People · Betty Skelton · Chapter 9 of 9

Legacy

Later years

Skelton's professional records eventually stop accumulating, the way any career's must, but her instinct for going fast never really leaves her. She marries Donald Frankman, and the two of them eventually reacquire Little Stinker — the Pitts Special that made her famous in the first place — and in 1985 donate the airplane to the Smithsonian. It is restored and mounted inverted, exactly as she flew her signature routine, and remains on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center to this day — a fitting way for the plane to hang, for a pilot who spent her most famous maneuver upside down.

Skelton cares for Frankman through his final years until his death in 2001. In 2005 she marries Dr. Allan Erde, a retired Navy surgeon, and the two settle in The Villages, Florida — a sprawling retirement community built around golf carts more than automobiles. It is, on the surface, an unlikely final chapter for the fastest woman on wheels. In practice, well into her eighties, Skelton is still driving a Corvette convertible through the neighborhood, in a shade of red that, by more than one account, matched her hair almost exactly.

August 31, 2011

Betty Skelton dies at eighty-five, in the Florida community she'd chosen to spend her last years in — a fitting final address for a woman born within earshot of a naval airfield, who spent her entire life finding out exactly how fast a human being could go, in the air and on the ground alike.

Three world championships. Seventeen records, by the careful count — hundreds, by the generous one. A biplane in the Smithsonian, hanging upside down on purpose.

Her place in Corvette history is, in the end, narrower than Zora Arkus-Duntov's three-decade engineering war, or Harley Earl's role in willing the car into existence, or Bill Mitchell's two defining production shapes. She never held a Chevrolet engineering title, never sat in a design review, never fought a corporate racing ban from the inside. What she did was simpler and, in its own way, just as important: in February 1956, she put a car that General Motors' own accountants had nearly killed through its paces on national television and beat almost every man on the beach doing it — proof, at a moment the Corvette badly needed proof, that the car worked exactly as promised. Three men built the Corvette's engineering, its shape, and its ambition. Betty Skelton is the reason America believed it.