Yahoo Autos David E. Davis Jr.: Good Friends, Hot Cars. And the Industry's Productive Past
Bill Neale’s illustration of his own replica Shelby Mustang GT350 is reproduced on this page, in a color close to the Terlingua Racing Team hue Carroll Shelby used to call “Godawful Yellow.”
Bill’s paintings and illustrations have made him famous, and I’m proud that he’s been willing to call me his friend through countless adventures going back to the earliest Sixties. The reference above to “antique military aircraft” was lifted from one of his mailers for the Terlingua Chili Cook-Off.
That may have been the chili cook-off where I was introduced to somebody’s cousins by marriage who were pulling a smallish Airstream trailer with a new Pontiac Catalina. They were good ol’ boys, and I was delighted to have a bed where strange drunks couldn’t barf on me. Late that night, they were told of a house of ill repute across the border in nearby Ojinaga, Mexico. As I slept in the Airstream, they unhooked the Pontiac and disappeared into the night. I awoke the next morning with a plane to catch. Since they were nowhere to be found, I started hitchhiking toward Midland, Texas.
I met Bill Neale through Carroll Shelby. We have hunted and camped together everywhere from the Texas Big Bend Country to Ontario’s duck flyways ever since. Cars and Carroll Shelby and Carroll’s adventures with organ transplants and marriages are the glue that holds our friendship together.
Now there’s a rumor skittering around the corridors at the Ford Motor Company, to wit: The latest Ford Focus and Fiesta are turning out to be paragons of automotive virtue, and management has expressed interest in a pocket rocket based on the next Focus or Fiesta platform. There’s a growing belief that the startling performance that is standard equipment in any Shelby Mustang is also lurking in a properly breathed-upon Shelby Focus. The potential for Shelby to create a latter-day GLH (“Goes Like Hell”) based on his experience doing a similar car for Chrysler in 1982 is a given. I love the idea, and I can’t wait to drive the prototype. I hope they do one in Terlingua livery.
When the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor projected the United States sled-length into World War II, President Roosevelt immediately looked to the nation’s automobile industry to change over from automobiles to military hardware more or less overnight. For instance, an Oldsmobile plant in Lansing, Michigan, went from Oldsmobiles to artillery within months of our declaration of war. Remarkable transformations like this were overseen by senior automotive executives whose contributions to the war effort were universally acknowledged at the time and are still recognized today.
Paradoxically, President Roosevelt’s passionately progressive wife, Eleanor, did whatever she could to keep the nation’s industrialists out of these wartime activities, fearing, I guess, that the Roosevelt New Deal might be contaminated by contact with “those people” in Detroit or Pittsburgh or Los Angeles.
One imagines New Deal production commissars and workers’ committees overseeing production of the thousands and thousands of Dodge and Chevrolet trucks that provided mobility for Allied armies all over the world.
Now we’ve had a latter-day taste of how the government will run our automobile industry, with the rise and ignominious fall of the so-called “car czar,” Mr. Steven Rattner. He fired GM chairman Rick Wagoner and created a place at the trough for the United Auto Workers union as a member of GM’s management. The UAW got one board seat and picked analyst Steve Girsky, already a Wagoner advisor, to champion their interests on the board. Rattner did not have much to do with the selection; Girsky turns out to be a very able vice-chairman at GM. Rattner wrote a book, Overhaul, in which he expressed contempt for every living soul with a southeastern Michigan ZIP Code. Then he got caught running a scam on New York state’s vast multi-gazillion-dollar Common Retirement Fund.
He would be a very poor choice to oversee your IRA, and there are no sex scenes in his stupid book.
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