Pat Flannery Stephens – “Perky Patty” to folks in the auto racing world, including those at a crowded Kil-Kare Dragway Saturday – was laughing as she told that story and many more about her fairy-tale rise from an Ohio farm girl to the most ogled woman in all of racing.
And it was a Cinderella story, although instead of glass slippers she had worn a gold-and-black tuxedo jacket with tails, gold hot pants, black bowtie and a black top hat cocked jauntily on her head.
Instead of a pumpkin turned into a gold carriage to take her to the ball, she stood in three-inch heels on a small platform affixed above the trunk of a souped-up Pontiac Bonneville as she grabbed hold of a 9-foot-high knobbed, Hurst shifter mounted in front of her.
Smiling and posturing, she was then driven around the race tracks before the Daytona 500, Indianapolis 500, Bristol, Riverside, up Pikes Peak and onto the Bonneville Salt Flats, wherever the cheering crowds – and the cameras – gathered in 1965.
Pat Flannery (Stephens would come later) was the first Miss Hurst Golden Shifter. While the job was later popularized by buxom Linda Vaughn, Perky Patty was the one who pioneered the dolled-up spokesmodel concept for George Hurst’s famed line of performance parts.
And not only did she pave the way, she did it in glorious fashion.
When Car and Driver named its top 25 racing personalities of 1965, two women made the list, Pat and driver Shirley Muldowney, who would go on to win three Top Fuel dragster championships.
While Muldowney won admirers with her blistering speed, Pat did it with her charm.
“I was a little bit of a character – I still am – but I always tried to bring a little bit of class to what I did, too,” she said.
She hobnobbed with movie stars and musicians, appeared on Wide World of Sports and worked with several big-name drivers, including Hurst-backed Parnelli Jones and LeeRoy Yarbrough.
She also helped promote several specialty racing machines of the ’60s, including the Hemi Under Glass (a Plymouth Barracuda with a fuel-injected Chrysler Hemi engine placed under the Barracuda’s big rear window), Hurst’s Hairy Olds (a rubber-burning funny car with twin 425 engines, one in the front, one in the back) and the 32-foot, rocket-like Goldenrod (upon which she took out her lipstick and wrote 409.277 m.p.h. on the tail after it set a land speed record at Bonneville that would last 26 years.)
All that was back in the mid-1960s and between then and now she has had a wide world of experiences, good and bad.
Diagnosed with stage IV throat cancer in 1995 (“They told me then to get my affairs in order,” she said with a now-raspy voice and a smile), she beat the odds and now runs a small quarter horse farm and tack shop outside South Vienna.
Saturday, she appeared at Kil-Kare, which held its annual Gathering of the Geezers, a full-day event that included old-time drag races, a car show and a swap meet.
Patty is 73, and when asked, she said she stands 5-foot-2. “You want my other measurements, too?” she teased.
She wore a shimmering gold top, gold nails, sparkling gold eye shadow and gold rings but had replaced the hot pants with long black slacks and black boots.
Sitting next to her at the table were drag racing Hall of Famer “Ohio George” Montgomery and his son, Gregg.
“You need to talk to her,” Ohio George said as he looked over at her. “Now she’s got quite a tale.”
‘Perky Patty’ emerges
Friday afternoon she shared some of that story on her 14-acre spread, which is just three miles from the farm where she grew up.
She was wearing coral boots and jeans and once her chores were done, she – and Winston and Phoebe, her two Australian blue heeler herding dogs that follow her everywhere – took you on a pair of tours.
One was through her sprawling barn, where she stables six of her quarter horses and has an indoor riding arena.
“When I was 4, a man owed my dad some money and part of his payment ended up being a pony,” she said. “And this is what came of that. I just love horses.”
As for the second tour, that came when she laid a bulging scrapbook of her Golden Shifter days on a table on the deck behind her house.
For a long time the book had been “under wraps,” as she put it. The husband she was married to “for 12 years and one week” didn’t like hearing about that reign, she said, and threatened to destroy all the photos and clippings.
She divorced him long ago and last year – when some neighbors discovered her colorful past – she pulled the old book out again.
“You’d be amazed,” she said proudly. “This little book tells quite a story.”
It begins after she graduated from Northeastern High School in 1957 and finally landed a job at Mefford Ford in Springfield.
“Mefford sponsored Jack Bowsher on the ARCA circuit and he had won three championships in a row,” she said. “John Marcum, the head of ARCA, came to our dealership to thank Mefford and I ended up talking to him and all of a sudden he said, ‘I’ve been looking for a girl to be my promotion model for ARCA and go to the races.’ I told him I’d never been to an automobile race in my life, but he hired me anyway and I became Miss ARCA.”
She did that on weekends and continued with her Mefford job during the week. But that all changed when she went to Daytona for the ARCA 250. That’s when she met Hurst and he stole her away to promote his performance products.
She explained that Hurst – a big man who grew up street racing in Philadelphia – used to break the transmission shifts on his cars, so he built the sturdy model that became a staple in all muscle cars.
An engineering genius (he’d later develop the Jaws of Life rescue device), he also was a marketing whiz. He was trying to sell his products to testosterone-charged young males and he knew what else they liked: Good-looking young women.
He sold Pat on the idea of Miss Hurst Golden Shifter and then dubbed her Perky Patty.
“People say, ‘Did they call you Perky Patty because of your breasts,’” she laughed. “I tell ‘em, ‘Nope, it was my personality.’ ”
As she leafed through the scrapbook, she came upon pictures of her with Hollywood actors, the Monkee Micky Dolenz, drivers like A.J. Foyt and Art Arfons and photos from places like the Mexican Grand Prix, Hawaii, New York City and Miami Beach.
“Look at this one,” she said pointing to a photo of her standing on an airport tarmac with her Maltese, Irma, peeking out of her purse. “Paris Hilton thinks she discovered something , carrying her dog around. This was 1965.”
She laughed and shook her head: “Am I blowing your mind?”
New lease on life
“Best Wishes & Happy Shifting….Perky Pat Flannery Stephens.”
That’s how she signed photos of herself Saturday at Kil-Kare.
And over the years no one has shifted gears better than she. Originally the Miss Hurst job was supposed to be a one-year gig. So when she handed the throne to Vaughn – who would end up wearing the crown for some two decades — Pat went on to other projects for Hurst and also served as Miss Atco and Miss Vargo, drag strips in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
She spent 17 years running a copier supply company outside Philadelphia and when her marriage hit the rocks, she reconnected to Hurst, who had always remained on the fringes of her life.
“He was the love of my life,” she admitted.
But then in 1986, the 59-year-old Hurst died mysteriously in his car in California.
Heartbroken from afar, Pat eventually would leave Pennsylvania and return home, where her parents were aging. She bought her farm, started breeding and training quarter horses and selling Avon and Tupperware.
Although the devastating cancer would require radical surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, she said she is doing well now and with a new lease on life, she began to embrace some of those good times long past.
Last summer Ed Crowder, the special events promoter at Kil-Kare, convinced her to come out for the Geezers gathering and since then she had made some other appearances.
And it turns out she still has it.
“I went to Ed’s Christmas party this past year and I had this old guy come up and say, ‘Still datin’, Hon?’ ” she laughed. ‘”Now he was oooold!”
She declined that offer same as the one from the guy flashing half a C-note.
When you’re Cinderella, you don’t have to settle for pumpkins.
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