Cleo Chandler left a legacy for women in racing

Story and photos by Dale Wilson

Rodger and Kayla Isbell and their daughter, Kristy, had just begun their family vacation with a trip to the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, just down the highway a bit from their Leeds, Alabama home. Big NASCAR fans, they had worked their way around the various rooms in the museum when they came across a car they knew nothing about, a diminutive, demure 1965 Chevelle that said "Mom's Toy" on both sides of the doors.

They knew about Fireball Roberts' Pontiac parked next to it, and Neil Bonnett's Monte Carlo on the other side, and a little bit about Stan Barrett's Budweiser jet car, the one that ran 700-plus mph on the salt flats, but they didn't know too much about this Chevelle sitting on the floor with the artificial flowers in the back and this lady who once raced it, Cleo Chandler. The Isbells, after all, were round-track fans, and this was a drag car.

Ed Chandler (photo below) was about to educate them. His mother, Cleo, a great-grandmother who passed away March 1, 2001 at the age of 84, raced the car.

Ed told the Isbells the story of how his mother, Cleo, then 68, was sitting in the stands at Sylacauga Dragway with him one Sunday afternoon and saw a racer screw up on his run. She calmly said, "Shoot, I can do better than that," and son Ed, listening, said to himself, "Okay, if it's that easy, let's see how you'll do in a racecar of your own."

And so that Christmas of 1985 Cleo was presented, complete with a pretty-tied bow, a Chevelle for her present. That Chevelle, one of Ed's bracket cars, and another built just for her, a '65 that ran I/ and J/Crate Motor Stock, took her to a win an IHRA national event and runner-up at two others, to honors for women in racing in Washington, D.C., and to races from Nebraska to Bristol to Aruba to Canada, and finally, in spirit and with her car, to the floors of the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in Talladega, Alabama, where Ed was now telling the Isbells about Mother Cleo's fabulous racing career.

Ed, 52, was the fourth and last born to Ross and Cleo (Cooper) Chandler, who lived in Anniston, Alabama not 10 minutes now from the motorsports museum and the sprawling NASCAR supertrack in Talladega. Ross was a mechanic who specialized in rebuilding starters and alternators, and Cleo was his wife. She had been a housewife all her life. Together, they had two girls and two boys. Although Ed's brother did a bit of street racing, it was Ed who belonged in drag racing. He started when he was but 16 years old, racing in everything from brackets to Stock Eliminator cars to those in IHRA's Super Rod and Top Sportsman classes. Ed has a small machine shop next to his mother and father's home that doubles as his own museum, and he lives with his wife, Kay, across the street. That Christmas of 1985 was when Cleo got her first Chevelle. She was a great-grandmother at the time, 68 years young. She had never been down a drag strip in her life.

"So we gave her the Chevelle," Ed remembered, "and she said, 'Now what am I going to do with that?' I told her, 'You said you could do better than so-and-so. Well, prove it.'"

So she set out to; she began racing. She got out in the driveway beside the house with the Chevelle and with Ed's coaching began doing burnouts. Ed says she wanted to halfway learn what she was doing before she started racing. The first race she went to, at nearby Green Valley Drag Strip in Gadsden, didn't portent to be anything worthy of note. Fact is, Cleo flunked her first test outright.

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