Blue Eyes Still Open By the Mountain Home staff
A young Blossburg woman gives Academy Award winner Paul Newman a moment he’ll never forget.
The actor Paul Newman has accomplished many unforgettable things in life. Winner of an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Emmy Award as an actor and director. Founder a food company, Newman’s Own, that donates all its profits, more than $200 million so far, to charity. Legendary race-car driver. Leading man alongside Hollywood’s leading ladies.
But it was a young Blossburg woman who gave him a moment he can’t forget.
It happened at Watkins Glen International. Newman is a legendary race car driver, and enjoys Watkins Glen. He has competed regularly since the early 1970s, and won four amateur national championships. At age seventy, at the Daytona International Speedway, he became the oldest driver to be part of a winning team in a major sanctioned race.
This May, at age eighty-two, he announced his retirement from acting, saying he was getting too old for it. But he’s not too old to go 185 miles an hour. In July he competed at Watkins Glen, driving a Chevy Corvette in one of the fastest classes in his trademark car number 82 – denoting his age – with his trademark initials, PLN (Paul Leonard Newman) scripted above the door. “His competitors are amazed at how quick he is at his age,” his crew chief, Bill Lloyd, told The (Williamsport) Star-Gazette. “He’s an inspiration for a lot of drivers, both young and old.”
A young Blossburg woman working as an intern at The Glen a few years back was less impressed. She was walking along when someone introduced her to a tall, silver-haired man with piercing blue eyes. We have it on excellent source that the encounter went something like this:
“I’d like you to meet Paul Newman.”
“Noooo!” the woman gushed with the you-can’t-fool-me enthusiasm of the young. “You’re not Paul Newman! He’s dead!”
Whether Newman’s lantern jaw reddened with an intensity that matched his blue eyes we’re not sure, but we do know he has a sense of humor. Every year since at The Glen, he approaches the young woman and says, “I’m still alive.”
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