Yahoo Autos Side Glances: Friends for Life
SO ROAD & TRACK IS TURNING 70 THIS SUMMER.
Well, that’s a little scary.
I’ve been around for three of these decade-ending anniversaries, and I have to say, I’m beginning to greet them with mixed emotions.
Why?
Well, because this magazine and I are almost the same age. Which, of course, means that in a few months, Barb is going to have to drive into town and buy more birthday candles. My last cake looked like a wildfire burning out of control in a national park, and if the next one puts out any more heat, I’ll be able to weld with it.
Truth be told, R&T arrived in this world just a bit earlier than I did. It hit the streets in June of 1947 when two Long Island sports-car enthusiasts named Wilfred H. Brehaut Jr. and Joseph S. Fennessy put the first issue together. Shortly thereafter, it was acquired by John and Elaine Bond, who built it into a national publication.
But I myself did not appear until eight months after that first issue, in faraway Saint Paul, Minnesota. My parents - who were not sports-car enthusiasts - took me home from the hospital in a maroon Kaiser-Frazer. R&T was not to be found on our living room coffee table, so I didn’t actually discover this magazine until I was 13. Nevertheless, I can remember that day quite vividly.
On a hot summer afternoon in 1961, I found myself ambling down the main street of Elroy, Wisconsin (pop. 1503), on my way to the birthday party of my pal and fellow car buff Brad Shrake. We were both big fans of Indy and midget racing, but neither of us knew much (i.e., anything) about European sports-car racing or Formula 1.
As I walked along the street in my neatly ironed plaid shirt, some nonbarbaric voice from my preteen past (my mom’s, no doubt) told me I should probably show up at the party with some type of gift, so I ducked inside the air-conditioned comfort of Lawrence’s Drug Store for a look at the car magazines. Then, as now, I found it easiest to ponder gifts for others when they were objects that I myself would want.
And there on the magazine rack were the August 1961 editions of two car magazines I’d never seen before. One was Sports Car Graphic, and the other was Road & Track.
Friendly druggist Ken Lawrence explained to me that a college kid named Chris Jepson had suggested he add these two titles to his magazine roster. This made sense, because Chris was a very cool guy who owned an MG TD, so I bought both magazines - 50 cents each - and went to the party.
When I got there, Brad was, as I recall, in the midst of a manic table-tennis game with some other kids, so I sat down in the corner and began to read the magazines.
I flopped one of them open and was immediately confronted with a photo of Phil Hill and Richie Ginther in their purposeful 156 Sharknose Ferraris, chasing Stirling Moss’s gossamer Lotus 18 through the streets of Monaco.
I looked at the beauty of those cars, beheld the curb-lined streets of Monaco, the palm trees, and the sunlit harbor, and suddenly a strange electrical current ran through my scalp. The whole scene was infused with an aura of danger and glamour unlike anything I’d ever seen. I was, as they say, a goner.
I left Brad’s party later, flying on a mixture of birthday-cake frosting, caffeine-laden Sun Drop, and blinding new inspiration. On the way home, I stopped again at the drug store and blew the rest of my week’s lawn-mowing income on my own copies of both magazines. Little did I know that I was about to make a whole bunch of new friends. For life.
When I got home, I read these magazines over and over, as only the young zealot of a new religion can. I pored over cut-away drawings of new cars, memorized entire F1 grids, and assailed my poor parents at the breakfast table with so much racing esoterica, I’m sure they couldn’t decide whether to weep or just strangle me.
Naturally, I wasn’t smart enough to leave these magazines in one piece, and I immediately started snipping pictures and articles out and pasting them in my auto-racing scrapbook, writing captions in my childish scrawl, which has not improved with time.
I still have the two cheap, spiral-bound auto-racing scrapbooks I kept in junior high (dug them out of a storage trunk yesterday), and you can see the moment when sports cars and European racing arrived. On one page is a Saturday Evening Post article about Indy hopeful Eddie Sachs titled “Racing’s Haunted Driver.” Flip forward a page and there’s that Monaco street scene. After that, F1 and sports cars predominate.
It didn’t take me long to notice who was writing and illustrating all this stuff, and the names on the masthead of R&T became as familiar to me as the starting roster of the Milwaukee Braves had been a few years earlier. John and Elaine Bond, Henry N. Manney III, Dean Batchelor, Dave Black, William A. Motta, James T. Crow, Tony Hogg, and Gordon H. Jennings were all suddenly part of my world. And still are. Through the miracle of generational overlap, I eventually got to know all these people - mostly World War II veterans energized by that generation’s optimism and good-to-be-alive spirit. I think Tom Brokaw named them right.
Probably my favorite all-time R&T photo, the cover shot of our January 1962 issue, was taken by European correspondent Henry Manney III. It’s a close-up, beautifully composed cockpit shot of Phil Hill, our new American Formula 1 world champion, behind the wheel of his Ferrari 156. I carefully trimmed this cover off with a razor blade, framed it, and put it up on the wall of my bedroom one cold winter night when I was in eighth grade.
About 30 years later, Phil signed this picture for me while we were working together on a story for R&T, and it’s hanging in my workshop now. Fate also arranged for me to become good friends with the photographer, Manney, who is also one of my favorite writers. That I would ever have had the chance to work with these two remarkable gentlemen still seems a kind of unlikely fantasy. More so now that they’re gone.
In a similar twist of unreality, Barb and I became good friends with Innes Ireland, former Scottish paratrooper, former Team Lotus F1 driver, and R&T’s then F1 correspondent. Innes used to stay at our house when visiting the magazine’s old California offices. Whenever he came, we would make dinner and stock up on his favorite scotch, the Famous Grouse.
One evening, we were sipping scotch and discussing his last season driving for Colin Chapman, 1961, when Barb mentioned that I had an old scrapbook from that very season. Innes insisted on seeing it and opened to a full-page photo of himself, winning the USGP at the Glen. “Oh my,” he said quietly. He then proceeded to page through the scrapbook and tell us the stories behind the photos. I stared into my glass of Famous Grouse and wondered at the strange ways of the world.
Since then, writing for this magazine has given me the opportunity to do interviews and stories with quite a few of my racing heroes - Dan Gurney, Mario Andretti, Stirling Moss, the Unsers, Jim Hall, Denny Hulme, and other legends. All this while working daily at an office filled with some of the finest people I’ve ever known.
When you’re almost the same age as Road & Track - the biblical three-score years and ten - you sometimes look back at a life filled with all the usual ups and downs, cloudy days, occasional illness, loss and disappointment, and try to pick out those few moments of outrageous good fortune, when the weather vane suddenly swung in your direction and put life on a better track.
Those moments for me would include meeting Barb, being given my first full-time journalism job at Cycle World in 1980 by R&T alumnus (and now friend and mentor) Allan Girdler, and, three years later, being asked by editor John Dinkel to work at R&T (upstairs in the same building) when Allan was about to retire.
And, of course, being invited to Brad Shrake’s birthday party. My mom was right: Always bring a gift.
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