More than once, my mother said she would like her gravestone carved with, “She knew how to spell the names of people she hadn’t met.” It was a newspaper thing, funny to people in the news business but a mystery to most outsiders. She was a newspaper person through and through.
As a feisty young Jewish woman from New Jersey, Helen S. Rattray had become the editor and publisher of The Star after her first husband, Everett Rattray, died in 1980 at the age of 47. Whether she had been quite as fiery before Ev’s death, with three children and a newspaper to run, she coped well enough and ran things around the paper with an iron fist.
One thing about Helen was that she had always liked big cars. They made her feel safer, she said, but I remember wondering if it also was because of her height, not too much above five feet one inch. She bought used cars, ones that had a story.
One was a yellowish Cadillac with a white roof that I discovered could hit 100 on the Napeague stretch. That was followed by a Buick, dark blue and massive, that my father said looked like it could have belonged to Richard Nixon’s White House cook. Its origins were more prosaic than that, but with a 370-horsepower engine under an acre of hood it was formidable. Mom was a heck of a sight driving down Main Street swallowed up within its vast interior. Some years later, some college buddies of mine and my brother drove the big, blue beast of a car to Pensacola, Fla., for spring break.
In my recollection — wrong, probably — eight of us fit into the thing.
This all ended when she changed her mind about cars entirely. I am not sure now if it had to do with fuel economy or the environment, but one day in the late 1970s she came home with a diminutive red Honda. She loved that car and loved driving it. She’d tear out of the Star driveway, defying traffic to make a left and burning rubber all over town with a grin.
It wasn’t too long after the Honda arrived that one of us kids started calling her Hell on Wheels, or Helen Wheels, which she thought was a hoot. Hell on Wheels was inevitably shortened to Wheels and took the place of “Mom” in most circumstances, mostly, but not entirely about the car.
Wheels died early yesterday, fittingly, on a Wednesday, which is production day at The Star. Wednesdays were when she really showed her mettle, towering — figuratively, anyway — over the newsroom. She gave that up a few years ago and turned the editor’s chair over to me but kept on with the small cars. Now she’s gone, but the nickname she loved remains. Speed on, Hell on Wheels, speed on.