Tag: Automobile Quarterly

Automobile Quarterly: The Memories (AQ Vol. 10, No. 1, 1972)

Automobile Quarterly: The Memories (AQ Vol. 10, No. 1, 1972)

A friend and fel­low fan of Leslie Char­teris and “The Saint” sent me the image above. “Is this yours?” he asked. Yes, it hangs in my home. My friend has now acquired AQ —Auto­mo­bile Quar­terly— First Quar­ter, 1972. It con­tains a port­fo­lio of The Saint’s 1930 sports car, the Hiron­del, con­jured up by five great artists.  This paint­ing was pre­sent­ed to me by its cre­ator, Ted Lodi­gen­sky. “It has no val­ue,” he declared. “It’s a car that nev­er was.”

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.…

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Old Jags & Allards: The Whimsy and Fun of Dick O’Kane

Old Jags & Allards: The Whimsy and Fun of Dick O’Kane

O'Kane called the Mark IV owners manual a "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..."

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Don Vorderman 1930-2018: The Best Editor I Ever Had

Don Vorderman 1930-2018: The Best Editor I Ever Had

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.

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The Browning of Detroit

The Browning of Detroit

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…

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“Correrai Ancor Piu Veloce…” Beverly Rae Kimes 1941-2008

“Correrai Ancor Piu Veloce…” Beverly Rae Kimes 1941-2008

None who read it will ever forget "Man on Fire!": Beverly Kimes’s biography of Tazio Nuvolari. 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: 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.

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