Ride of Your Life
A Race Car Driver's Journey
By Lyn St. James
HYPERION
Copyright © 2002 Lyn St. James.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-7868-6866-X
Chapter One
Drive the Course
You're Given
Unlike racing, life isn't run on a predetermined course, and you aren't given a map of all the bumps and turns along the way. My life certainly didn't follow any predestined track. I can't remember a time when I developed any grand strategy to become a race car driver. Neither of my parents worked in racing, and aside from the occasional teenage drag race, we had no racing history or culture. We were a working-class family (my father worked in a family-owned sheet metal business) in the small Cleveland suburb of Willoughby, Ohio, and I, like millions of other little girls, was a child of the baby boom.
As young Evelyn Cornwall growing up in the '50s and '60s in Middle America, I never lay awake at night dreaming of one day revving my engine and racing my way around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. I was far too shy to consider such things, and even if I'd had those kinds of dreams, sharing them with anyone would have been laugh-out-loud embarrassing. Women didn't drive race cars. Women didn't even set foot inside the garages, at least not at Indy. Gasoline Alley was for men only. Women weren't even allowed inside the garage compound. That rule raised a few eyebrows in the early '50s when a wealthy woman named Bessie Lee Paoli fielded a car in the 500-mile race and became the first team owner in history to be forced to watch her car from the grandstands. Actress Barbara Stanwyck of The Big Valley fame also elevated the acrimony when she appeared in the movie To Please a Lady with Clark Gable. In the film, Gable, an Indy car driver, is seen chatting with Stanwyck in the garage area. This sent racing traditionalists into a tizzy. Movie or not, women, including Dame Barbara Stanwyck, weren't allowed in Gasoline Alley, period. Officials at the Speedway later admitted that Stanwyck hadn't actually been in the restricted area. The film's director had cut a hole in the fence to create the illusion of Stanwyck in the garage compound when, in fact, her feet never crossed the neutral zone. For many years I never thought mine would, either.
Mom loved to drive, and she would spend hours telling me how a car talks to you; gives you warnings and signals when things aren't right and gives you positive feedback when things are running well. She taught me to drive in the summer of my fifteenth year, but she taught me more than the rudimentary mechanics of driving; she taught me how to listen to a car and how to identify the sounds and smells it gives you. Mom was also stricken with polio when she was young, so she had to take a car everywhere she went, and once I was old enough to drive, she let me chauffeur her around Willoughby.
When I was seventeen, we set out for Indianapolis to watch the Indy 500 with a guy named Dave Froman and several of his buddies from the local Amoco station. Mom was a frequent customer of the station, and I had worked there part-time growing up, but the trip was more of a guy thing. Mom went along as a chaperone so I could go to the race with the guys.
It was the Saturday before Memorial Day, 1966, and we got into town early. A trip to Indianapolis was a big deal, especially for a wide-eyed seventeen-year-old girl who didn't make friends easily. When we pulled onto Sixteenth Street and approached the Speedway, I got my first taste of the largest spectator-sporting event in the world, and I was both thrilled and a little frightened. If you've never seen 400,000 people migrating to one location at one time, it's a sight you'll never forget. Hordes of people as far as I could see lined the streets, slowly funneling their way through the track gates. Hippies, commonplace in California in the '60s but a rarer sight than Halley's Comet in Willoughby, camped out on the curbs and carried their coolers and bedrolls into the infield while Ma and Pa Midwesterner stared and shook their heads in disgust. I felt like the whole world was awakening before my eyes.
Mom stayed in one of the small houses adjacent to the track while I ventured to the track with my friends. Saturday morning was the drivers' meeting, a final gathering of the drivers before Sunday's big race, and the guys and I crowded the fences to catch a glimpse of those brave souls who would take the green flag. I was surprised by how small Mario Andretti looked in person, and I hoped to get a little closer so I could take full measure of his stature. But I was a girl, so I was forced to stay outside the fences at Gasoline Alley, even though my buddies had garage passes. They were able to get A. J. Foyt's autograph while I was forced to hang around outside, peering into this kingdom I couldn't visit. Only one driver, Mel Kenyon, came over to the fence to give me his autograph. Mel was a kind man who had been badly burned in an accident. I found myself staring at my shoes rather than looking at his disfigured facial features, a fact that disappointed me later in life. This man had been kind enough to trek out to the perimeter to give me his autograph, and I found it hard to look him in the eyes. It was a moment I would remember for a long time.
On Sunday, race day, we took our seats in the stands at Turn One, and I had a feeling of electricity like I'd never felt before, a rush of nerves and senses that would stick with me throughout the rest of my adolescence and well into adulthood. This was cool. When the drivers started their engines, the rumble rattled my entire being. This race, in this place, was the greatest spectacle I had ever seen. Even though I didn't set the goal of driving at Indy until years later, the dream crept into my noggin for the first time that day.
I also got my first taste of the hazards of auto racing. Moments after the green flag fell, Billy Foster's car spun out and hit the outside wall of Turn One less than 100 yards from where I was sitting. A. J. Foyt then plowed into Billy's car, and nine other cars followed. Wheels and suspension parts flew through the air like leaves in a storm, and I found myself dodging and wincing, even though nothing came close to hitting me. A. J. scrambled out of his car and climbed the high-wheel fence directly in front of me, and other drivers did their best to get out of smoldering vehicles and run toward the infield. In those days race cars burned gasoline instead of the methanol we burn today, and with 75-gallon fuel cells, they were as flammable as tanker trucks. Drivers who could get out of their cars after a crash always did so as quickly as possible, and all eleven drivers in that crash scurried out of harm's way. I think I heard someone say something like, "Oh my God," during the ordeal, but I was too consumed with the drama on the track to pay much attention. This was Indy racing, and I was in love.
The first auto race I ever entered came later that same year at a drag strip in Elizabethtown, Indiana. I entered on a dare after being teased by some friends. Even though I won a trophy, my mother was not pleased. She informed me in no uncertain terms that I had made a tragic error, and that I would never do anything like that again. Ladies didn't race cars. Ladies wore dresses and makeup and played piano. I'd taken piano lessons for thirteen years and attended the St. Louis Institute of Music...
