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Sunday
Jul282013

An Unforgettable Meeting

Like a large portion of kids who grew up in the Detroit area in the 1950s and '60s, I seem to have come out of the womb already fascinated by cars. I have clear memories of the two-toned black and white '55 Chevy my parents drove, and I can still recall the night when my Dad surprised my kitchen-apron-wearing Mom with a new metallic silver '57 Chevy station wagon. By 1964 I was going to the huge Detroit auto shows, collecting shopping bags full of new car brochures while goggling at the slinkily-dressed models draping themselves langorously all over new Buicks, Fords, and Chryslers. I then pored over the brochures for hours at a time back at home, admiring the photography, illustration, and type used in the layouts. My obsession with cars took new and expanded form as I began building model car kits, and soon I had subscriptions to Road & Track, Motor Trend, and Car and Driver magazines.

The magazines exposed me to the world of auto racing and exotic vehicles not made in Detroit, and for a brief period I harbored secret fantasies of being a Formula One driver like my then-heroes Jim Clark and Dan Gurney. It was while reading Car and Driver that I became familiar with the irreverent and frequently hilarious writings of one David E. Davis, Jr., a contributing editor at Car and Driver from 1962 until 1967.

In 1966, however, any thoughts of a more focused attention in automobiles quickly disappeared when a new interest appeared. Her name was Debbie, and from that point on cars took a poor second place to girls. I no longer made model cars, I stopped following Formula One results obsessively in the newspapers, and I let the magazine subscriptions lapse. For the most part I lost track of Davis, although he popped up in the news from time to time, such as in 1977 when Davis, by then editor and publisher of Car and Driver, moved the publication's editorial offices to Ann Arbor.

Fast forward an alarming number of years to 2009, when my good friend and design colleague Mike Savitski let me tag along on a visit to a secret garage in Ypsilanti that houses dozens of classic and very rare sports cars and vintage autos in varying stages of restoration and repair. The real reason for the visit was Mike's planned visit to one David E. Davis, Jr. At the time Mike was working with Davis on a book project about a private auto collection and its owner, and wanted to pay a courtesy call on Davis during our time at the garage. Luckily for us, Davis and his wife Jeannie were available, and they graciously consented to a visit. I was unceremoniously ushered into the presence of the guy whose writings on cars and racing had fired my imagination so many decades ago.

For the next hour or so, Mike and I were mesmerized by Davis's rambling, almost stream-of-consciousness torrent of stories, tales, and anecdotes about racing, famous drivers he knew, wine in France, the food in England, even his near-fatal 1955 accident that required extensive facial plastic surgery. Very early in our meeting I let him know of my childhood subscription to Car and Driver and my then-love for road racing in all its forms, and that seemed to pique his interest. Toward the end of our visit he pulled out gigantic albums into which he'd pasted articles, photos, and printed ephemera about the racing world during his career as an automotive journalist, and I instantly knew that these albums were incredible and irreplaceable historical documents of racing and automotive history. For a few brief minutes I pored over those albums with the same fascination that had consumed me when I was a 12-year old gazing at the sales brochure for the 1965 Buick Electra 225 or an issue of Car and Driver containing an article about Jim Clark's latest Formula One victory.

In a photo that shows his irreverent personality, a union suit-wearing Davis quaffs a beer in what appears to be a VW camper. The photo appeared in Automobile magazine's memorial photo gallery."Larger than life" may be a horribly over-used term, but it applied perfectly to Davis. I knew from reading articles about his stewardship of Automobile magazine in the late 1980s and '90s that he could be irascible and cantankerous, but those traits did not appear during our meeting with him. Just like I found his writings to be in 1965, Davis in the flesh was hilarious, irreverent, informative, opinionated, and as entertaining as any person I've ever met. After our meeting with Davis and Jeannie was over, I wandered outside into the brilliant September sunlight and photographed a gorgeous 1959 Cadillac parked in a rear lot of the facility. I then put together a graphic and editorial homage to Davis in the form of a bogus magazine cover (above), but I never sent it on to him. If I had, he surely would have excoriated my graphic combination of the Car and Driver name with the famous ornate ampersand that Road & Track has used in various forms in its masthead for almost 60 years.

Fast forward two more years, and Davis was suddenly gone; in March of 2011, he passed unexpectedly following surgery. In September of that year, Mike and I again visited the secret garage in Ypsilanti, and a large banner hanging from the ceiling trusses proclaimed the phrase that Davis was said to have desired for his coat of arms, if he had one: "No More Bullshit."

To this day, I regret that I didn't have the opportunity to spend more time being regaled with his stories of Brands Hatch, Nurburgring, Sterling Moss, Graham Hill, and Dan Gurney, and Juan Manuel Fangio.

 

 

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