By DON McCORMACK - donmac@suite224.net
Sports Editor
—
And to think, Terry Holcomb figured it was just another trek to the bank to deposit a few bucks and pay some bills.
Well, not so much.
“When I got to the counter, the lady working the counter, Shirley Harco, who used to work at (Raceway 7), said, ‘Are you Diane’s sister?,” she said. “When I answered yes, she said, ‘Well, your picture’s in the paper!’
“All I could think of was, what for?”
Terry was the “unidentified beauty” in the photo that ran with the feature story on Tom Johnson, which appeared in Friday’s edition of the Star Beacon in our most recent rendition of our “Hot Wheels” series.
Terry, who was Terry Jeffery at the time the photo was taken, instantly remembered the night the photograph was taken.
“I was 26 at the time and I had moved up here a year before,” she said. “I worked a few summers at the track and had a blast!
“My job was to work in the tower and I would call out the numbers of the cars in the order they passed the tower on each lap,” she said. “I was in my sister, Diane’s, ear all the time because she wrote the order of the cars down.”
And, the night the photograph was taken?
“They asked me to go down from the tower and present the trophy to Tom,” she said. “I really didn’t want to do it, but everyone encouraged me to go ahead, so I did.”
After her initial trepidation, she was glad she did.
“It was a lot of fun,” Holcomb said. “Plus, I always thought Tom was a real cutie!”
Now 61, Holcomb still lives in Conneaut. She has two grown children — 33-year-old Raina Showalter and 32-year-old Sonny Holcomb.
Told she was “a babe” as the photograph attests, she immediately blushes and pauses.
“Why, thank you!” she said through a laugh. “I have a few people who tell me I still don’t look too shabby, even at 61.”
Her memories spent at Raceway 7 do come with a twinge of sadness.
“Jerry Blystone was my sister, Diane’s, husband,” Holcomb said. “He was one of the owners of the track. That’s how I got my job there.
“He was killed in an automobile crash when the car he was driving was hit by a woman while on his way to work. He was big guy who really loved life and loved the time and effort he put into the track.
“We all miss him very much.”
Still, Holcomb remembers the summers she spent at Raceway 7 fondly. Seeing the photograph of herself and track legend Tom Johnson from days gone only reinforces that.
“We all had a ball working at the track,” she said. “After the races were done, we’d all go down to the pits and hang out with the drivers and their crews.
“It was just a great time.”
