8 of Our Automotive Heroes
We spend a lot of time on this site discussing significant figures in automotive history—people like Enzo Ferrari, or the man who designed the Tucker (and the Subaru Brat). We’ve written about the guy from Indiana who invented cruise control and men like Roger Penske and Rick Hendrick, who shaped the motorsports scene as we know it. Andrew Newton has written at length about the East Coast couple who may have invented car collecting.
This week, we decided it was time to get a bit more personal by sharing our automotive heroes. You may know some of the names below, and some may be totally unfamiliar to you, but we picked these people for the impact they’ve had upon us as individuals—as writers, as wrenches, as car nuts in general.
Telling the stories of people who helped make us who we are seemed like a fitting thank you, so read on for a glimpse at those who helped shape us!
The Art Professor Who Truly Cared
I didn’t think that writing about someone who influenced how I look at cars would be so difficult, but here I am admitting just that.
Back when I was an ignorant kid of 20 or 21 years old, I believed I could change my career path and become a car designer. So I took art classes at the school associated with my local museum to begin that process. My favorite and most challenging class was a 3-D design course taught at night by a man who learned from the best minds at the Art Center College of Design. It was hard work, and he was always pushing me, because he knew I wanted to go to a place like Art Center for my education.
He understood, as he was friends with Larry Shinoda when they were Art Center students. I remember he once told my brother (another important person in my life as a car enthusiast) to “keep pushing” me, because he saw my potential. The man truly cared, and I found that was a rare characteristic in art education.
The potential he saw in me never came to fruition, but what’s making this so hard to write is how I’ve shamefully forgotten the name of the man who helped me understand how cars are designed. When I talk about design to anyone, when I write a Vellum Venom, etc. I have him to thank. How could I forget his name?
It took a few minutes, but my now-middle-aged brain finally made the right search query: His name is HJ Bott, and a quick spin on Google tells me he is far more than an adjunct professor I met with every Tuesday and Thursday night. He is a hero in the Houston art scene, and I feel like a damn fool for not googling him sooner. I need to reconnect with this legend, as this video shows his depth of knowledge and compassion.
In this Youtube video (forwarded to the right place) I see his challenges and his ultimate successes in being an artist. I feel it in my soul, as everything I learned from others turned into Vellum Venom … the unique creation of my own for the world of automotive journalism. — Sajeev Mehta
Uncle Gearshift
“You’d better enjoy these—I had to eat a lot of Happy Meals to get them,” he said one Christmas in the early ’80s as he handed me a shopping bag full of Hot Wheels.
Uncle Gary, aka Uncle Gearshift (I coined that nickname when I was about four), cultivated my love of cars and my interest in working on them from a very young age. Once a “Mr. Goodwrench”—a tech at a Chevy dealer and then at Sims Buick in Euclid, Ohio, before he became a firefighter—there wasn’t a mechanical problem he couldn’t solve. His small, detached garage could well have been a professional shop given its assortment of tools and cleanliness.
As I moved from Hot Wheels to slot and RC cars, I’d call to consult him—I lived in Virginia at the time—about how to hop-up and repair my little cars. Once I graduated to the real thing, he was there to help, and didn’t hesitate to give me grief when I took a shortcut or did something that, years ago, he’d learned the hard way not to do.
I didn’t keep up with Gearshift nearly as well as I should have even after I moved back to Ohio, but the last conversation we had before he passed was, fittingly, about cars. I think of him almost every time I turn a wrench. — Eddy Eckart
The Guy with the ’55
Manson! That was his last name. Robert Manson was married to my (slightly) older cousin Midgie back when I was maybe 10. Robert drove a 1955 two-door Chevrolet, painted blue, with a 283-cubic-inch V-8 and a four-speed manual transmission and Cragar S/S wheels. He brought it to my grandmother’s house and took me for a ride. Even then I thought the 283 was a little light-footed, that at least a 327 would be preferable. But the rest of the car was mint. Robert then let it slip that he was selling the ’55, and at a price that was far lower than I expected.
I immediately, and for days hence, hounded my father to help me buy it. I probably had about two percent of the price, and all he had to do was kick in the rest—we’d store it under the magnolia in the front yard until I was, you know, 16. Mom could drive it! You could drive it! We could install a 327 as a father-son project! But no, he wouldn’t come through. I was heartbroken when I heard the ’55 was gone.
“He sold it to buy us a green washer and dryer,” Midgie just texted. “I had just had your cousin Chris.”
Man. I was just 60 years late in submitting my offer. Story. Of. My. Life. — Steven Cole Smith
Grandpa Ferguson
Lots of ways we could go with this one, but for me, I’d have to say it comes back to my grandfather. From the minute I first called him to tell him that I’d gotten a job at Car and Driver back in 2016, he made it his mission to press headlong into cars so that he and I would always have something automotive to discuss when we were together—or over the phone. He’s never short of encouragement or advice, both in the craft of writing and also just in following the things I love.
He’s an engineer by trade, and a damn fine one at that. Although the years before I came around didn’t necessarily overflow with exciting cars, Grandpa had a knack for taking interest in the automobiles he did own. My mom loves to tell the story of how one day, Grandpa came home from work and decided he needed to get a better understanding of the Corvair that he owned. He took the whole thing apart, piece by piece, and then reassembled it in his garage, just to learn.
In my early years, I was fortunate enough to enjoy many road trips with him—to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, then to New York for a whirlwind tour of a few baseball stadiums and a stop in Cooperstown to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. We could have flown to either place, but I think his enjoyment of the open road made driving the only logical choice. These days, I’m often smiling on longer trips thinking of the time he and I have spent in and around cars together. — Nate Petroelje
Designer, Columnist, Critic
For me, my automotive hero is designer and design critic Robert Cumberford. Robert’s combination of academic erudition and cutthroat straight talk makes him a force in whatever room he enters. The man attended Art Center, was hired by Harley Earl at GM after sending in 100+ sketches at the tender age of 18, and later worked with Holman-Moody on race cars. He even created his own car, the Cumberford Martinique. Most people, however, know him as the pointed and forthright design columnist for Automobile magazine.
That is where I met Robert, at the Detroit auto show in 2014. As a recent hire at Automobile, I walked the halls of Cobo with him for more than an hour, soaking up his every word, hoping that through some sort of intellectual osmosis, I might absorb a scrap of his wisdom. He has always been deeply kind and generous to me.
What strikes me, always, about his approach to criticism is the way he welcomes novelty. For such a traditional and seasoned guy, Robert has an open mind to unique and clever solutions to design and engineering problems. And for decisions that he considers lazy or short-sighted, he is ruthless, biting in his disdain. That comes not from dismissiveness or a sense of superiority, but rather disappointment in what could have been. That combination of knowledge, perspective, and honesty is something I respect a great deal. — Eric Weiner
The Man Who Knew Everything
Harold Pace was a family friend going back long before I was born, before my parents even met. He was a talented photographer, a great writer, mechanically knowledgeable, and an absolute walking encyclopedia when it came to cars. Seriously, the guy knew absolutely everything, especially old race cars (he literally wrote a book on them). I soaked in a ton of car knowledge, which would probably be useless in any profession other than this one, just listening to him talk.
I also wasn’t one of those kids who came out of the womb loving cars, but at seven years old it only took a few minutes in Harold’s Ferrari 330 GT (these were still kind of cheap back in the mid-’90s) to become forever hooked on this hobby. He also showed me how you could actually make a living writing about and playing around with old cars and gave me invaluable advice when I decided to try doing it myself. I wish he were here for me to thank him. — Andrew Newton
A Tale of Two Hot Rodders
My older brother, Brian, had a big influence in my love of cars, as he had a hot-rodded ’67 Camaro and a small-block-swapped Chevy Luv when I was little, so that’s the genesis for me, but everyone’s talk about design has me thinking about Thom Taylor, who I worked with for several years at Hot Rod. Thom has a great way of describing cars and many of his takes on a car’s stance and general lines have stuck with me. I don’t have the eye of a car designer, but I understand a lot more of it after walking though car shows and gleaning some of his wisdom from his critiques of custom ’32 Fords as well as mass-produced, mainstream cars. — Brandan Gillogly
The Professor Who Showed the Way
Hear me out, because the man who opened my eyes to the beauty of writing about cars doesn’t have much of a car connection at all.
Dr. Somerville was one of my professors in college, and in my senior year, I took his Creative Non-Fiction class. I remember every book on the reading list: An account of a wife’s experience in the year following the sudden death of her husband, a travelogue about Antarctica, some tome about a Jesuit priest and mental organization systems that I never finished, a first-hand account of snake-handling churches in Appalachia (you bet I finished that one), a report written almost novel-style by a guy who spent a year alongside the homicide unit of the Baltimore Police Department (David Simon, same guy who produced The Wire), and another “embedded journalist” book about a guy who traveled with European rugby fans. I still own all the books, except that one written by the priest. No offense to priests, but that one couldn’t really compete with snake-handling mountain preachers.
Somerville was a soft-spoken, white-haired graduate of UNC Chapel Hill with a reputation for being a wickedly strict grader of papers (there were several of those in the English department at my school, all fantastic people who cared so, so deeply about language and writing). The class discussions sometimes felt molasses-slow, or obsessively detailed, but Somerville transformed my understanding of what a writer could do, whether the subject was rugby or cultural assimilation or grief: Open up the world in a new way. He broke the dichotomy that to write creatively means to write fiction, and I wouldn’t put the care and time into what I write today if it weren’t for him.
Guess I should probably make sure he reads this … — Grace Houghton
