Posted by Horisly in
Auto Blog,
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Mercedes on 03 28th, 2011 |
Comments Off David E. Davis, Jr., died on March 27, 2011, while recuperating from cancer surgery. He was 80 years old. Davis was widely acknowledged as the dean of automotive journalism, the man who turned Car and Driver into the world’s largest automotive magazine, and the founder, in 1986, of Automobile magazine. Over his long career, he worked at all four major car titles, with detours for triumphant stints in the advertising business. David E. was born in Burnside, Kentucky, on November 7, 1930, in a house with no running water. He learned to drive on a Jeep belonging to his uncle, who enlisted David E.’s help building a road up to the house. That was the first in a lifetime of automotive adventures stretching across six decades and seven continents. He said the secret to his success lay in his ability to marry southern storytelling to big-city presentation. These gifts prompted Bill Ziff, the owner of Car and Driver up until 1985, to call David E. “the man who made special-interest magazines sing.” It was a formula that many other magazines, including some with great literary aspirations, rode to their own success. And it’s still the foundation of what we try do here every month. He was so in love with the craft and subject matter of car magazines that he came to inhabit an archetype. He was the dashing, witty, high-spirited, and deeply knowledgeable writer/editor who brought the automobile to life, whose personal flair transferred to whatever he was writing about. David E. could have written and edited brilliantly on a wide range of topics, from military history to hunting to food to travel to books. But he chose cars, he said, because that’s where the action was. The automobile, in David E.’s formulation, was not only the thing that took you to your next adventure; a great car was an adventure self-contained. I remember walking into his office at Automobile magazine for the first time twenty years ago. It was filled with automotive art, a grille of a Mercedes-Benz 600, photos he took of his racing heroes from the post-war Grand Prix era, and a nimbus of cigar smoke. Outside his office hung an ad for Booth’s House of Lords Gin bearing the words, “Protest Against the Rising Tide of Conformity.” I walked out of there thinking, That’s what I want my...
