A name like Maude Yagle conjures up images of a gangsters’ moll, a telephone operator or a milliner in the 1920s. It’s certainly not a name one associates with auto racing.But she’s a woman you should know. If for nothing else but to amaze your friends.
In 1928, Mrs. Edward Yagle of Philadelphia purchased the rear-wheel-drive car formerly owned by Frank Lockhart, who was killed in a land-speed attempt at Daytona Beach, Fla., earlier that year. Yagle entered the car under the name M.A. Yagle, no doubt to avoid any criticism that a woman was invading the all-male world of auto racing.
But Ray Priest of Universal Service news service took notice and published a story under the headline “Goshalmighty! Now look where the women are horning in!” The story said the “weaker sex invades the speed game for no good reason at all, but it makes story.”
Maude got the last laugh.
Yagle hired Ray Keech as her driver of the Miller Simplex Piston Ring Special and raced throughout the season and won three of six races across the country. The car was entered in the 1928 Indianapolis 500, but mechanical failure put him in fourth place at the finish.
The Miller Simplex was entered in the 1929 Indianapolis 500 with Keech at the wheel. This time Keech won the race and earned Yagle the distinction of being the first and only woman to win the Indianapolis 500 as a car owner. Yagle managed all the details of her racing entry from the grandstands across from her pit, clocking her car and keeping a complete detailed record of its participation in the race. Yagle was never allowed in the garage or pit section of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Tragically, Keech was killed just two weeks later at the Altoona (Penn.) Speedway.
Yagle wasn’t the only woman to own a car that year. Marion Batten, the widow of racer Norman Batten — he died in the sinking of the SS Vestris passenger steamship in 1928 about 200 miles off Hampton Roads, Va., in the Atlantic Ocean — also entered a car in the 1929 race. Wesley Crawford was at the wheel. The car finished 15th, but Crawford had to be relieved by two other drivers.
Maude Yagle died in 1968 at the age of 83. Her obituary bears no mention of her place in history.