Hardin: Lynda Petty, wife of Richard Petty, dies at 72 (2024)

She was the queen of the greatest racing family of all time, a racing mom who ran the house while the King was away.

And all of racing is in mourning today. Lynda Petty, the wife of Richard Petty, died Tuesday at the age of 72.

Petty battled central nervous system lymphoma beginning in 2010, and her health declined through a series of strokes.

She was like family to so many people in and around the little towns of Level Cross and Randleman, a homecoming queen, a cheerleader and a member of the Future Homemakers of America at Randleman High, where my mom taught. Everyone in Randleman knew her and knew the story of Richard Petty and Lynda Owens. Their story isn’t about NASCAR or 200 victories or the great highs and lows she enjoyed and endured, but a simple story of two kids who met and made a life together.

They had one of the wildest rides two kids could imagine.

They began to date when she was still in high school. Richard would drive up in a car with no passenger seat, which she put up with for a while before telling him in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t getting back in that car until he figured out a way for her to sit in it.

The next time he showed up at the school, he had a tire where the passenger seat used to be. And a rope for a seat belt.

“We saw every movie there was,” she said a few years ago, telling the story of the little Rand Theater in downtown Randleman. “That was about all we did. We drove around a lot.”

That was what all teenagers did in those days. And that’s what Richard and Lynda did until one day they just disappeared.

No one really knows the whole story, but folks in Randleman have heard bits and pieces. Sometime in 1959, they eloped.

“I don’t know their anniversary,” son Kyle once told me. “Nobody does.”

They had to keep it a secret. Lynda’s parents, and some teachers, too, for that matter, weren’t all that fond of Richard Petty.

But what a tale. They would have four children: Kyle, Sharon, Lisa and Rebecca. And they were raised by Lynda, along with various cousins and friends and people in racing who would become household names.

Their little house out on Branson Mill Road, where Richard’s parents once lived, became a destination for fans and friends and family. I spent summers there. My grandma, Mozelle Hardin, would watch the Petty kids when Lynda would go to a race here and there. Sometimes, they’d take my grandma with them.

I still cherish pictures and letters from race tracks with Grandma Hardin in victory lane right alongside the entire Petty family.

“We were family,” Kyle said when he and his son Adam brought food to my grandma’s memorial service at Mount Lebanon United Methodist Church in Randleman. Outside the church is a plaque Lynda had placed there. It has the names of departed relatives in the Petty and Owens family, and people who became part of their extended family.

My grandmother’s name is on that plaque.

Lynda was the sweetest lady I’ve ever met, a beautiful person whose life wasn’t all bright lights and fast cars. She lost her brother in racing, and she lost her grandson.

After the funeral for Adam Petty in 2000, she walked up to me and hugged me as we cried.

“I miss your grandmother so much,” she said. “I don’t know when all this will end.”

It ended on a Tuesday with her family at her side. It ended only days before the Sprint Cup stops in Martinsville, where the Petty clan all would load up in that old station wagon all those years ago and head up 220, egg sandwiches packed in brown paper bags, my grandma in the back, headed to the racetrack up the road.

Lynda Petty once told me that people from Randleman were special and never to forget that.

She was special to everyone she met. She was more than the wife of Richard Petty. She was a mom and a homemaker in the untamed world of stock-car racing. She was a saint, and no one from Randleman or Level Cross or anywhere else she went ever will forget her.