This Ohio mom won races driving Corvettes. She left her deepest tracks on Hilton Head

Lines in the sand.

We know all about them on Hilton Head Island. They are here for a moment, then gone forever.

Danny Popp of Cincinnati drew lines in our sand last weekend, and I saw the picture he took of it to show his friends.

It was in a beloved place for him, in Shipyard, where his family used to come for vacation from Cincinnati.

But then that place on the ocean took on a much deeper meaning. It’s the spot that his father and his three siblings thought was the perfect final resting place for their mother, and wife.

“Judy loved the sea,” said Herb Popp, her husband.

Six years ago, Herb and his grown children came to Shipyard with Judy’s cremated remains. They searched out a place where they could be alone. It was about 7 in the evening. Then they waded into the Atlantic Ocean and placed their loved one’s remains in the churning, teeming life of the ocean.

Last week, Danny drew lines in the sand. First was a heart. Below that were the initials of his mom: Judith Wendell Popp. And under the JWP were the dates of her life, “4/10/41 - 10/21/2011.”

“Collectively, we decided the only logical thing to do was to put her to final rest in the place where she most frequently wanted to visit during vacations, the Shipyard Plantation on Hilton Head Island,” Danny explained on Facebook. “We put her remains into the ocean slightly over 6 years ago this month. From there on out, we are forever tied to this island.”

Visits to Hilton Head built a lot of memories for Danny — riding bikes and playing miniature golf and doing cannon balls in the swimming pool.

Herb, ever the engineer, remembers the fun of getting kites aloft in the sea breeze.

They remember eating out.

For Judy, it was the beach, the beach and more beach. She was an avid reader, and our beach can sometimes be confused for the library.

Herb said the whole vacation thing was in Judy’s hands. “I just went along and enjoyed it,” he said. “It was a classy place to go. It was very upgraded.”

Judy kept thick scrapbooks filled with family photographs. They would show her kids on Hilton Head, and later her kids and their kids on Hilton Head.

Herb, now 87 and hard of hearing, shouted into the phone from his home in Cincinnati that the real reason Judy loved Hilton Head was because it’s where the whole family came together. “The whole collection,” he called it.

Herb met Judy at the General Electric plant in Cincinnati. He was a mechanical engineer, working on aircraft engines. She was an engineer assistant and could have been more except for her habit of playing bridge in college, Herb said.

When they met, Herb was sporting a 1960 Corvette, black with red interior. On their dates, they went to his autocross races with the Cincinnati Corvette Club.

Judy quickly got behind the wheel and was a good Corvette racer. She even won a national championship in Daytona Beach, Florida. She did it in their 1965 Corvette, a four-speed with a 350-horsepower engine with 350 displacement.

“She was pregnant with Daniel, but we didn’t know that at the time,” Herb said, “till she got sick on the way home.”

Danny jokes today that he could have been conceived in a Corvette.

He raced in his mother’s womb and rode shotgun as a toddler with his dad. Now he races Corvettes in 30 or 40 amateur events per year. He is a seven-time Sports Car Club of America national champion, five-time National Auto Sport Association national champion and four-time winner of the Optima Ultimate Street Car Series championship (televised as “Optima’s Search for the Ultimate Street Car” on MAVTV on Friday nights).

For most of those races, he has commandeered his dad’s blue 1972 LT-1 Corvette.

His brother, Adam, sometimes races their father’s 1986 Stingray.

One of their sisters, Aimee, has a Corvette. She grew up to be a pathologist. Their sister Laura is a partner in a prestigious New York City law firm.

But they always shifted gears on Hilton Head.

Danny said he hadn’t been to Hilton Head in years, until his girlfriend suggested he was long overdue a vacation. His day job is Corvette technician at McCluskey Chevrolet in Cincinnati, and he has a business that helps people learn to race and set up race cars.

Herb said Judy supported all the kids in all their endeavors, mostly swimming. Danny said she was his biggest fan.

The first thing he did when he got here was find that special place on the beach.

“I sat and tried to be one with the mother we were not ready to lose and had a long cry,” he told his Facebook friends. “I love you, mom ... and you are missed every day.”

We are used to lines in the Hilton Head Island sand.

But are they really here for a moment, and then gone forever?

This story was originally published August 30, 2018 at 4:23 PM.