The Beauty And The Beast: NDRA Super Street Class 1927 Ford Model T
“Pro teen” Mendy Fry and her 8-second Rocket Roadster Ride.
Santa Rosa, California, May 24, 1969: A screaming little girl is born to Ron and Marilyn Fry. Her name is Mendy. Later known as “the kid” around Sears Point Raceway, the Fry’s home track, Mendy grew up jumping rope in many California racetrack pits—and strapping her teddy bears in the seat of friends’ race cars.
By the time she was four years old she was kicking up dust at the local oval tracks in a Quarter-Midget built by her dad. She probably would have done well in left-turn racing, but she just wanted to be a kid at the time, so she asked her dad to park the car after two years of fun.
Mendy and car owner Tom Boswell take a casual Sunday morning drive during the recent West Coast Nationals.
At the age when a girl’s life usually revolves around boys, telephones, and’TeenMagazine, Mendy preferred the atmosphere of her dad’s race car construction shop (Fry Racing in Rohnert Park, California) and reading about the flashy hot rods featured in car magazines.
She developed an early skill for hammering sheetmetal, and turned her artistic talents into fabricating aluminum auto body panels rather than sewing or knitting.
Mendy does her own between-rounds maintenance.
While attending junior high school, Mendy took a home economics class, but quickly substituted it for two metal shop courses and an auto mechanics class. At Santa Rosa High School she continued taking auto mechanics classes and became a teacher’s aid in her senior year.
She also enrolled in an Advanced Auto Technology course, gaining knowledge she later applied to working at her dad’s shop after school, and for tuning her own 1966 SS 396 Chevelle. While Mendy’s skills may indicate a “tomboy” image, she prefers to think of herself as a young lady with automotive talents.
Mendy owns 48 percent of Fry Racing and is responsible for all sheetmetal work.
During earlier years, Mendy had been appointed official family test pilot for all Fry-built, four-wheel ATVs. However, nothing meant more to Mendy than turning 16—that coming of age that meant drivingrealcars. She got her first drag racing experience within days of her 16th birthday when she entered her dad’s dualie shop truck at a local bracket race during an extended grocery run!
After rapidly perfecting her driving skills with her Chevelle, which runs 11.47/117 mph, she immediately graduated to Amos Beard’s Fry-built, B-Econo dragster, then to her own B/ED, and later Dave Frei’s gas dragster.
