As a boy of 10 years old, I discovered the writing of David E. Davis in the pages of Car & Driver magazine and this man's monthly column became my window on the world, exposing me to people, places and ideas well beyond my small Midwestern town. Eccentric, self-indulgent, irreverent, and a wonderful master of prose, David E. surprisedly and thrilled me on a regular basis. His passing makes me feel old and nostalgic...and grateful. So very grateful to have enjoyed his musings all these years.
From yesterday's New York Times:
March 28, 2011
David E. Davis Jr. Dies at 80; Elevated Automotive Press
By WILLIAM GRIMES
David E. Davis Jr., an editor and writer who transformed automotive journalism by bringing an irreverent tone, a literary sensibility and top-notch writers to the magazines Car and Driver and Automobile, died on Sunday in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 80.
The cause was complications of surgery for bladder cancer, his wife, Jeanne, said.
Mr. Davis, a former racecar driver and advertising copywriter for the Chevrolet Corvette, brought a taste for Southern-style storytelling and a penchant for splashy editorial concepts when he signed on at Car and Driver in the early 1960s, first as a writer and later as editor and publisher.
The magazine, a weak sister to publications like Road & Track and Motor Trend, moved into the passing lane under Mr. Davis, a combative swashbuckler who encouraged criticism of the cars it tested, even at the risk of losing advertising, and signed promising young writers, notably a former taxi driver and Chrysler test driver named Jean Lindamood (now Jennings).
Ms. Lindamood’s wild adventures behind the wheel became reader favorites, as did Mr. Davis’s monthly column, “American Driver,” a wayward exercise in which he might veer off into, say, a character sketch of God: “He likes a little Armagnac, but only after the roast has been consumed and the empty Bordeaux bottles cleared away. He drives one of the old fastback Bentley Continentals, and he drives it both vigorously and well.”
In the mid-1980s, Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate, asked Mr. Davis to create a new car magazine. Elaborating on ideas he had developed at Car and Driver, Mr. Davis came up with Automobile. With its heavy paper stock and lush color photography, it aimed at the kind of upscale readers who, he told Adweek, “are interested in driving from New York to Los Angeles in a Porsche 911 Turbo” and whose tastes would be attractive to advertisers like Ralph Lauren.
Shedding the mechanical focus of Car and Driver, Mr. Davis did away with orthodox test drives and numerical results. Instead, he handed the keys to writers like P. J. O’Rourke, Jim Harrison and David Halberstam and encouraged them to hit the road, have adventures and write about the lived experience of driving a spiffy car.
David Evan Davis Jr. was born on Nov. 7, 1930, in Burnside, Ky. After graduating from high school in Royal Oak, Mich., he studied briefly at Olivet College but soon took an assortment of jobs — selling Volkswagens and Triumphs for a dealer in Ypsilanti, working in a men’s clothing store, assembling Fords — before the sight of a Jaguar XK120 inflamed his incipient car lust.
He turned to auto racing, but in 1955, driving in an amateur race in Sacramento, he flipped his MG and nearly destroyed half his face, requiring 18 months of recuperation and reconstructive surgery.
“I suddenly understood with great clarity that nothing in life — except death itself — was ever going to kill me,” he said in a commencement address at the University of Michigan in 2004. “No meeting could ever go that badly. No client would ever be that angry. No business error would ever bring me as close to the brink as I had already been.”
After selling advertising on the West Coast for Road & Track, he was hired by Campbell-Ewald, the longtime agency for Chevrolet, to write copy for Corvette ads. A colleague, the future novelist Elmore Leonard, coached him on how to put pizazz into his prose, advising him, he told an audience at the Adcraft Club in Detroit in 2003, to “write like you talk, and read aloud everything you write.”
In 1962, he began writing for Car and Driver, which had been founded in 1956 as Sports Cars Illustrated and was struggling to compete under a new name. Soon he was named its editor and publisher, but his monthly column got him in trouble. Reviewing the BMW 2002, he wrote that its Blaupunkt radio “could not pick up a Manhattan station from the other side of the George Washington Bridge.”
He resigned after being ordered to apologize and returned to Campbell-Ewald as a creative director. In 1976, he resumed his post at Car and Driver, which he moved to Ann Arbor from New York two years later. He grew disenchanted with the job after CBS bought the magazine from Ziff-Davis Publishing in 1985.
Many of his columns for Car and Driver and Automobile were reprinted in “Thus Spake David E.: The Collected Wit and Wisdom of the Most Influential Automotive Journalist of Our Time” (1999).
At Automobile, to which he gave the motto “No Boring Cars!,” Mr. Davis installed Ms. Jennings as editor, hired Robert Cumberford to write on car design in a monthly column, unleashed the illustrator Bruce McCall and maintained the atmosphere of creative turbulence that had become his editorial style. Being fired by Mr. Davis was a left-handed compliment.
In 1991, Automobile was sold to K-III Communications (renamed Primedia). Mr. Davis, under pressure, turned over the editorship of the magazine to Ms. Jennings in 2000. He stayed on as a columnist and as an editorial director of Motor Trend after it was acquired by Primedia in 2001.
He designed the start-up Internet magazine Winding Road in 2006 and in 2009 returned to Car and Driver as a columnist.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Matthew, David and Margaret; a stepdaughter, Eleonore Snow; two stepsons, Vincent Kuhn and Tony Kuhn; a sister, Dr. Jane Makulski; two grandchildren; nine step-grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
“I see myself as a guest in the homes of several hundred thousand car enthusiasts each month, talking about what I’ve driven, where I’ve been and who I’ve met,” he wrote in Car and Driver. “I strive to be entertaining as well as informative, because I want to be liked, to be remembered, to be invited back. It usually works.”
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