BY SUE SMYSER, Staff Writer

Few people would ever guess this petite woman with a winning smile would be classed as a daredevil.

But history tells a different story. In the 1930s and early '40s, Betty Hutton wowed the crowd as part of a five-woman thrill show. Young and with no family, she said she enjoyed traveling from fair to fair and state to state, where she rode in a motordrome thrill show.

In the motordrome show, daredevils rode motorcycles on a vertical circular wall. Although some riders perform tricks and acrobatics while on the wall, she never did.

Still, the possibility to be injured is real enough. In her quest to master the wall, she recalled a couple of whopping-big "owies."

"I got a concussion once and rubbed some skin off my hip while I was doing that (riding cycles in the motordrome)."

Hutton, now Betty Jeffries, will be 92 in June and lives in Mattoon. Her father died when she was 18 months old and she lost her mother when she was a teen-ager. After her family moved from Indiana to Charleston, she worked as a waitress. Because of the type of work she did, she said her leg muscles were solid.

"One day my best and lifelong friend, Dottie, came by to tell me what she wanted to do."

The year was 1934 and Dottie was going to drive a car to Chicago to see the World's Fair and learn how to ride a motorcycle. The two young women agreed to go together and left in her friend's car.

"That was the first time I ever saw a motordrome show."

They both learned to ride motorcycles, but Jeffries returned home and her friend met and married a man named Oscar Bloom. And this is where the story begins.

"Oscar got in a poker game in St. Louis with a man who ran out of money."

He paid his debt to Bloom by giving him three carnival rides. Armed with a Tilt-a-Whirl, merry go-round and Ferris Wheel, Bloom built a business, adding a Merry Mix Up ride and wax museum. Then he got the idea to have a thrill show with women motorcycle riders.

Dottie's Sensational Thrill Show was the end product and featured female motorcycle riders who climbed the wall electrifying spectators. Jeffries was in her mid-20s when she began riding in the show. The girls dressed alike in corduroy pants and caps.

Jeffries worked with fellow riders Bloom and her sister, Ruth Cooper; Virginia Mays; Jean Delaney; and a girl from Mexico nicknamed "Chiquita." Another friend in the circle was Betty French, whose father was the "barker" and announced the show.

"Riding up that wall was a funny feeling and scary at first," she said. "But once you got on the wall it looked like you were on a road going straight."

She said the girls started up the wall on a small start track, then moved to a slanted wall that was a little bit wider, then on to a more angled area and finally to the straight wall. The mechanics took the bikes apart and removed everything possible that was heavy to make the bikes as light as they could.

Her bike was an Indian Chief and she loved it.

"But it had a suicide clutch. You had to push it down easy, never with your heel," she said.

"One day my bike kept dying. The mechanic couldn't get it to stay running. I was mad," she said. "I stomped the clutch and when I did it took off and went straight up. We both came down. I got a concussion and woke up in the hospital."

She said her friend Dottie told the girls, "If you know you're gonna fall, let go and you fall on the bike. Don't let the bike fall on you."

That's what she did, when she ended up with a concussion.

By 1942 rubber for tires was hard to come by because of World War II and they could only find retread tires. When Mr. Bloom died, Mrs. Bloom sold the show, and Jeffries gave up the thrill of riding and went back to her old job.

"I went back to being a waitress. I worked at Woolworth's Dime Store behind the lunch counter and at Knowles Cafeteria," she said, adding that many old acquaintances and former diner customers still recognize her.

But the memories of her days as a daredevil have stayed with her, and she said she would do it all over again if she had the chance.

"I still like motorcycles."

Had she not been part of the traveling show, she said she would never have seen the Catskill Mountains or New York. She remembered the New York State fairground as beautiful. She also met Roy Rogers and his horse and the Sons of the Pioneers, a group of Western singers, while they were all appearing in Little Rock, Ark.

"It (the sport) was healthy. I was healthy. I was never sick," she said.

"And I saw so many beautiful things. I've been from Arkansas to New York. I got to see a lot of the U.S. of A."

Contact Sue Smyser at ssmyser@jg-tc.com or 238-6864.

Published on Thursday, May 29, 2003 12:21 PM CDT
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