Transportation Women’s Hall of Fame inducts its first members
Car care expert and national TV personality Lauren Fix is no stranger to accolades, but Friday she was given the Cadillac of honors during a ceremony in the Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum.
The Clarence resident and five other trailblazing women were inducted into the National Transportation Women’s Hall of Fame, a first-ever event arranged by museum founder James T. Sandoro. The Pierce-Arrow Museum, which is in the process of being expanded from its current 20,000 square feet to a campus of buildings totaling 80,000 square feet, has been featuring an exhibit on “women and the automobile” since 2002.
“We’ve had busloads of women from Syracuse, from Cleveland and other places coming here,” noted Sandoro, prior to the induction ceremony.
“I started to look into it and investigate with them: Did anyone honor just women in transportation? I went to all the women’s groups around the country. They said no, and said it would be a great reason to come Buffalo. So, hopefully, we’re going to do major conventions with women’s groups all around our museum theme,” Sandoro said.
To help boost that effort, Sandoro created the National Transportation Women’s Hall of Fame and selected Fix for a top berth in that first-time honor.
“Why not kick it off with a Buffalo gal who is well known around the country?” Sandoro said.
A posthumous inductee was Alice Ramsey, the first woman to drive an automobile cross- country, from New York to San Francisco, in 1909.
The other inductees were Emily Anderson of Seattle, who, this year, retraced Ramsey’s trip in a 1909 Maxwell; Donna Luh of Depew, a state Thruway Authority board member; Mary Martino of Buffalo, a member of the Automobile Association of America board; and Marguerite Hambleton of Williamsville, president and chief executive officer of AAA Western & Central New York.
Fix, a professional race car driver and award-winning author with a background in marketing, said she has always been passionate about cars. There are niches for women in the very male-dominated automobile industry, she added, noting that the industry is aware that women have a disproportionate influence in the bulk of car purchases.
“The industry is so aware that women make the decisions that they want women designers and engineers. Some dealerships are paying bonuses to women who want to be service riders . . . which is talking to people [and] helping people,” Fix said.
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