We are lucky to live in this digital age and today we invite you to revisit an old friend we introduced back in 2012. Our picture shows Joan Newton Cuneo in 1911 at the wheel of her Pope Hummer (corr. 1911 Knox) with which she set the woman’s speed record of 111.5 MPH. This was after her previous successes had helped The American Automobile Association ban women from entering their events .
Even before her motoring career, Cuneo had displayed her spirit when she helped start the Ladies Four- in-Hand Club for driving a coach and four – a pastime not for the faint hearted! Men had their own Coaching Club open only to gentlemen.
The digital age has helped author Dr. Elsa A. Nystrom complete her painstaking research into today’s subject and publish the fruits of her four years’ labour in Mad for Speed - The Racing Life of Joan Newton Cuneo and it has also helped us receive a copy through the letterbox with an easy click of a mouse.
The book was published in 2013 and more pictures have emerged since our first story. This one is rare since it is the only ‘staged’ shot where Cuneo looks clean and posed as opposed to her usual business like images. You’ll like this one of her at the bench and here she is changing a tyre.
Surviving pictures often show our Friday lady wearing an elegant hat, but as Dr. Nystrom says in her comment on our original story, “ The hat came off and the goggles went on when she put the pedal to the metal.”
Text Robin Batchelor, picture courtesy Pettee Memorial Library / Wilmington Historical Society.