Denise McCluggage was born in El Dorado, KS on January 20, 1927.  She lived with her parents, Robert and Velma McCluggage, and two sisters at 214 South Taylor.

Attending Mills College in the San Francisco Bay area of California, she graduated in 1947 with a BA in philosophy, economics, and politics.  She began what was to become an amazingly successful career in journalism with the San Francisco Chronicle.

While working in San Francisco, Denise spent a lot of time with people who would later be termed “car people.”  Her friend, Barney Clark, introduced her to their special hang-out, an imported car dealership owned by Kjell Qvale.  It was there that she saw something that in her words, she “quite simply had to possess”: a black MG-TC.  This was the car that is most often credited with the introduction of the sports car to postwar America.  As Denise put it, it was “a loose roller skate of a car.”  Her parents back in Kansas advanced her $1795 to purchase the car, a sizable sum for the early 1950’s.

McCluggage’s first MG led to another.  With the rise of amateur sports car racing, it was just a matter of time before she ended up racing.  She had already been attending indoor sprint car events.  Moving to New York City about 1954 to take a position with the New York Herald-Tribune, she was racing a Jaguar XKK 140 MC just one year later

A gifted descriptive writer, McCluggage eventually moved to the sports department; at this time women sportswriters were rare.  With her adventurous spirit, she became known for actually doing whatever she wrote about, whether it be racing, skiing, or parachuting.

In her own words, “It could be said that what successes I have enjoyed were not because of any opportunities but because of the absence of them.  Women were rare on the city desks of newspapers then, and in sports departments, too.  So I chose the fringe sports, like skiing and auto racing.  And I was further unique in that I did what I wrote about.  That was not common then. I created my own niche.”

Also a talented photographer, Denise’s photographs have hung in museums and galleries across America, including the Peterson Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, CA.

After living in many parts of the United States and traveling around the world, McCluggage now makes her home in Santa Fe, NM.  She was once married to an actor but is now single.

Among those she has had close friendships with, many before they were well known, are actor Steve McQueen, and musicians Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and Cal Tjader.  “It’s been a smorgasbord sort of life,” she once chuckled.  “Maybe I’ll come back sometime and have a full-course dinner.”