Patti Wallace was sneaked into Orangeburg Tuesday evening on Jim Roquemore's private plane as a surprise to her husband, race car driver Rusty Wallace.

Wallace was in Orangeburg for his 10th annual engagement at the annual Boy Scout fund-raiser at Tourville Lodge. Last year, Wallace's appearance helped raise $100,000 for the local scouts.

Karen J. Williams of Orangeburg, a federal judge with the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, flew to Charlotte to accompany Mrs. Wallace back to Orangeburg and to "show her the town" before the Boys Scout supper. Williams says she's been a race car fan since she and her family went to the Concord Shootout in 1993.

The judge's husband, attorney Charles Williams, and Roquemore, owner of SuperSod of Orangeburg, have always helped sponsor the Boy Scout fund-raiser.

Judge Williams saw Rusty Wallace arriving at the Orangeburg Municipal Airport in his own plane and had to tell a little white lie about where she was going.

Wallace was on national news all day Tuesday after an incident in New York City.

"Sunday night, after the Darlington race on Saturday, Rusty had gone to New York with our daughter Kate," Mrs. Wallace related during an interview. "He filmed an ESPN show, and then 'The Tony Danza Show.'"

Danza, 54, and Wallace, 48, were filming a go-cart race on West 66th Street when the race car driver decided to give the actor, who was in the lead, a little "bump and run." Danza lost control of the go-cart, which flipped over.

"Rusty said after he bumped Tony, he hit a wall, and turned around and saw the other go-cart flipping over," she said. "He thought he had killed Tony Danza."

Meeting as teenagers

Patti Hall Wallace, a very attractive blonde with a constant smile, met Rusty Wallace when they were teenagers in St. Louis. She was 14 and he was 17, and her dad started helping him with his racing.

"I used to do his homework," she said. "Rusty started out racing motorcycles. His dad raced cars, and his brothers worked on them, but when he was 16, he wanted to race himself."

Wallace also worked at a vacuum repair store for awhile. In those days, Patti said, the drivers had to be mechanics too, and Rusty could build anything on a car except the engine. He told her recently that he can tell which drivers really know the mechanics of the car, and which ones just know how to drive.

Patti went along to the races back then and said she made a lot of sandwiches for the boys. Rusty has two younger brothers who also race.

Patti and Rusty Wallace married in 1980, when she was 21. In 1984, the couple moved to Greensboro, N.C., where they had their first two children, Greg and Katie. The couple then moved to High Point, to Charlotte, and finally to Concord, where they lived on a farm outside of town. They had a third child, Stephen.

"Every time we moved somewhere, we would have to explain to our friends about the race car life, and you can't explain it quickly," she said. "By the time they would learn it all, they would be hooked on it, and then we would move."

After four years of planning to build a bigger home, the couple decided recently to buy an existing home on Lake Norman near Davidson University.

Following the children

Greg Wallace, now 25 and obtaining a dual law/business degree at Wake Forest University, raced a little and decided, she said, that it was "an awful hard way to make a living."

Although Patti Wallace had never visited in Orangeburg, she said she drove through here in the past year to take her daughter, Katie, 20, to the College of Charleston. Katie recently transferred to Wake Forest to be closer to her family.

Stephen, now 17, has started racing in the Southern Division of the Hooters Pro Cup. The circuit races on paved track at some of the places where Rusty Wallace raced in his early career, she said, and Stephen loves the old school racing and reminiscing to his dad about those places, she said.

Her husband is at the races from Thursday through Sunday most weeks, Patti Wallace said, and makes frequent appearances on behalf of his sponsors on other days. If a driver wins, they have to stay over for media appearances and for the Tuesday night Motor Racing Network radio show.

"And now, instead of playing golf or something on Saturdays, Rusty watches the Busch races because he owns a car in it, and when he can, he goes to Stephen's races," she said.

"I go to about 28 of the 36 races each year," she said, "but some are too inconvenient because they might be somewhere like Arizona one weekend, California the next."

Mrs. Wallace tries to go to all of her son's races too. She says she has never worked but loves her home, her garden and her dogs. "If your husband is racing, the race track becomes your life," she said. "When you come home, you're washing clothes and packing to go again."

Life with Rusty

When it comes to home cooking, Rusty loves meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, apple pie, chocolate cake, just regular food, she said. "You can't give him sushi."

Patti says she is still amazed at the numbers of people involved in the race car business, and now companies have kitchens at the tracks and serve exquisite menus in mass quantity.

Although she is friends with other racers' wives, she said the men have to appear all over the place at the races and rarely do they get to go out with the others. "When we do, it is lots of fun."

Wherever the couple goes, she said, fans recognize Rusty, she said. Once they went to Hawaii, thinking there was less interest in racing there, but still five tourists recognized him. "People are pretty nice though," she said. "They at least wait till we're finished eating, usually, to ask for an autograph. And they are so excited, and apologize, saying, 'I'm sorry, but I know I'll never get this chance again.' And they probably wouldn't. So I don't mind."

Asked about women who make a play for her husband, she said, "I've probably seen it all, and more than making me mad, it just amazes me."

Patti recently gave her father a three-day package to the Concord Speedway and requested that he be allowed to drive Rusty's car, and he had his photograph taken in Victory Lane.

Judge Williams said she had done the same thing and got up to 145 mph, but decided that she didn't want to die on the Concord Speedway.

"That's how I feel on the back of Rusty's motorcycle," Patti smiled. "I told him I didn't want to die on I-77 that way."

Mrs. Wallace says although there have been frightening moments, she prefers to forget them and keep going. "My son, Stephen, had a really terrible wreck at Bristol last year," she said, "and it really rang his bell. Then he raced there two weeks later and won.

"I could tell when he was young that he wanted to be a race car driver. He wasn't afraid of anything, a bike, a go-cart; he would start out riding straight down a steep hill.

"I used to baby-sit Rusty's youngest brother, Kenny, when he was little, and Stephen is just like him," she said.

Wallace plans to retire this year, she said. "But he's still going to be really busy 'cause he wants to go to all the Busch races, where he has a car, and to all of Stephen's," she said. "He also hopes to be an announcer for Fox or NBC."

Going for a ride

Patti never wanted to race herself but said she once asked Wallace, when he was giving charity rides in Michigan, if he would take her on a ride. "The car was a Grand Prix," she said, "and he told me that after everyone else goes, you can go. He said, 'Now, at 130 miles an hour, the air conditioning will shut off and it might get hot. If a tire blows out, lean toward me.'

"I just laughed, because I thought he was teasing, but at 130 miles an hour, the air conditioning shut off and I was burning up and he was driving an inch from the wall and I naturally was leaning toward him.

"One time at the Richard Petty Driving School in Vegas, he said he would take me for a ride. The cars had restrictors on them and he could only go so fast. When we finished, I said, 'Next time could we spin it out?' He thought that was so funny."

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