Women drivers: We’re a better world with them in it!

Denise McCluggage was born in 1927 and developed a passion for race cars and journalism at an early age. When she was just 6 years old, she asked Santa Claus for a “Baby Austin 7,” a classy little British-made economy car. 

McCluggage became publisher of her own neighborhood newspaper in Topeka, Kansas, at age 12. “Someone would move in, and I’d run over with a pad and paper,” McCluggage told Rick Peterson of The Topeka Capital-Journal. “What were the names of their dogs, how old were their kids?” 

McCluggage got her Kansas driver’s license at age 13 and would cruise around town in her mother’s Oldsmobile Hydra-matic. 

McCluggage was 16 when she enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., to study philosophy. She said she learned all she needed to know about journalism in high school. 

After graduation, McCluggage applied for a staff writer position at the San Francisco Chronicle. “As a rule, they didn’t hire women as reporters,” said Amy Wallace, a freelance journalist from Pasadena, Calif. 

“McCluggage was undaunted,” Wallace wrote, “pestering the editor…visiting him almost daily. Finally, he relented. Her first job was in the advertising department, but after she joined the ‘staff softball team’ and pitched like an ace, she was given a chance to write…women’s features.” 

McCluggage was introduced to Midget car racing – very small vehicles that “could really fly,” Wallace said. “After the last heat, the guys would let her drive the cars until they ran out of fuel.” 

McCluggage thought, ‘I’ll do a story on the Midgets.’” That was the beginning, but it was a long road to gain acceptance as a sportswriter. 

“Female reporters were not allowed in the pit area, garage or press box,” she said. “I had to interview drivers through a chain link fence.” 

She convinced her editors that she could cover races better as a participant.

 

For weekend races, Wallace said McCluggage would race a few heats, observe the heats of other racers, then “set up her pink portable Olivetti typewriter on a stack of tires in the pits and write up the day’s events, filing the story by Western Union,” using “adrenalin from the race to get the story out.” 

As a driver, McCluggage’s most prestigious title came in 1961, when she and co-driver Allen Eager won the GT class for sports cars at the “Twelve Hours at Sebring” in Florida.She told her readers that it was on a “dark, late, lonely backstretch at Sebring” that she had a “petite epiphany – the slower your breath, the faster you go.”

 

Thus, McCluggage invented and perfected “participatory sports journalism.” She was the first motor sports journalist inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Mich., in 2001. 

Wallace said: “McCluggage chronicled the evolution of auto racing from an oddity ‘as obscure to the general public as championship tiddlywinks,’ to a high-stakes, big-money sport. Over 60 years, no one would document the sport more diligently. No one would capture more poetically what it felt like to drive at high speed.” 

In 2013, at age 86, McCluggage was still giving driving lessons at the track for $1,000 a day. 

She never stopped writing. McCluggage once said: “I’m cursed with a lot of ideas. They’re just like a bunch of gnats. You have to do something.” 

McCluggage was 88 when she died in 2015, five days before the publication of her final essay for her syndicated column, which was titled “Drive, She Said.”