<VV> Long Time Friend Of The Corvair Passes On

[MSYVairs at aol.com]

He will be missed !
 
Bill Hadley
Baton Rouge,LA
 
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Longtime auto journalist David E. Davis Jr. dies
 
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(http://autoweek.com/storyimage/CW/20110328/CARNEWS/303289999/AR/AR-303289999.jpg) 
David E.  Davis Jr. was editor for Car and Driver and Automobile magazines 
during a long career in auto  journalism. 



By STEVEN COLE SMITH on 3/28/2011

David E. Davis Jr., inarguably one of the deans of automotive  journalism, 
died on Sunday, March 27, at age 80. Davis had been suffering from  bladder 
cancer and underwent surgery a few days earlier. Even so, his passing  was 
unexpected. He appeared to be in comparatively good health and was in  
reasonably good spirits at the Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance in Florida just  
two weeks earlier. 
Davis was the founder of Automobile  magazine, which just celebrated his 
25th anniversary, and prior to that he was  the editor of Car and Driver. He 
had returned to the  pages of Car and Driver in the summer of 2009 to write a 
 monthly column for the magazine's editor, Eddie Alterman, a graduate of 
Automobile magazine. 
“He was a man of enormous talent and presence, genteel most  often, and 
scythelike when he had to be,” said AutoWeek  associate publisher and editorial 
director Dutch Mandel, whose late father and  predecessor at AutoWeek, 
Leon, was one of the few in the  business who could go toe-to-toe with Davis in 
both talent and occasional  irascibility. “My father had great respect for 
David and still had the  distinction of firing him from Car and Driver. David 
 taught multiple generations what great automotive journalism looked like.” 
After leaving Automobile, Davis took  over the online magazine Winding Road 
before returning to the pages of Car and Driver in 2009. 
Davis was a lifelong car enthusiast and, early in his career,  a racer, 
until a serious accident at age 24 nearly cost him his life and left  him with 
severe facial injuries that required plastic surgery, though with his  
trademark beard, few would suspect. In 1955, he flipped his race car upside down  
during a national championship in California. He lost his left eyelid, the  
bridge of his nose, the roof of his mouth and all but a few of his teeth. 
“I was uglier than a mud fence,” he said in a commencement  speech to 
4,000 University of Michigan graduates in spring 2004. “I actually  frightened 
children and sometimes caused their parents to call the police on  me.” 
Following that, Davis said that he “understood with great  clarity that 
nothing in life, except death itself, was ever going to kill me. 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.” 
That perhaps explains Davis's take-no-prisoners style of  journalism, which 
he personally practiced as a writer and an editor. Though  actually quite 
shy, Davis was a superb speaker but typically let his writing  speak for him. 
Davis did not shy away from feuds and, in fact, started  several, one of 
the most famous with writer Brock Yates. In 1991, Davis slammed  Yates's book 
on Enzo Ferrari. The feud continued for years, with Yates adding  his own 
wood to the fire: “To know him is to acknowledge his short fuse and his  
penchant for unpredictable, snorting charges at friendly targets.”  
The two did make up and, in fact, Davis was in the front row  for a seminar 
at Amelia Island hosted by Yates on the history of the Cannonball  Run. 
Among the literally hundreds of writers whom Davis  influenced--including 
his own son, Matt, who has written for AutoWeek and who remains a European 
correspondent for  multiple publications--was Jean Jennings, plucked from her 
previous careers of  driving a taxi and testing vehicles for Chrysler to 
become Davis's most visible  protégé. Jennings left Car and Driver with Davis 
to start  Automobile for the then-owner Rupert Murdoch, and while  the two 
will forever be connected in journalism history, they had some battles  of 
their own that were legendary and which led to periodic estrangement. 
As recently as 2009, Davis, in an interview with Autoline:  Detroit, said 
he sometimes dreams “of a FedEx flight on its way to Memphis  flying over 
Parma where she lives and a grand piano falling out of the airplane  and 
whistling down through the air, this enormous object, and lands on her and  makes 
the damnedest chord anybody has ever heard; this sound of music that has  
never been heard by the human ear. And the next morning all they can find are  
some shards of wood and a grease spot and no other trace of Mrs. Jennings.” 
Still, in her story in the April issue of Automobile on its 25th birthday, 
Jennings wrote of Davis as  “the most interesting, most difficult, 
cleverest, darkest, most erudite,  dandiest, and most inspirational, charismatic and 
all-around damnedest human  being I will ever meet. I have loved him. I have 
seriously not loved him. But  this isn't an obituary, so we don't have to 
get into any weepy crap here.” 
Unfortunately, now we do.  
“I worked for David E. in the magazine world and in the  advertising 
business,” said William Jeanes, another contemporary of Davis and  himself the 
former editor and publisher of Car and  Driver, and publisher of Road & Track. “
He never  fired me. I always suspected that he just never got around to it, 
but it's  nonetheless true. We were also competitors for a while, during 
which period he  took a shot or two from time to time. But so did I; that's 
competition. Our  relationship was never less than cordial, and it became 
quite close as the years  went on.  
“Every one of us who ever picked up a pen, pencil, typewriter  or word 
processor to write about cars owes David E. Davis Jr. more than we will  ever be 
able to repay. He made our writing better, and he saw to it that we were  
well paid. He did nothing less than change the paradigm for car magazines and 
 raise the standards for all enthusiast magazines. In our orbit he stands  
unchallenged as the best storyteller that ever was. I only wish he'd told 
his  own more completely. He was not always a gentle man, but he was forever a 
 gentleman. We were already deficient in that category, and now we've lost 
one of  the real ones.” 
Davis leaves behind his wife, Jeannie, a daughter and two  sons. Services 
are pending. 

Read more: 
_http://www.autoweek.com/article/20110328/CARNEWS/303289999#ixzz1Hu6mnSiZ_ 
(http://www.autoweek.com/article/20110328/CARNEWS/303289999#ixzz1Hu6mnSiZ)