Joan Newton Cuneo

Joan Cuneo was the last of four daughters born to Leila Vulte and John Carter Newton in Holyoke, Massachusetts. By the standards of the time, John Newton, a self-made millionaire, treated Cuneo more like a son than a daughter. He allowed her to drive a steam train and a six horse team. She became an expert horsewoman and bicyclist. As Cuneo grew older, her parents sent her to several boarding schools, reportedly to become a Victorian lady.[3]

In 1898, Cuneo married Andrew Cuneo, the adopted son of millionaire banker Antonio Cuneo. The couple had two children, Antonio and Maddalena, in the first three years of their marriage. In 1902, their relationship began to change when Andrew Cuneo bought his wife a 1902 Locomobile. Cuneo soon became interested in racing.[2][4]

Excited to participate in the 1905 Glidden, Cuneo and three passengers, her husband, Andrew, her mechanic, Louis Disbrow, and his sister, set off in her 1905 White. At least four other Whites were entered in the tour, including one driven by Walther White, the president of the company. Cuneo was enjoying the first day's drive when she saw the car in front of her, inexplicably stop and start to back-up at the entrance to a narrow bridge. There were no brake lights in 1905. Cuneo tried to evade the car but there was little room to maneuver; the wheels of the White ran off the bridge, and the car and its passengers fell off the bridge and landed in the stream bed below. The White was a sturdy machine and started up after it was righted by nearby spectators and workmen. Its passengers suffered only bruises and were unfazed by their experience. Cuneo was able to drive her car up out of the ditch and the foursome continued on their way. However, the battered White eventually gave out on the final day of the tour despite repairs by a local blacksmith. Cuneo's accident, however, made headlines throughout the Northeast and would actually launch her career as a racer.[7][8][9]

Shortly after the Cuneos got back to their Long Island home, several newspapers contacted Joan Cuneo and encouraged her to enter a competition being held on the beach at Atlantic City, NJ. She immediately shipped her car to the beach and came in second in a one-mile race on Labor Day weekend. She knew she could do better and jumped at the chance to race at the Duchess County Fair held at Poughkeepsie NY later that month. This was her first attempt at track racing, as she said later, "I had my first experience at track racing...it was a case of love at first sight and my love for track racing grew each time I drove around one." It was here that she met Barney Oldfield for the first time. Her experience at Poughkeepsie was somewhat frustrating. She was disappointed with her slow time of 1:22:5 for an exhibition mile to set a new women's record, and she was unable to finish the 5-mile handicap race she had entered (competing against male drivers) as she had car trouble. Ironically, after fixing the car, she was arrested for speeding on the way home.[10]

In 1905, many male drivers, including Barney Oldfield and Ralph De Palma drew crowds at local tracks when they attempted to set a new speed record for one, five, or even ten miles. Cuneo was often limited to exhibition runs because of her sex but she also gained fame by setting a number of speed records. Unlike Dorothy Levitt, her British contemporary who drove factory prepared cars, Joan always drove her own personal cars, although they were stripped down to the bare essentials for racing. After women were banned from racing, several of her male competitors trusted her to drive their race cars in order to set yet another women's speed record. In 1906, she would continue to hone her skills at a variety of tracks, usually one-half to one mile flat dirt ovals, used for horse-racing. There were no purpose-built automobile race tracks until the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was completed in 1909, both in attempts at speed records and in competition. She also competed in popular amateur automobile events called gymkhanas. These were obstacle course events for cars instead of horses. Drivers had to drive around and over obstacles and inclines, sometimes in reverse. At the Danbury Fair in 1906, Cuneo was driving full speed in a gymkhana with two women passengers when the car caught on fire. The passengers bailed out the back of the car but she calmly shut off the engine and turned off the gas before jumping out. Although she suffered painful burns and singed hair, she shrugged off the event as nothing unusual.[11]

Cuneo had become an experienced driver who could muscle a car without power steering and minimal suspension and brakes on the horrible roads of the time as well as rough dirt tracks. IN 1907, she finished third in a hundred-mile race in a time of two hours and 23 minutes; no mean feat for an any woman in a brass age car. Many who interviewed her were surprised to meet a small woman with a steady gaze and low voice instead of a powerful Amazon.[12] As she gained skill as a driver, she also was more involved in the care and maintenance of her cars. Cuneo believed that in the years since she had learned to drive, autos had improved mechanically, and the main problem now was blow-outs. The tires of that era had little resemblance to those of today; all had a tube as well as an outer casing and were time-consuming to change. It would take many years before tires caught up to mechanical improvements. Cuneo also longed for a self-starter. As she said, "It took both knack and strength and one can tell only by one's automobile sense whether more knack or more strength is needed at the precise moment[13]."

In the summer of 1908, Cuneo reached the high point both of her racing career and celebrity. She completed the 1908 Glidden Tour with a perfect score, set more speed records and had her entry accepted for a number of races to be held at the New Orleans Fair Grounds track in February 1909. The promoters of these races hoped to add one or two women's events to create additional publicity. What they didn't realize was that Cuneo intended to enter almost all the races, including those supposed to be for males only. When the time came, they did not forbid her to race, perhaps because no other women showed up to compete against her. As a result, during the course of the three-day event, she defeated some of the leading male racers including Bob Burman and George Robertson, and finished second to Ralph De Palma in a fifty-mile race. De Palma was the best racer of the day. The resulting flurry of news articles trumpeting her success came just as the Contest Board of the American Automobile Association had decided to ban women from any competition they sanctioned, including the Glidden Tours. Although she was furious, there was little she could do. The men of the Contest Board, most of whom she knew well, turned her away whenever she tried to enter an AAA event. Although never a vocal proponent of women's rights, Cuneo felt strongly that women should be allowed to compete if they had the ability and desire, and she had already demonstrated that she had plenty of both. Although she thought of taking the Contest Board to court, she realized it would be futile as its male officials had closed ranks against her.

Alice H. Ramsey and Joan N. Cuneo, from a 1909 publication.

After the new rules went into effect, Cuneo still competed in events that were not sanctioned by the AAA, and set several "unofficial" women's speed records. She wrote articles on motoring for magazines and was a valued spokesperson for the Good Roads movement as well as orphans' charities in New York. However, she would never again have the opportunity to do what she wanted most: compete against the best male drivers of the time. The years of opportunity had slipped by; she was close to forty. However, she still loved fast driving and collected the speeding tickets to prove it.[14]

Her glamorous life in New York slowly ground to a halt as Andrew Cuneo's bank and businesses came close to failure. In 1915 her marriage ended in divorce due to Andrew's scandalous involvement with a showgirl. By 1916, she no longer made the national news, and in 1917, she and her daughter Dolly moved to the Deerfield Valley of Vermont that she loved. In 1923, she followed her childhood sweetheart James Francis Sickman to Ontonagon, a small town in the upper peninsula of Michigan where she lived until her death in 1935. She eventually married Sickman and was heavily involved in improving the lives of Ontonagon's residents. Cuneo's obituary in the Ontonagon newspaper did not mention her racing career and her death merited only a brief paragraph in the New York Times.[15]

Cuneo was undoubtedly the most experienced female racer in the United States between 1905 and 1910. She had the respect of her male rivals who often let her drive their race cars, after women were excluded from racing. She remained an important spokesperson for women drivers and better roads for a decade. Although her determination to race against all comers, no doubt hastened the exclusion of women from organized racing, the men of the sanctioning body and the auto manufacturers of the day were willing to exclude women in order to save the sport which was considered by many as too dangerous to continue.[2]