Denise McCluggage

Denise McCluggage (January 20, 1927 – May 6, 2015) was an American auto racing driver, journalist, author and photographer. McCluggage was a pioneer of equality for women in the U.S., both in motorsports and in journalism.

McCluggage spent her childhood in Kansas and then graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Mills College in Oakland, California. She began her career as a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Auto racing

In San Francisco in the early 1950s, while covering a yacht race, she met Briggs Cunningham, who built the first American cars to race at Le Mans. She bought her first sports car, an MG TC Midget, and began racing at small club events. In 1954 she moved to New York to work at the New York Herald Tribune as a sports journalist. The MG was replaced with a Jaguar XK140; she began to race professionally, and earned the respect of her male counterparts. Her trademark was a white helmet with pink dots. Her racing achievements included winning the grand touring category at Sebring in a Ferrari 250 GT in 1961, and a class win in the Monte Carlo Rally in a Ford Falcon in 1964. She also participated in the 1000-km race at the Nürburgring. She drove Porsches, Maseratis, and other racing cars of many marques, often with another woman driver, Pinkie Rollo. She ended her racing career in the late 1960s.

Publishing

She helped launch the U.S. automotive magazine Competition Press, now AutoWeek. She wrote many columns for AutoWeek, and was a Senior Contributing Editor at AutoWeek until her death on May 6, 2015.

Skiing

In the mid-1950s, after a failed lobbying attempt to get the State of New York to develop a new ski area on Hunter Mountain, the original investor group contacted McCluggage, then a sports reporter at the New York Herald Tribune. They told her they had a mountain to give away to any developer who would build a ski area called "Hunter Mountain". McCluggage wrote an article that attracted the interest of a group of Broadway show-business people.

In 1977 McCluggage authored the book The Centered Skier, published by Vermont Crossroads Press owned by Constance Cappel and R. A. Montgomery. It mixed elements of sports psychology and Zen Buddhism highlighted by calligraphy by Al Huang. It became the foundation of approaches taken by the likes of the Sugarbush Ski School. On the PSIA reading list, the book had a resurgence when parabolic shaped skis were invented in the mid-1990s, putting carved turns, rather than skidded turns, within reach for recreational skiers.

Journalism

She held both the Ken W. Purdy Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism and the Dean Batchelor Lifetime Achievement Award. She was presented a lifetime achievement award by the IAMA and is the only journalist to have been inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame. Her weekly syndicated column called "Drive, She Said" appeared in some 90 newspapers across the U.S. and Canada. She was the author of a number of books including The Centered Skier and By Brooks Too Broad for Leaping (a collection of pieces from AutoWeek). She wrote the text to accompany Tom Burnside's photographs for American Racing: Road Racing in the 50s and 60s.

Personal life

McCluggage was married for one year to actor Michael Conrad, perhaps best known for his portrayal of veteran cop Phil Esterhaus on Hill Street Blues.

McCluggage died May 6, 2015, aged 88.

External links

• Denise McCluggage at the Internet Movie Database
• Bio with sources from the Henry Ford Museum
• Denise McCluggage's web site
• Road & Travel Magazine article
• Denise McCluggage's cars
• Race Legends
• The Car Connection
• The Centered Skier
• Sugarbush Ski School
• Denise McCluggage at Beyond Butler