Education
McCluggage spent her childhood in Kansas and then graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Mills College in Oakland, California.
McCluggage spent her childhood in Kansas and then graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Mills College in Oakland, California.
McCluggage was a pioneer of equality for women in the United States., both in motorsports and in journalism. She began her career as a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle. 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.
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. 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.
lieutenant 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.
Her weekly syndicated column called "Drive, She Said" appeared in some 90 newspapers across the United States. and Canada.
McCluggage 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. She also wrote “Are You a ‘Woman Driver?’” and "The Centered Skier".