A little grandmotherly advice from Lucille Treganowan:
Apply a light coating of petroleum jelly to your battery terminals to avoid corrosion buildup.
She may look like the kind of person who would ask about burping and diapering. But what you see in Treganowan is not what you get.
You see a 66-year-old woman with upswept white hair who could be a kindly librarian; you get someone who fixes transmissions like a teenager with a cigarette pack rolled under a T-shirt sleeve.
She became a local celebrity in Pittsburgh in 1973 when she opened her own auto repair shop with a name worthy of a beauty parlor–Transmissions by Lucille.
She become a national celebrity two years ago when she got her own weekly national cable TV show on Home & Garden Television–it opens with the strains of “Little Old Lady from Pasadena”–and a growing body of press clippings began introducing the public to the unlikely and irresistible story of the single-mother-turned-grease-monkey.
Now the owner of two Transmissions by Lucille shops in her hometown of Pittsburgh, Treganowan has written a book, “Lucille’s Car Care” (Hyperion, $19.95), in which she explains cars in English so that owners can be better car-repair consumers. She also gives such idiosyncratic advice as how to use an old scarf to help temporarily repair a split radiator hose.
She writes a biweekly car column for a Microsoft Network on-line magazine for women called UnderWire and is a national spokeswoman for Jiffy Lube.
And she drives fast, her current record being 120 miles per hour on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in a ’74 Oldsmobile Toronado. She is so experienced a speeder, in fact, that she advised notorious leadfoot David Letterman when she appeared on his show to avoid tickets by limiting speed-limit violations to the 6 a.m. state trooper shift change.
“I’ve ridden with her, and you think, `Wow, this is like being in a video game,’ ” said Gina Catanzarite, co-author of “Lucille’s Car Care” and producer of the cable TV show “Lucille’s Car Care Clinic.”
She has a longstanding affection for muscle cars, having driven her children around Pittsburgh when they were young in a 1966 burgundy GTO.
“I still enjoy a good high-performance car,” Treganowan acknowledged during a recent trip to Chicago to plan a clinic she will teach for Jiffy Lube in the spring.
The juxtaposition of Treganowan’s appearance with her reality helped her engage in some sneaky drag racing back when she owned her GTO.
Would-be challengers would look over and see a nice mom out with her kiddies. Then the light would change, and they would see dust.
“She is an instant double-take,” Catanzarite said. “She’s like this 15-year-old muscle-car fanatic who just happens to be channeling through the body of a 66-year-old woman with a beehive.”
But Treganowan is more than an incongruity, Catanzarite said.
“The first thing people think is that she’s going to be a gimmick, Ruth Buzzi in overalls, shooting transmission fluid out of a soda bottle,” she said.
“But they find out she’s the real thing. This is a woman who works in the industry and has done so for 40 years. She did it before there was a women’s liberation movement. She did it when it was hard.”
It all began when her marriage ended. Left to support three children, ages 5, 3 and 18 months, Treganowan took what she intended to be a temporary job as a part-time bookkeeper in an auto-repair shop.
Frustrated at being unable to answer customers’ questions about their repairs, she began studying car manuals, “just so I could at least sound intelligent,” she put it.
Then the car bug bit. “I got fascinated with cars,” she said. “I would go into the shop and look at what the mechanics were doing, and I would be reading the manuals. It was an ideal learning situation.”
Transmissions, in particular, sang to her. “Transmissions, I think, are the most fascinating parts of cars,” she said. “You can take a transmission apart and everything is working properly, then put it back together and it still doesn’t work.”
Figuring out a tough transmission problem, she said, is “like playing a really, really hard game of Nintendo, where you keep getting where you want to get, and then–oh, my God!”
The men in the shop thought her interest was adorable. The fact that no one took her seriously, she said, made it easier for her to break into auto repair then than it would be today.
“That was back in the ’60s. It was such a novelty. No one was threatened,” she said. “It was kind of like sneaking in the back door.
“The owner of the company . . . told me if I was a man, he would not teach me all this because I would open up a shop and compete with him.
“Famous last words,” she said, grinning.
She became an expert diagnostician and in 1962 started teaching Powder Puff Mechanics classes to women at night. She was moved out of the office and into the shop, where she directed repairs and explained them to customers.
Not that all customers wanted her explanations.
“Sometimes there would be people who wouldn’t want to talk to me because I was a woman,” she said. “In the beginning, I reacted to that by, `You’ll talk to me, or else.’ “
She backed off, she said, after a car dealer, piqued that she had argued with him over how many times a particular car shifted, refused to sell her auto parts.
She had been right about the car, she said, but it had cost her a parts supplier. The incident “made me realize I might be a little bit obnoxious,” she said. “You can win the argument and lose the account. As I became more confident, I realized how stupid it was to lose a customer.”
Which is not to say that Treganowan could be trifled with. A Pittsburgh repair shop is unlikely to forget the time she came in to retrieve a hydraulic jack.
She had taken the jack in for a minor repair, recalled her son, Kip Treganowan, 39, now his mother’s shop foreman. But when she was quoted an outrageous estimate, she smelled a rat and told them she wanted the jack back.
“They said, `It’s too late; you can’t get it,’ ” he said. “So I went with her and we stormed into the place.” She demanded the jack; they threatened to call the police.
“She actually picked up a crowbar,” he said. “She wasn’t going to hit anybody, but I’m saying, `Oh, my God–that’s my mother!’ ” The police forced the shop to return the jack.
“When she believes something’s right, she’ll stand behind it,” Kip Treganowan said.
The shop’s owner made her a partner. But Treganowan envisioned a spotless, professional shop where customers would be educated on the workings of their cars, and they had differences.
Her partner, she said, had two stock responses to her suggestions:
1) This is the way we’ve always done things.
2) We know better because we’re men.
“I didn’t believe either of them,” she said, and opened her own shop with the help of the first Small Business Administration loan given to a woman in western Pennsylvania.
Treganowan’s two sons and daughter grew accustomed to being introduced as the offspring of “that transmission lady.”
“The boys were really happy with it,” Treganowan said. “I was the most popular mother, because I drove a GTO.”
But her daughter, she said, was dismayed to find that her teenage dates were sometimes more interested in talking with her mom than with her.
“They would come to the house, talk cars and that was that,” Treganowan said, sighing. Her daughter soon soured on car-crazy boys. “She tended to date hippies,” Treganowan said.
She recalls teaching her daughter the facts of life about men and cars in a McDonald’s parking lot.
“We noticed that some young men were staring at us,” Treganowan said. “My daughter, who is very pretty, said, `They’re looking at me.’ I said, `No, they’re looking at the GTO.’ Then I went in and asked them.
“They were looking at the GTO.”
But when it comes to car-repair expertise, there are far fewer differences between men and women than there used to be, Treganowan said.
“When I first got into it, boys grew up with their fathers teaching them; they grew up knowing how to change tires,” she said. “Now nobody does repair work at home. Nobody could, with many of these new cars.”
One major difference between the sexes remains, she said: The car repair equivalent of Asking for Directions.
“Women don’t mind if you know they don’t know something,” she said. “Men won’t ask. Because of that, women tend to be better consumers.”
She advises women not to be afraid to learn about their cars–and to beware of men who think they can repair cars, but really can’t. When her own car once broke down on a highway, she had to turn away countless would-be Samaritans who wanted to try to fix it despite her assurances that she knew it needed to be towed to a shop.
“Everyone wants to grab wires and be the hero,” she said. “In the end, I just shut the hood and got in the car and waited.
“I mean, you hate to be rude. But just because it’s a man doesn’t mean he knows how to fix your car.”
– TV SHOW
Treganowan’s cable TV show appears weekly on Home & Garden Television.
– COMMERCIAL
In Treganowan’s recent Jiffy Lube commercial, she tells viewers the most important thing to do for their car.
– ON-LINE
Writing for UnderWire on-line magazine, Treganowan offers many quick tips about cars.
– BOOK
Treganowan uses plain English to teach motorists about car repair.
