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"She leaves the starting line and goes about the same length as she was doing in the driveway and slams the brakes on," Chandler said. "Of course, she lost. She came back just a-grinning, like always. She said, 'Well, I won't do that no more. I've learned my lesson.' But later on, whenever she got to knowing what she was doing, she'd come back and be smiling, it didn't make no difference if she won or lost. She was happy. I told her, 'Mother, you're going to have to get mad if you're going to win.' 'Mad?' she said. 'If I'm going to have to get mad, I'll just quit, because I enjoy this too much to get mad about anything.' Even though she'd lose, she'd be happy. She enjoyed racing, and if she lost, there was always next week. She didn't look at it like I did. It was an enjoyment for her."

That first car, the '65 Chevelle, was one of Ed's old race cars that he ran in Stock in the 1970s, and he had converted it into a bracket car with a 350 engine and a Glide. Chandler put a slower motor in it for Cleo, and it would run mid 8s in the eighth-mile. He wanted to put mufflers on it, but his mother protested, saying. "Oh, no, I want it loud if I'm going to race it."

"And the faster I could get it to go, the better she liked it," Ed said.

Cleo was always doing things that Ed and the rest of her kids did. When he was boating, she'd get on the water with a tow-along surfboard and ride it. After the story broke in the Associated Press about this drag racing great-grandmom from Anniston, she told everybody that when she got tired of racing, she wanted to jump out of an airplane. "It didn't make her no difference," Ed recalls. "If her kids wanted to do something, she'd be right there with us doing it."

At Green Valley, Cleo won $1,000 racing on the footbrake, her first big racing payday. Even when Ed was gone across country to an IHRA race, she and her younger sister, Jessie Dunwell, would go off racing by themselves. Ed would load the Chevelle on the ramp truck and the two would head for Sylacauga or Green Valley and bracket race. Friends would unload the car for her.

In 1988, when entrepreneur Billy Meyer bought the IHRA, Ed decided to make his mom his partner. He put together a 12.90-class engine for her, and Cleo finished in the top 10 that year. A year later, Meyer sold IHRA and the sportsman classes went back to Stock and Super Stock and so on, and she began racing Stock.

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Ed found another '65 Chevelle at a local body shop and built it up with 10-inch tires underneath and a 327-250-horse motor under the hood that put the car in J/ and K/Stock Automatic. "I wanted her to go with me," Chandler says. "I had a 7.20-second/185-mph Top Sportsman small-block dragster, and me and Kay and mom would load up the 32-foot trailer and all three of us would go racing. Every weekend we'd go out, to Nebraska, Canada, Ohio, Tennesee, all over the Carolinas, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, just everywhere that IHRA went, we'd go."

And Cleo got good. In 1992 she won the Lunati Shootout at a race for the top 8 points leaders in Stock, and that paid $5,000. Seven others got $100 apiece, and she got the $5,000. "Nobody gave her nothing," Ed says. "One year she finished No. 2 in the nation, and that was a pretty doggone good goal for her to shoot for, No. 1."

Cleo Chandler got more than good. She got to be near-legendary. She won at the 1992 Darlington All-Pro Winter Nationals, and she got runner-up in 1992 at the Mid-America Nationals, and in 1993, she runner-upped at the NAPA World Nationals. Suddenly this little old lady from Anniston, Alabama was a contender in IHRA Stock Eliminator. She ended up on the "To Tell the Truth" TV show in California that year, and the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker show--not the Jim and Tammy Faye religious show, but another, a talk show, when Jim Bakker was in jail.

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