DENISE AND STERLING MOSS BACK IN THE DAY
Denise McCluggage was godmother to all of us who write about cars. Reliable, caring, funny, kind, attentive, daring, adventurous, and a million other flattering adjectives aren’t enough to capture her character. She was always a fine writer, a great editor, and had a genius for friendship. And when she raced, she was fast. She was born in 1927, wrote about cars and the people who raced and loved them for more than 60 years, and passed away May 6th.
She was born in Eldorado, Kansas, and made it out to California when she attended esteemed Mills College in the Bay Area. After graduation it was an easy step to the San Francisco Chronicle and her first newswriting job. She soon fell into the region’s active sports-car scene. “It was Barney Clark who first took me to [Kjell] Qvale’s store,” she told Matt Stone of Road & Travel Magazine. “And one day I saw something there that I quite simply had to possess. Had to!” What that was, was an MG TC.
In 1954, she had moved over to the New York Herald Tribune and soon after that found herself a sportswriter at a time when women sportswriters were a true novelty. In addition to racing, she covered skiing, parachuting, and a few other sports that were extreme then—and still are. She tried almost all of them. But racing is what grabbed her.
By 1955, she was driving a Jaguar XK140MC in local events on the East Coast. And from there she moved into a Porsche 550 RS Spyder with which she regularly won “ladies’ races” and proved an indomitable competitor in races that weren’t gender-segregated. At the 1957 Nassau Speed Weeks, she finished ninth in the TT, fourth in the Governor’s Trophy, and eighth in the Memorial Trophy. There’s a photo of her at the TT, in the 550 RS, her hand on her signature polka-dot helmet. Incidentally, the guy who won that race was named Masten Gregory. Stirling Moss finished 25th and John Fitch wound up 29th.
Back in the world of journalism, during 1958 she worked alongside Don Stewart and Tom Swantek in founding the biweekly newspaper about racing called Competition Press. It would eventually evolve into today’s Autoweek. She remained connected to the publication the rest of her life.
She was tight with everyone who mattered in racing right up until yesterday. She played football against Carroll Shelby, was one of Dan Gurney’s biggest boosters, and Phil Hill wrote the introduction to her book By Brooks Too Broad for Leaping. Even as she shrunk with age, she was proud that she stood taller than Danica Patrick. And if you weren’t involved in racing, you probably knew Denise, too. She had a life so full of legends that new ones would have to shove old ones aside to gain attention.
“In memoir, autobiography, or biography, truth is present in various percentages,” she wrote on her own website. “As Barbara Kingsolver said, Memory and Truth are relatives but not twins. The same can be said of Fact. Memory and Fact grow more distantly related as time intervenes. And even Fact and Truth often seem to be born of parents barely acquainted. That’s why fictionalized biography often has more ‘truth’ than a diligently researched biography trailing footnotes through its pages.”
Wikipedia says she was married to the actor Michael Conrad of Hill Street Blues fame for a year. Friends of ours have been posting Denise stories on Facebook involving Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and turning down the chance to be on Top Gear. There’s no reason to doubt any of them. With Denise, even the exaggerations were always likely true.
It’s tempting to celebrate Denise McCluggage as the first female this or the first woman to do that. But why understate her influence? She lived how all of us can aspire to: enthusiastically and robustly.
Take some time today to pay her the greatest compliment any writer can get: Seek out her work and read it.
DENISE AND STERLING MOSS RECENTLY - BOTH WELL INTO THEIR 80'S
WITH HER FOOT STILL IN IT AT 80 YEARS OLD
photo credit: © 2015 Google
video credit: © 2015 Google
text credit: © 2015 John Huffman / CAR and DRIVER
