Maybe so, but not to devotees of “The Saint,” aka Simon Templar. “He was an Englishman, and a gentleman,” explained AQ editor Don Vorderman—”though one must admit a pretty rakish one. Of impeccable manners and dress, he was nonetheless superbly skilled in the dark arts of detection and self-defense. He was the James Bond of the 1930s.”

An AQ classic

I’m glad my friend appreciates this stuff—few are left who do—and am happy that he found a copy. It was one of our classic issues, if only for its Englishness.

After the Hirondel, we published a panel discussion on what was wrong with the British motor industry. It caused a furore in England. Bill Boddy, veddy traditional editor of MotorSport (an AQ contributor and accomplished historian of Brooklands) denounced us as Yank barbarians and mocked “a magazine featuring a car that never existed, a slapstick motor race, and an auto engine powered by soap bubbles.”

(The issue included a spread on a car engine with wind-driven vanes, stirring a bucket of soapy water, generating bubbles which, pricked by piston heads, drove the crankshaft. I dunno! It seemed like a fun idea at the time. And it was a British idea—from The Autocar.)

UK motor industry

The panel discussion was entitled, “What’s the Matter with England? Fine engineers muzzled by incompetent executives and a dismal labor force, among some other things.” It caused such an uproar that British Leyland Motors organized a press tour of all its factories to prove to us ignorant Americans that they really knew what they were doing.

… It was my  first trip out of the country, and Barbara and I fell in love with England (as it then was), particularly driving there—long before speed cameras. The quality of motoring was almost universally high. You could drive almost as fast as common sense suggested. You could pass on curves, for heaven’s sake! (“Reason is, we don’t have anything else,” said a British friend.) The car being overtaken would politely inch over, while oncoming drivers calmly moved likewise, giving you a lane. Provided  you seemed to look like you knew what you were doing (and not drunk), you were rarely arrested. (I do know Brits who are exceptional drivers even under the influence, such as…oh, never mind.)

Incidentally, and sadly, it turned out that our panel discussion was exactly right. As far as homegrown products went, the UK motor industry was almost kaput by the 1990s.

From AC to Mercer

There was a history of AC (Autocarriers) in Thames Ditton, Surrey, from the Sociable to the Cobra. The author, Pennsylvanian Bill Jackson, is the spitting image of Benjamin Franklin, with a literary wit to match. We wound up with the Cobra 427, although somehow Vorderman didn’t get pictured behind the wheel, as he usually arranged to do.

I contributed (edited) the memoirs of Dutch Darrin, including several tall tales by Dutch. But they were so gaudy and wonderful, everyone  forgave him. Don photographed Darrin’s DiFrasso Rolls-Royce town car—which he thought one of the most beautiful cars he’d ever seen.

There was a road test of a “Living Legend: T-head Mercer Raceabout.” Don did the serious photography; I snapped him driving this amazing car at speed. Despite several dozen bad shots more of trees than car, I  managed one so sharp you can read the name on the hubs. (With 35mm Kodachrome, even.) For a larger image of this incredibly lucky photo, and more on Don, see my tribute to him here.

The Bol d’Or: All Come All Ye Faithful

The motor race that so incensed Bill Boddy was the Bol d’Or, crafted by a colorful charlatan rather incongruously named Eugene Mauve. The hilarious history of this ersatz road race near Paris was recounted by the inimitable English writer Dennis May. To Dennis’ pen we added irreverent cartoons by Russ Brockbank. Bill Boddy hated it passionately, because Mauve wasn’t really a gentleman, dontcha know. As Dennis wrote:

Mauve’s total disregard for competitors’ qualifying experience and the race-worthiness of their cars constituted a local hazard. By his philosophy, a man had to start somewhere, so why not in the Bol? As long as the completed entry blank was accompanied by the appropriate fee, Mauve’s attitude was O Come All Ye Faithful. He once exercised this engaging complaisance in favor of a team of horrendous three-wheelers, built in a Paris backyard:

Dennis May

I’m sad to observe that Dennis May cannot even be tracked by search engines. His writing blended a superlative grasp of English literature with precise automotive knowledge. He was capable of  an exquisite turn of words. Describing a car’s independent rear suspension he quipped: “All independent of the leafy spring, in Keats’s phrase.” He was a charming, gentle man, died too young, and Don Vorderman lamented his loss: “Everyone who knew Dennis loved him. And that’s one crowd I’m proud to be a member of.”

Back to AQ and the Hirondel

Still, what made this issue was Simon Templar and his fabled Hirondel. Each artist was fed a passage from Charteris’ descriptions of the car. AQ asked them to illustrate the words. John Hanna and Dale Weaver Totten started  in London. Dale’s painting eerily captured The Saint rushing past Hyde Park:

Ted Lodigensky drew the suburbs, as you see at the top. Bob Andrews, a talented designer who had helped style the Avanti for Raymond Loewy, drew The Saint outside London, blasting up the open road. The climactic passage, of course, was reserved for Walter Gotschke:

Again and again in the dark, the Hirondel swooped up behind ridiculous, creeping glowworms, sniffed at their red tails, snorted derisively, swept past with a deep-throated blare. No car in England could have held the lead of the Hirondel that night.

It seems like yesterday…

If I have written anything worthwhile over 50 years it’s thanks to my five years as a minor player at AQ. Between Don Vorderman and Beverly Rae Kimes, I learned things that couldn’t be acquired in a school of journalism. The foregoing began with an email to a friend who acquired this old issue. I just wanted him to know the treat he was in for.

Forgive the ramble. RML

Further reading: the artists

Dean’s Garage, “Stan Mott’s Autobiography,” 2022.

D.D. Degg, “Stan Mott RIP,” 2022.

Dale Weaver Totten’s Facebook page (maintained by his daughter Tabitha)

”Don Vorderman: The Best Editor I Ever Had” (including more on Grendel, the Allard from Hell)

“Shrieking with hilarity and wheelspin, they left—Fast. B.O. sprinted puffing to his cruiser, leapt in and hit the starter, siren and red light all at once. With a wild squeal of rubber, the cruiser shot off after the Allard. That’s when I noticed the chain coiled up under the police car. One end was wrapped securely around a fire plug. The other end seemed to be attached to something underneath the cruiser. There was, oh, maybe 100 feet of it. We watched fascinated as the cruiser picked up speed and the coil grew smaller…and smaller…”  —Dick O’Kane

The O’Kane ouevre

Reader Mark Jones writes of my tribute to Don Vorderman and Automobile Quarterly:

You mention a story by Dick O’Kane and an Allard J2X named “Grendel.” In my youth I enjoyed O’Kane’s stories of the Thunder Beetle, Peter the Fisherman’s Engineering Thesis, the Goat circling the disabled VW van. I can still just see the Land Rover inching the squealing Alfa into traffic. My question is: who was Dick O’Kane, and what became of him?

(Glory, Mark, I can only imagine what O’Kane must have written about the Goat, the Rover and the Alfa…)

I wish I had half the talent of John Richard “Dick” O’Kane (1936-2019), a unique wit and a gentle man, with a whimsical attitude toward cars. I remember his best-seller, How to Repair Your Foreign Car: A Guide for the Beginner, Your Wife, and the Mechanically Inept. Dick was neither the famous Navy admiral nor the Long Island labor leader by the same name. But like them, he was in a class by himself.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Dick was raised there and in Providence, Rhode Island. By the 1960s he was winning awards for TV and print copywriting. His repair book was gleaned from his travels in Europe and North Africa. Driving their VW camper, Dick and his wife Jennifer (Jeffi) observed those lands with wry wit. His later books were The Making of an Aircraft Mechanic (1970), Repairing the Inscrutable Toyota (1974), Most Miles Per Gallon (1975), and Simple Auto Repair (1976).

Settling down

His Arkansas memorial tells us of Dick’s later life:

Tired of traveling, Dick and Jeffi settled in northwest Arkansas in 1973, creating O’Kane Studios. It produces extraordinarily beautiful custom stained glass installations for homes and businesses. A visual artist, Dick always sought new possibilities. He invented unique optical lens mosaics combined with stained glass, watch crystals, bevels, jewels—anything glass—creating three-dimensionality and movement in his works, a startling beautiful innovation. He also invented soldering techniques which have since been adopted by stained glass artists today.

Dick was brilliantly funny, a natural storyteller. Quotes from his first book include… “If you own or drive a foreign car you need this book. In fact you need two copies—one to read by the fireside, the other to amuse you by the roadside.” One chapter was headed: “Why, When Britannia Rules the Waves, Will Her Cars Not Go Through a Puddle?”

[I owned just such a car, “Hilda, the Friendly Hillman.” Reliable as Big Ben, but if you splashed through a puddle deeper than half an inch, the little Minx convertible stopped dead. You had to pop the bonnet and dry off the inside of the distributor cap.]

O’Kane and the English

Like many of us, Dick was besotted by English cars. Not always by their running—when they were running. (“I’d rather be driving my Jaguar, but it’s in the shop.”) No—it is their very old world essence, the leather and walnut, the way the rain beads on the bonnet, that causes us to get bees in our bonnets, and buy and drive and fix the things.

Dick wrote two stories for Automobile Quarterly. One was that bizarre tale of Grendel, the Allard from Hell (Summer, 1970). The other was “Bright Wheels Leaping” (Summer, 1969), about his love affair with a Mark IV Jaguar. Why Mark IV, and not its real name, “1948 Jaguar 3.5 Liter Drophead Coupe”? “Mark IV is easier to say,” Dick explained. But why this car out of all cars?

It was classically pretty—huge Lucas P.100 headlamps, sweeping fenders. I didn’t care much for the sedan. I often was struck with the feeling that the designer got to the back of the car and ran out of patience. Ahh, but that drophead. I think it was the landau bars that made the car truly pretty. They were working ones, too, part of a delightfully baroque top system. The top wasn’t exactly hard to put up and down. Involved would be a better word.

Behind the wheel was pure Edwardian Glitz. Everywhere was walnut, leather and wool. The dashboard was Power, Glory and Excess in all things. There were dials and knobs and switches and cranks. You could do everything from increasing idle speed 25 rpm to winding the windshield out to the horizontal if this pleased you. A man getting behind the wheel of a Mark IV for the first time is lost.

Frustrated lovers

We all know those feelings if we’ve owned English classics. Dick knew the penalties, too. One was “The Adventure of Operating.” Dick explained:

I say “operating,” because that’s what you do to a Mark IV. And operating encompasses more than mere driving…. Oddly, that Mark IV was the only Jag I’ve ever had that laughed into the teeth of a New England winter. It fired up with the first turn of the starter.

The top was reasonably weather-tight, and cold was no problem if you could get the heater to work. This was an involved system of ducts, flaps, knobs, switches, lights and faucets, all rather optimistically labeled AIR CONDITIONING. When you turned it on you would be rewarded with a big green light that said ON, and a little fixture designed for the function would drop antifreeze on your right shoe. The way you fix it is to rip the whole system out and replace it with a ’38 Buick heater.

Ah, the memories…

The Mark IV owners manual was a special experience. Dick called it “Monument to the Quaint Assumption…. It assumed you had all sorts of peculiar doodads lying around.”

The section on brake adjustment begins: “Obtain a steel disc having a circumference of 6.749 inches and being .388 inches in thickness, with a .435-inch square opening offset one-half inch from the centre of the disc…”

Of course, as Dick writes, the day always comes when car and driver must part:

One afternoon the Mark IV owner slips into a nimble, quick little roadster to rediscover the joy of driving a machine that doesn’t argue with him. Sadly, he’ll realize that his Mark IV just isn’t what he has in mind. He’ll sell it—an unhappy day. Right to the end that lovely old car will still be trying its hopeless best.

It will appeal immediately to someone else. I had no trouble getting rid of mine. I swapped with a dealer for a nice Jag roadster and a serviceable Austin sedan, even deal, no cash. Then the dealer turned around and convinced some poor, classic-mad wretch that the Mark IV had been specially built for King Farouk and was worth $4200. [Those were the days.]

* * *

“Dick O’Kane was a man of wisdom, and great kindness,” his memorial reads. “He was an iconoclast, living life as he saw fit, not as others would have him live. He is survived by his wife, Jennifer, his sons Charles and Benjamin, five grandchildren, his beautiful stained glass works, and many wonderful stories.” Rest in peace, Dick. Thanks for the memories.

Further reading: the artists

Dean’s Garage, “Stan Mott’s Autobiography,” 2022.

D.D. Degg, “Stan Mott RIP,” 2022.

Dale Weaver Totten’s Facebook page (maintained by his daughter Tabitha)

”Don Vorderman: The Best Editor I Ever Had” (including more on Grendel, the Allard from Hell)

“Automobile Quarterly: The Memories,” 2021.

* * *

“Writers rarely talk about writing among each other. It’s a very personal thing, and it’s almost always hard to do well, none of which is too conducive to cheery cocktail chitchat. Most of us would rather visit a dentist than face up to the task of beginning the next piece, though it’s not quite so awful once the commitment is made and the thing is under way.” —Don Vorderman, 1977

My dear friend Don wrote that about the English motoring writer Dennis May, but he was also describing himself. He didn’t write spontaneously, but when he did, his words sang. Vorderman’s years of prominence—Editor, Automobile Quarterly, 1968-74; Auto Editor, Town & Country, 1980s—were brief and under-appreciated. His work was as far from the falls-easily-to-hand school of motor writing as one could imagine. His depth of knowledge made great cars come alive. We saw ourselves crouched low over their steering wheels, like Don’s hero, Simon Templar, “the seat pressing forcefully into his back under the urge of the Hirondel’s terrific power….”

Vorderman and Charteris

Yes, the “Hirondel”! Only Don, who as a boy read “Saint” novels with a flashlight under his blankets, could have conjured up Simon Templar’s great silver beast from the books of Leslie Charteris. Wisely, Charteris never described the Hirondel in detail. He left it to our imaginations. Each of us visualized in our mind’s eyes the ultimate sports car.

In 1973, Don asked five of the world’s leading auto artists to portray the Hirondel as they saw it, assigning each a few lines by Leslie Charteris for inspiration. In The Last Hero, The Saint drives to rescue his lady friend Patricia Holm, held prisoner outside London by the Ungodly.

“Snarling silver fiend…”

Dale Weaver Totten got right into the spirit of the thing:

“If this had been a superstitious age, those who saw it would have crossed themselves and sworn that it was no car at all they saw that night, but a snarling silver fiend that roared through London on the wings of an unearthly wind…”

“Ridiculous, creeping glowworms…”

The final image focused on a coastal road outside London. Here the great Walter Gotschke produced a masterpiece of contrived motion. Knowing Walter’s style, Don gave him exactly the right Charteris passage:

Again and again in the dark, the Hirondel swooped up behind ridiculous, creeping glowworms, sniffed at their red tails, snorted derisively, swept past with a deep-throated blare. No car in England could have held the lead of the Hirondel that night.

About Don

Derwood Lorrimer Michael Vorderman was born in Texas, though everybody thought he was South African. I rather think he pictured himself as Simon Templar come to life. He was a sharp dresser, a friend recalls: “Don spent all his money on whisky, Burberry overcoats, silk pocket squares and cravats. Such a dandy.”

He once visited us in rural New Hampshire driving a yellow Ferrari, wearing tweeds and wowing locals. His checkered past included romances with Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gina Lollobrigida and, reportedly, Connie Francis. At forty Vorderman still made ladies swoon, and AQ’s brilliant managing editor Beverly Rae Kimes married him. Alas Don rapidly burned bridges, including that one.

With Vorderman at Automobile Quarterly

Fortune brought me to AQ during a golden age for the hardbound “Magazine of Motoring”: the reign of Don Vorderman and Beverly Rae Kimes. You couldn’t buy that education in a university. Don taught me things I never forgot. On word-count: “A bore is someone who tells everything.” On accepting edits: “The surest sign of an amateur is sensitivity about his prose.”  About bylines: “One per issue. No over-indulging. If you write a second article, use a pen name.” (Don’s was “Michael Lorrimer.” He hated “Derwood.” Wouldn’t you?)

He taught me manners. To the throwaway greeting, “How are you?” Don would reply, “I’m fine, thank-you. I hope you are”—and wait for an answer. He didn’t tolerate fools: “Putzes are everywhere, like diarrhea.” He was impatient with the sharks and blowhards of our world. Yet he introduced me, a rank amateur, to the elite of automobilia, from Phil Hill to Dutch Darrin to René Dreyfus.

And what a photographer he was—with an 8×10-inch view camera, a relic nowadays. Ken Drasser, then our art director, writes: “I remember his transparencies. The pictures were stunning. We christened him ‘Ol’ Magic Fingers.’ He was so talented.”

Editors exist to make writers better, and Don was the best editor one could have. He fired me once (I deserved it), but reconsidered when he liked my next piece, on Triumph. In it I’d written that the Luftwaffe “did its number” on Coventry. He blue-lined that and substituted “wrought terrible destruction”—sensitive and precise. We shared miseries over a certain publisher, and I declared I’d wear a red tie the day he died. “Don’t say that,” Don scolded. “Life is too short to carry grudges.” It was just like him. The day came, and I refrained.

The Allard named “Grendel”

Above all stood his fantastic imagination. Who else would precede a road test of the fearsome Allard J2X with a fantasy by Dick O’Kane about a fictitious Allard named “Grendel,” owned by twin mountains of flesh, the Boslovsky Brothers?

Don hired the zany genius Stan Mott to illustrate Stanley: “Boslavsky Major.” (Stanley’s brother Nick was “Boslavsky Minor.” Nick was shorter—only six-foot-seven.)

Mott duly portrayed Boslavsky Major, stoned out of his mind, wearing nothing but hair and beads, his pinwheel eyes fixed on Grendel. (“I hoped he was having a good trip.” wrote Dick. “Stanley on a bad trip was like a malevolent seven-foot owl….)

“Dazedly Stan approached the Allard…. His pinwheel eyes began to fill with tears. Then he was wrapping his arms around her hideous pink nose and sobbing, ‘Mother.'”

Don, of course, caught and used O’Kane’s references to Beowulf. His J2X road test began: “And now alone I shall settle affairs with Grendel, the monster, the demon.”

Farewell, Don

Though we never saw each other after exchanging a few visits in the 1980s, we had a warm email friendship. When I sent him my articles in The Automobile, he always had an interesting smidgen to add. Of “Churchill’s Motorcars” (August 2016) he wrote: “What a delicious idea! You mentioned the death of Churchill’s daughter Marigold. It brought to mind Bentley Boy Tim Birkin, passing from the same condition while not a mile away, Fleming had already developed the early versions of penicillin.” Of Dutch Darrin (May 2017): “Your touch is just right—authoritative but friendly. I still think that 1938 Phantom II town car he built for Countess di Frasso is one of the prettiest cars I have ever seen.”

And then the emails stopped. I wrote him, but my letter was returned. Too bad, because I had written how much he meant to me.

This remembrance began with Don’s piece about Dennis May, and I’ve often quoted his final paragraph:

There’s nothing to be said when a friend dies, even among people whose trade is words. There’s just an empty hole where there was once someone you loved. And all the talk in the world won’t change that. Everyone who knew him well misses him. And that’s one crowd I’m proud to be a member of.

Vordermania: Don on Cars

Alfa Romeo: “Sure, they’re building nice cars today, but before the Second World War they were magnificent. Every blessed one of them.”

Allard J2X: “The first thing you notice is the acceleration. This is also the second and the third thing….”

Bugatti: “They were bitter rivals, but you have to admit that for every year when Bugatti was building a good car, Alfa was building a great one.”

Cadillac Eldorado: “It’s a highly visible declaration of what the owner wants you to think of him. But it’s a free country, and everybody has the right to make a fool of himself.”

Hudson: “I tried to keep up appearances for my MG’s sake, but soon my friend’s Hornet and I started to meet secretly. She could do everything my TC could, only ten times better.”

Jaguar: “In 1961 the new E-type was the most exciting car in the world. Sir William Lyons was one in a thousand.”

Lincoln Continental: “You know why you want one: because it’s big and expensive and everybody knows it. Also, the instruments are down by your knees where you won’t have to look at them.”

Lotus Elite: “Colin Chapman’s come a long way from the backyard welding torch.”

Mercer Raceabout: “Why not be philosophical about it, and consider it an honor to be passed by such a car?”

Messerschmitt: “Is das nicht einen Kabinenroller? Ja das icht ein Kabinenroller!”

Packard: “The 1947 Custom Super Clipper is my idea of the perfect Packard. Wonderfully smooth big-ass straight eight and that graceful, swoopy shape. Doesn’t matter what color—they’re all gorgeous.”

Pontiac Grand Am: “Get one quick, before they change it.”

Rolls-Royce: “They haven’t been making RRs since the Silver Wraith…. They must sense the distress of we impatient, disappointed lovers. But even an unrequited lover has his limits.”

Studebaker, 1953 Starliner: “You are not old enough to have experienced the impact it had on everybody who was into cars. How gorgeous! How un-American!”

Dick O’Kane: A Memory

The Grendel-Allard story was written by the late Dick O’Kane, another hero of my youth, whose joyful, whimsical pieces about cars decorated the pages of Road & Track and Automobile Quarterly. A short note about Dick is posted here.

Further reading: the artists

Dean’s Garage, “Stan Mott’s Autobiography,” 2022.

D.D. Degg, “Stan Mott RIP,” 2022.

Dale Weaver Totten’s Facebook page (maintained by his daughter Tabitha)

“Automobile Quarterly: The Memories,” 2021.

Detroit, 2013— A correspondent sends “25 Facts about the Fall of Detroit That Will Leave You Shaking Your Head,” by Michael Snyder of the Economic Collapse Blog:

Once upon a time, the city of Detroit was a teeming metropolis of 1.8 million people and it had the highest per capita income in the United States.  Now it is a rotting, decaying hellhole of about 700,000 people that the rest of the world makes jokes about.

When in July 2013 Detroit announced that it would  file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the move was stopped at least temporarily by an Ingham County judge:

She ruled that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing violates the Michigan Constitution because it would result in reduced pension payments for retired workers [and that] bankruptcy filing was “also not honoring the president, who took [Detroit’s auto companies] out of bankruptcy”….How “honoring the president” has anything to do with the bankruptcy of Detroit is a bit of a mystery….

My correspondent writes: “We can be pretty sure this judge is not a Constitutionalist—one of those awful people who believe in Aristotle’s view that ‘the law is reason free from passion.’”

Detroit Then

I knew it when. In the early 1970s, as an editor with Automobile Quarterly, I frequently visited Detroit for research, test drives and interviews. I remember the spinning numbers on the Goodyear signs heading in and out of town from the airport, toting up car production for the year; the great and thriving GM Design Center; the Ford Rotunda in Dearborn and the vast Rouge Plant; the Chrysler Historical Collection at Highland Park; struggling little American Motors on the edge of town, all humming along with varying degrees of prosperity. Gradually the rolling numbers on the sign became perceptively slower, and in 2002 the signs disappeared altogether.

Detroit Now

My last visit was in 2012. We cruised around the derelict Packard plant with our car windows up and the doors locked—past the once fine houses along East Grand Boulevard, one a burned-out shell, the next one inhabited and trying to stay alive. A police car warned us not to stop because it wasn’t safe and they won’t come to your aid if you get into trouble. Frequently fires break out amid the old brick buildings. The D.F.D. never answers a call there because it’s a risk to firemen’s lives even to enter the area.

In 1972 Automobile Quarterly ran a piece on the British car industry entitled, “What’s the Matter with England? Fine engineers muzzled by incompetent executives and a dismal labor force, among some other things.” One of the other things was government, devoted to the Purchase Tax, which regulators both Labour and Tory would constantly raise and lower to “control” the economy. They would do this two or three times a year, and you never knew whether it was going up or down.

At the time we were called Cassandras. British Leyland Motors even organized a press tour to show how wrong we were and how prosperous they were. But ten years later, the British industry was bust. Today it largely comprises assembly lines for foreign manufacturers.

Michael Snyder writes a good piece, but it’s not about Coventry or Dagenham. It’s about what was once the mightiest industrial city in the world—and a harbinger of things to come.

“Detroit is only the beginning,” Snyder warns. “When the next major financial crisis strikes, we are going to see a wave of municipal bankruptcies unlike anything we have ever seen before.”

You can call him a Cassandra, too. But before you do, you might want to pay a visit to Detroit.

Nothing anyone can say will ease the pain of a friend’s loss, but here is one inadequate try: When The Packard Club circulated the loss of Beverly Kimes, it struck me that everyone who received the same message would in turn circulate it to a group of people, more or less organized by make or era of car.

To each of us, each in our own way, she was an inspiration. She helped remake what some called a “hobby” into an institution. Bev had that rare ability to ferret out (from what she called the “sublime disorderliness” of automotive history) the most obscure facts about people and cars famous and forgotten, and knit them together with style and humor. She raised our little pastime from mechanical entertainment to a true place in history.

Bev Kimes wrote the letter that changed my life. She was accepting “The Glorious Madness of Kaiser-Frazer,” my first published car article. It led to our being colleagues at Automobile Quarterly from 1970 to 1975. “I’m simply overwhelmed,” she wrote. “…Learned to drive on my dad’s 1953 Kaiser. I thought at the time it was the most wonderful car in the world….”

Golden Years at AQ

I too was overwhelmed. AQ was in its heyday, with editor Don Vorderman’s astonishing imagination and feel for stories, managing editor Beverly Kimes’s superb English, art directors Ted Hall’s and Ken Drasser’s brilliant feel for layout and type (long before the days of digital layouts). We were planning a new series of books, for scores of “marque histories” had yet to be written. And AQ had the most accomplished team of writers, artists and photographers ever assembled in the field.

You never knew who might walk in the door, from Hollywood legends like coachbuilder Dutch Darrin, to America’s first Grand Prix champion Phil Hill, to the immortal Ken Purdy, father of us all. Across Madison Avenue from our warren on East 49th Street was Le Chanteclair, our watering hole, presided over by suave and affable René Dreyfus, Champion of France, and of Bugatti. To an aspiring young writer, nuts about cars, this was an education no tuition could buy.

We worked hard together for many years, and never lost our mutual affection, which frankly took some doing. The AQ mélange was eclectic; everybody had strong opinions about what constituted cars, and “non-cars.” Occasionally we were misled and put at odds temporarily by someone for their own purposes, yet we inevitably communicated, and eventually determined the cause of the problem, which was not us.

Kimes remembered

Bev-Up was one of the finest stylists in journalism. Bev-Down was heartbreaking. Her physical state was a constant worry: I never knew her to have a healthy year. There came a major upheaval in her personal life, when we spent a long night talking. “I never fail at anything,” she kept saying, inconsolably. Fortunately a few years later she met Jim Cox and found happiness. We always kept in touch; and when I came to Manhattan a few years ago to expound about Winston Churchill, there among the audience was my old friend to remind me of times past.

None who read it will ever forget “Man on Fire!”: Beverly Kimes’s biography of Tazio Nuvolari (Automobile Quarterly, Vol. XI, No. 1, 1973). It was one of those signal experiences when you remember where you were. I read it in galleys on the “Broadway Limited” en route to Chicago: started in Newark and put it down somewhere west of Harrisburg.

She wound up with the legend on the great racing driver’s tombstone in Mantua, where drivers in the Mille Miglia would raise a hand in mute salute as they raced through “Nivola’s” home town: Correrai ancor piu veloce per le vie del cielo. (You will travel faster still upon the highways of heaven.) “Ah Tazio,” she ended: “Godspeed.”

And that’s all that really matters in the end: thoughts of old and good times, which eventually blot out the last sad ones.

Ah Bev…Godspeed.