“If only they didn’t speak English,” a BBC US correspondent told us, “We could easily see America as a different country.” Denise McCluggage and Dan Gurney, treasured Americans, embodied the distinction. The only female racing driver in the Automotive Hall of Fame, founder editor of Competition Press, later Autoweek, lucid and funny, the last time I saw her was at Monterey in August 1996 when she gave me a copy of her last book, inscribing it, “Keep the revs up – and best of luck with the Clark book.”
She quoted AE Housman:: “With rue my heart is laden/ For golden friends I had/ For many a rose-lipped maiden/ And many a lightfoot lad. By brooks too broad for leaping/ The lightfoot boys are laid;/ The rose-lipt girls lie sleeping/ In fields where roses fade..”
Re-reading McCluggage’s book now I ynderstand more what she meant. I had read her colums for years in Road and Track, Car and Driver and elsewhere but maybe, after acquiring an American son-in-law, I now heard her in American. She wrote crisply and lightly, in phrases and with rhythms old-style writers of English don’t attain.. Once you listen to them, in American as it were, they take on shades of meaning and nuances you’d never grasped. American English has racy ways.
There is melancholy sometimes in her book – the Housman quote is a clue – yet she never falsl into the trap of drawing up lists of racing drivers who have died, as a means of parading her own prowess and survival, or even strength of character. McCluggage (1927-2015), pioneer of equality for women in both motor sport and journalism was born in El Dorado, Kansas, graduated from Mills College, Oakland, California and worked for the San Francisco Chronicle. Covering yacht races she met Briggs Cunningham, America’s Cup sportsman and car collector who took America to Le Mans. It led her to buy an MG TC.
How often an MG crops up in a motor racing Genesis.
Automotive Hall of Fame image, Denise McCluggage
McCluggage became sports writer on the New York Herald Tribune, raced professionally and most competitively in Jaguars and Ferraris yet she was so much more than a racing driver or chronicler. She described meeting Steve McQueen at Joe’s Luncheonette on West 4th Street, Greenwich Village, calling him a Village Hang-About, leaning against a newly-acquired MG TC, like hers. She knew about aspiring actors having been married to one (Michael Conrad) as well, as she puts it, also unmarriying him.
McCluggage had magnetism and astonishing fortune through people she knew. Dave Brubeck lived in a flat downstairs and practised on her piano. Ken Purdy, whom I came to know in London was motoring writer for Playboy and corresponded with her for years. Tragic talented Kenneth William Purdy (1913-1972); three times won Playboy’s annual award for his writing. I was given his Kings of the Road (Hutchinson 1955) for my 21st birthday, which led me to think I could write about cars.
Purdy died of a self-inflicted gunshot, yet among McCluggage’s distinctions was the Ken W Purdy award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism. “By Brooks…” would be a sad book but as Phil Hill writes in its introduction “Denise has stirred my memory and imagination. But it’s the people who really shine through her words. She brings the Rodriguez brothers, with their raw talent and undeniable charm, back to life…. Wolfgang von Trips, Soichiro Honda, she puts an enigmatic Masten Gregory in perspective. And who but Denise could recall my old friend Richie Ginther as being, ‘…built like a short stretch of barbed-wire fencing.’ “
https://dovepublishing.co.uk/titles
JIM CLARK: Tribute to a Champion by Eric Dymock
MG Classics by Eric Dymock. Model by Model, Books 1, 2 and 3