They Called Me Boxcar Betty
How I grew into and beyond my nickname
“Boxcar Betty!” my uncle Jeffy called from my grandparents’ pool while I roller-skated around it. “She’s a jammer! She’s the queeeeen of the roller derby!” he sang, echoing the Leon Russell song blasting from the speaker perched outside his room above the garage.
From that day forward, I was Boxcar, or Box, to my uncles and my dad. My father never used my given name again.
I was seven, and it was 1972 in northern California—the peak of the roller derby craze. The skates I’d wanted for Christmas were the white leather lace-ups worn by the “Blond Bomber” Joanie Weston and “Demon of the Derby” Ann Calvello. I’d seen them jam around the rink for the San Francisco Bay Bombers on KTVU.
What I’d gotten instead were Steven Super Skates, the metal-wheeled slip-ons worn by ten-year-old Jodie Foster in Kansas City Bomber, the derby movie starring Raquel Welch as her single mom, K.C. Bomber Carr. But I didn’t want to be a kid like Rita; I wanted to be K.C.—tough and sexy.
The women in my mom’s Italian-French family were magnetic, bossy, and smart, but I wanted to be more like the men. Being Boxcar brought me closer to the boys club of my dad (Ben the Rat) and uncles Jeffy (Wolf), and Marc (Dr. Science).
They made adventures out of a drunken run to the county dump; drove, and sometimes crashed, their motorcycles and convertibles; and hunted deer, duck, and abalone, barbecuing their prizes on the grill by the pool. They drank Hamm’s and PBR during the day and red wine at night, telling stories of their capers around the fire pit.
In my teens, Boxcar presented her fake ID confidently at bars. She had her twenty-first-birthday party at the strip club owned by the Mitchell brothers, her dad’s famous pornographer friends. Boxcar went on to be a confident and cool foreign correspondent, interviewing Italian politicians, activists, and priests. She was sexy too.
As I matured, however, Boxcar started to block me. She was great at rough talk and writing about city politics but clammed up when it came to vulnerability and feelings. She was fine with love affairs but skeptical of committed relationships and trust. A couple of weeks before my wedding, she got drunk and kissed her editor in front of her husband-to-be.
I woke up on the bathroom floor the next morning and faced off with Boxcar. It had taken me nearly thirty years to realize how I had boxed myself in with my own nickname. Something valuable was at stake and I wanted to see who I might become without her.
Boxcar never fully went away, but now she’s my champion rather than my saboteur. When one of my kids was severely ill, she hip-whipped me forward so I didn’t stop trying to heal my child. She got me to shore when I became panic-stricken while swimming from Alcatraz.
Even now, as I write, I can hear her yelling, “Go, Pia!”
A version of this story appeared in The Sun February 2026 issue in the Readers’ Write section on Nicknames. Support The Sun!
What a great nickname - and also, I can see why she had to take a back seat eventually!
And to think that all this time since you were a baby living on Castro St I’ve only ever called you Pia. It’s good to meet you Boxcar.