Loving Your Job, Even If It’s a Drag

There used to be this scene in MGM movies. The camera would pan in on the legs protruding from underneath a car. It would show blue jeans, maybe white socks, workman’s shoes. Then, the figure would wheel out from under the car and it would be someone in a baseball cap, medium height--and something familiar about that smile.

And, then, the hat would fall off, long hair would come tumbling and you would stare--son-of-a-gun! It’s Loretta Young!

Or, you would be going up in this gilt elevator in the offices of this rich and powerful tycoon. Everybody tiptoed around carefully and talked in whispers and looked scared for their jobs so you knew that this boss was tee-oh-you-gee-aitch. And then you went in the boss’ inner sanctum--and there behind the desk stood the boss, Rosalind Russell!

It was sure-fire romantic comedy. Jennifer Jones as a plumber. Doris Day as a telephone lineman. Betty Hutton whipping a mule train.

If you saw any of these early day emancipated women flicks, you would be ready to walk into the pits at the Chief Auto Parts Winternationals drag races at Pomona this week and think you had stumbled on a remake. There, looking for all the world like Doris Day with a dab of grease on her nose and a lug wrench in her hand would be Kim LaHaie.

Now, Kim LaHaie doesn’t look like any grease monkey you’ve ever seen. Kim LaHaie looks as if she got lost on her way to modeling school. Not even if you found her underneath a car would you mistake her for anything but a woman. Kim LaHaie could make Farrah Fawcett want to get her boyfriend home early.

So, what’s she doing with a wrench in her hand? Why isn’t she out lying on a yacht instead of across an engine?

Is it a gimmick? Well, look at it this way: She’s a dragstrip crew chief, and her driver won the national drag racing championship last year. He won five national events, he set the national record (5.17 seconds), he set elapsed-time records at five national events and speed records at two, and he set a world (FIA) record for elapsed time and speed. A.J. Foyt should have that kind of year.

Her driver is also her father. But when you get these kinds of performances out of a drag racer in today’s fiercely competitive conditions, you expect the chief mechanic to be some cigar-chewing, wire-bearded lug with a wrench who looks as if he were born under a car or with pliers for hands, and, if a woman such as Kim were in his pit, she would be on a calendar.

Kim looks as if she should be sitting helplessly in the front seat of a $50,000 Cad saying: “Tell me again what the big pedal is for?” Instead, if you saw her standing beside the engine of an 18-wheel semi with the cabin lifted and you stopped to help, Kim would tell you to shove off, “It’s only a fuel pump.”

The LaHaie family is drag racing’s royalty this year. It would not only make a great plot for a Doris Day remake, but it should please Gloria Steinem.

A fuel dragster is probably as complicated a piece of machinery as there is on a track today.

First of all, the engine is encased in this spindly chassis that makes it look like an automotive praying mantis or something you just took the roller skate wheels off. It gulps fuel like a rocket, 35 gallons a minute, at $35 a gallon, and, if you’re not careful, everything melts, including, sometimes, the driver.

It is Kim’s job to keep this thing from trying to hedge-hop or get airborne as it tools down the runway at speeds in excess of 280 m.p.h. It has to be stopped by parachute, otherwise it would be past two state lines before the brakes could work.

It’s dangerous. Kim’s dad, driver Dick LaHaie, had his hand torn off at the wrist in Gainesville, Ga., in 1975, and it had to be re-attached.

Nonetheless, Kim wants to be more than just Miss Goodwrench in the drag racing scene. She wants to be a driver, too. Like Shirley Muldowney, her heart is a wheel.

Kim LaHaie was only 14 when she was entering cross-country motorbike races.

Other girls were spinning records, she was spinning spokes, other girls in Michigan were going to dances with the boys, she was going to motocrosses and not with the boys, against them.

She came to California after high school but not to get into movies, to get into a water truck. She drove a beat-up 1952 model on construction sites, and it broke down so often, she spent more time in the engine than in the cab.

She decided if she was going to keep engines running, it might as well be on her father’s dragsters as on water wagons.

“I called her one time in California and she says, ‘Have you ever fixed a universal joint on a truck?’ ” Dick LaHaie recalls. “Another time she called me, she wanted to rebuild the carburetor on her Camaro. I told her by phone, and she did it in 20 minutes.”

When Kim first came back to the family racing team, many people thought it would be to sell T-shirts and pack the lunches.

But Kim, like her father, could never be around an internal combustion engine very long without yearning to improve it. “Kim would want to modify the family vacuum cleaner,” admits her proud father, and it wasn’t long before she was in grease up to the elbow, trying to bring a little creative engineering to the family business.

The LaHaies will be more than decorative as they wheel their dragster to the line in the Winternational drag races at the L.A. County Fairplex strip in Pomona this weekend. They will be the team to beat.

And even if they do, they can always sell the script to the movies. Kim would be the biggest breath of fresh air there since “A Touch Of Mink.”