Meet Betty Skelton: Member of the ‘Corvette Hall of Fame’

One of the popular attractions at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Ky., is the “Corvette Hall of Fame,” which was established in 1998.

The intent is “to confer official recognition upon the most influential individuals in the history of the Corvette since 1953 and honor their achievements.” The first woman to be enshrined in 2001 had North Carolina connections.

She was Betty Skelton, who started flying airplanes as a 12-year-old. Skelton was a three-time U.S. female aerobatic champion. She was operating a charter airplane service in Raleigh in the early 1950s. One of her customers was Bill Francis, founder of NASCAR, who hired her to fly race car drivers hither and yon.

 

A friendship developed, and Francis invited Skelton to drive a stock car at Daytona Beach during Speed Week events in 1954. She drove fast, setting a new speed record of nearly 106 miles per hour. She found a new passion, which launched yet another chapter in her whirlwind career.

 

After a stint as an automotive test driver, Skelton landed a job in 1956 as an advertising executive with the Campbell Ewald agency in Detroit, Mich. She was assigned to the General Motors account. Soon thereafter, Skelton emerged as the official spokesperson for Chevrolet. She also raced Corvettes.

 

Skelton became known as “The First Lady of Firsts,” a tribute to her accomplishments in aviation, auto racing, astronautics and advertising.

In 1959, Skelton was the first woman to undergo NASA’s physical and psychological tests, identical to those given to the Mercury Seven astronauts: M. Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John H. Glenn Jr., Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Walter Schirra, Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Donald K. “Deke” Slayton.

 

Sources say Skelton “met and charmed the astronauts with her personality, then impressed them with her pilot skills.” She was featured on the cover of Look magazine in February 1960.

The Mercury astronauts signed a photograph that they presented to Skelton along with a personalized message: “To Betty Skelton, who is number eight in our book, with warmest regards….”

 

Kurt Ernst of Hemmings.com wrote: “NASA was decades away from considering the possibility of a female astronaut, but Skelton would turn her relationship with NASA and its astronauts into marketing gold for Chevrolet. Skelton was one of the driving forces behind the program that put astronauts in late model Corvettes.”

“Ed Cole, president of General Motors, teamed with Jim Rathmann Chevrolet of Melbourne, Fla., to offer the astronauts a special Chevrolet leasing plan in which they were given the use of any Chevrolet automobile for a year at the nominal cost of $1.”

Clayton Seams, an automotive media specialist, said that Jim Rathmann (shown below) was an accomplished race car driver who won the Indianapolis 500 in 1960 and was the runner-up three other times.

 

“The astronauts would frequent his dealership (located south of Cape Canaveral) for cars or tuning, and in the process got to know him and his prodigious driving abilities,” Seams wrote.

Six of the Mercury Seven jumped at the opportunity and chose Corvettes. The odd duck was John Glenn, who used the lease deal to take home “a ho-hum station wagon for his family,” Seams wrote. “The others ribbed him constantly for his lack of automotive chutzpah.”

Corvette piled up a ton of publicity. The brand scored again in 1969 when Apollo 12 crew members Pete Conrad, Alan Bean and Dick Gordon received identical gold and black Corvettes that were painted to match their lunar module spacecraft.

 

For the rest of her life, Betty Skelton drove a Chevrolet “courtesy car” – a shiny red Corvette.