Crash Course

How Stunt Coordinator Terry James Punched, Tumbled And Kicked His Way Into Daytime.

- Devin Owens

While growing up in a small town in Ohio, Terry James was fascinated with action movies, but not for the plot, rather how many cars would be demolished. Thus began his daredevil ways. “As kids, we had bicycles, but I was always wrecking mine,” he chuckles. “I was 13 when I bought my first car for $35. It cost me more in transmission fluid to drive it because in 10 minutes, there was oil going all over the place. It was pretty wacky and that’s how I learned to drive.”

And then some. “When it snowed, I was the one taking the car into the parking lot of my dad’s grocery store and sliding all over the place just to have fun,” James recalls. “I did drifting before it became famous all over the world. Then I was driving my dad’s semi and, at 16, I got my pilot’s license.”

Channeling all that motor maneuvering into a career didn’t seem a viable option to James, who went off to college in Cheyenne, WY, where a medical emergency prompted him to change his life course. “I had to have my appendix taken out, which meant I had to leave school and go back to Ohio to stay with Mom and Dad,” he explains. “I was going to Kent State while I healed until my parents said I could go back to Wyoming. I said, ‘You know what? I’m not going back.’ I started working with my dad again.” In the meantime, annual trips to visit family in California laid the groundwork for an alternate destiny. “My uncle had a church in Topanga called Chapel in the Canyon,” he says. “So, that’s how I got to meet Roy Rogers’s son, Dusty, and he was the one who told me, ‘You should be a stuntman.’ ”