. "After races, he'd let me drive it around to run it out of fuel before they put it back on the truck. We had the Bay Cities Racing Association, where most guys ran Ford 60s. Down in the Valley, where Bill Vukovich lived, around Fresno, they ran Offys. Eddie ran what they called a Shaker, a modified two-cylinder motorcycle engine, with incredible torque.

"Dirt tracking and rallying both reminded me of what an old ski instructor of mine called kinesthetic cookies. You had to beg for your traction. I just loved driving hard into a turn, slashing the steering over, holding it, heading one way but going another. It just feels so right. You also had it in early racing, because those narrow tires would just turn pavement to dirt."

Her road to racing was the same on which change in the hidebound world of daily journalism was bumping. When she was starting out, newsrooms were in great measure the smoky dens of salty-mouthed men who were as likely to have a quart of bourbon in their desk as a beat-up Royal atop it.

"The reason I wasn't on the city side was because they already had a woman there to do those sob-sister stories, as they called them, the tearful lost child things, even though she was a real crackerjack, an excellent reporter," she said. "We did what we could do. I had a very modern boss on the Sunday section, called 'This World,' which was like a mini Time magazine. Scott Newhall was the editor's name, and he became editor of the whole shebang after I'd left the Chronicle and gone East. He was a car buff, later had one of his cars win Best in Show at Pebble Beach, and was the person who got me not just interested in cars, but also in working on cars."

Her coming-out was learning that Bull Durham tobacco was useful for curing a leaky 1926 Dodge radiator. Next came a 1936 Chevrolet whose interior she fixed with strips of Oriental rugs and a sail needle. She hired the jazz writer Ralph Gleason. Denise was transitioning from her original goal, reporting, to becoming the rarest of creatures at this time, an editor who was also a woman. Around that time, she learned that a six-week course on book criticism would be taking place at Radcliffe. When the bosses balked at giving her a leave of absence, she took the initiative and headed for Manhattan, and got a slot at the New York Herald Tribune.

She took a ski trip to Vermont with a friend, typed up a report and, on a whim, took it to the Herald Tribune sports editor. He liked it so much that he offered her a full-time writing position, mostly on skiing. It was an era when newsstands in New York were crowded with dailies staffed by superstar sportswriters, all men. "I was interviewed by Mrs. [Helen Rogers] Reid and her sons, who were the owners, and I said I would also like to cover this new thing going on, sports-car racing. I had had an MG TC in California and bought another TC later. I was known as a sportswriter who did what I was writing about."

In New York, she covered everything from yachting to lacrosse. She was barred from the press box at Ebbetts Field while helping cover the World Series, so she did it from the stands. Denise interviewed Willie Mays's landlady in Harlem. On assignment at Pequot Yacht Club in Connecticut, she struck up a conversation with a guy scooping ice cream for the kids--Briggs Cunningham. He helped her fix a tech problem with the TC, made sure she could get to races, and then let her drive his cars. Her first true competitive start was aboard a Jaguar XK140 at some airport course in upstate New York.

"It was club racing. People would be there with their cars, people like Briggs. I met Luigi Chinetti, who says, 'Maybe we should get you into a Ferrari.' And within a couple of years, I was in one. I drove Briggs's Porsche 550, then his O.S.C.A.s. It was an incredible opportunity. I got to go to Nassau, race there, drove my first Sebring in Briggs's Fiat Abarth in 1958. Briggs and Luigi made it possible for me to have my own Ferrari in 1961, and I co-won GT at Sebring.

"I always tell people I was the first professional driver in SCCA, because I'd drive my Jaguar to a race to cover it, so I got paid eight cents a mile in mileage expenses," she laughs. "Then I'd drive a 10-lap race at a mile and a half a lap. Do the math. I was getting maybe 80 cents. Then I'd jump out, yell for a couple of details, put my typewriter up on a stack of tires. You can tell how long ago that was because, now, one tire is high enough for a desk. I'd write my story, then go find the nearest Western Union or else phone it in. It was unbelievable. In the winter, I spent it at different ski areas."

One of Denise's achievements in both journalism and racing is rescuing the publication that is now Autoweek. The tale dates to 1958, when she was on Herald Tribune assignment covering a race at Cumberland, Maryland. Two founders of a proposed newspaper called Competition Press encountered her and asked her to become its East Coast editor. She would end up in Europe, covering such landmarks as Phil Hill's first Le Mans victory for Competition Press, while still on the Herald Tribune's staff. As she puts it, the Herald Tribune had a sports editor named Stanley Woodward, nicknamed The Coach, who "hated women reporters. I discovered most sportswriters then couldn't really deal with women. They could deal with pom-pom girls and beauty queens, but not with women as equals. I had earned the respect of the other sportswriters because I was straightforward and a good reporter."

Long story short, before Denise was hired, The Coach had left the paper, and then returned with much fanfare. Herald Tribune writer Roger Kahn (who later authored the acclaimed baseball memoir The Boys of Summer) asked The Coach what he planned to do when he returned to the Trib. His answer: "The first thing I'm going to do is fire that broad."

Her fallback was Competition Press, which Denise had taken over by paying off the other partners' debt. She'd been putting it out at night. She took her severance pay from the Tribune, walked out the door and became a full-time racing reporter and photographer, with a newspaper that was occasionally breaking even. She had a learning curve--dumping ads to make room for a compelling story--but an excellent newspaper, and the most direct type of source contact imaginable.

"We covered a lot of stuff that other people didn't. I was at all these races, and it was simpler then. You got to be friends with the drivers. They didn't have press conferences. You went out to dinner with them at night and talked to them then. There were just very few of us. It was a tight group. Dinner took a long time, a whole evening. We'd talk about cars, racing, music, anything.

"Originally, I'd ride around Europe with Phil Hill, who got a new Beetle every year. I was headquartered in Modena like most everyone else. Then I got an Alfa Romeo Giulietta, which I raced, including at the Nürburgring. I don't remember what happened to it, but I went back to bumming rides. I had gone up to the Nürburgring with Alejandro De Tomaso and Isabel Haskell, because I was sharing an O.S.C.A. there with Isabel. The car broke in practice. Henry Manney III offered me a ride to Stuttgart, where I could wait for Isabel to put my passport on the Rapido train from Modena. I had suddenly realized I'd left it in my helmet bag, which I'd stowed in the race car.

"So I hung out in Stuttgart for several days, and I visited Mercedes, and then Porsche to see my friend Huschke von Hanstein. There, he had a Porsche 356 just back from a show somewhere. It had an unheard-of electric sunroof and knock-off hubs. It could not be sold in Germany, because knock-off hubs were illegal for street use. He suggested I buy it. Like every other time I bought a car, I had exactly enough money in the bank to cover it--in this case, $3,000 (1959, remember?). I never thought that now I had nothing left. There was always something else down the road. Unfortunately, I'm still like that. By the time my passport arrived, I'd bought the Porsche and was ready to head for Modena."

Back in the States, where she was now writing a column for The New York Mirror, Denise hired a college kid to handle office chores. When covering races in Europe, and lacking the fast communication services of today, she'd take her Mirror copy and exposed film and stories for Competition Press to Orly airport, find a Pan Am crew and have the plane met at Idlewild Airport by her "staff." That college kid, by the way, was Steve Smith, who went on to a career at Car and Driver and Motor Trend magazines.

Later, she had a paying assignment for a round-the-world trip, and sold the newspaper to Road & Track. It then moved to Reno under the editorship of the late Leon Mandel. Around then, the title changed to Competition Press and Autoweek. Crain Communications of Detroit changed it to the current magazine format.

At 85, Denise continues to write, market her photography of the great years in racing on her website, www.denisemccluggage.com, and judge at Amelia Island and Pebble Beach.

"There's a great opening line in a book called The Go Between," she said, "which I often quote: 'The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.'"



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