The Enthusiast NetworkCar and Driver
On a wall in the office of Duttweiler Performance in Saticoy, California, there's a framed magazine article. It's a single page with a black and white photo of the truly awesome engine builder Kenny Duttweiler along with a few hundred words about him. I wrote that article back in 1991 as one of my first assignments for Car Craft. That it's up on that wall is one of the great honors of my life.
Car and Driver
"It's hard to describe how much I loved reading Car Craftback then," Brian Hatano, who was on staff when I started there, wrote in an email about growing up with the magazine. "I had stacks piled around my bed with the latest issues tucked under my pillow that I would read every night, over and over, until the new issue came. I read every single word in each issue, and I felt like I knew the staff personally. I was familiar with cars from across the country, I learned about what parts were the hot setup, and I learned from the tech articles, too."
For a much younger me, Car and Driver and Car Craft were twin inspirations, smart and funny about their subjects, more amusing than lesser car magazines. I didn't read Car Craft because I was a drag-racing fan. I became a drag-racing fan because I read Car Craft.
Throughout its 67 years in print, Car Craft was as much about people as it was about cars. It was a magazine that focused on legendary Pro Stock driver Bill "Grumpy" Jenkins so much that it made him, well, legendary. When Don "The Snake" Prudhomme and Tom "The Mongoose" McEwen snagged a sponsorship deal with Mattel for 1970, Car Craft's Fred M.H. Gregory hauled their funny cars out to Orange County International Raceway and took a head-on shot that remains the single greatest image ever put on the cover of a car magazine. The story wasn't about the cars, it was about Snake and Mongoose.
And then there were the car features. If you wrote about some guy's blown and tubbed '69 Camaro in Car Craft, you were writing about the effort and creativity of just some guy. There weren't any corporate decisions involved, no marketing plans, no sales goals. Most of the work was done in the guy's garage. When I was writing a car feature in Car Craft, I was writing right into someone's soul and obsession. Occasionally they'd call me up to say something nice about what I wrote. Other times, I'd get a call telling me about the wide range of reasons why I suck.
The temptation here is to recount all the great times the people on Car Craft'sstaff had. But that misses the point of what the magazine was about. It covered people doing car things. In the 1950s, that meant George Barris drowning Merc coupes in lead, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth perfecting the art of pinstriping, and all of us encountering the small-block Chevrolet V-8 for the first time. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was all drag-racing obsession and the heroes thereof. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, it meant home-built street machines, junkyard spelunking, and painting cars in your own garage.
Before the internet, and before the face of hot-rodding became cable TV shows with fake deadlines and guys throwing clipboards, getting the car you built displayed in a car magazine was a true achievement. It validated your effort and gave you a month of semi-celebrity. It was the sort of recognition a "little guy" could earn. And it was the base upon which so much of automotive culture was built.
Car Craft wrote about the people who read the magazine. The audience and the subject matter were indistinguishable from one another. That's what is going away with Car Craft's print edition passing into history. It and many of the other books slaughtered December 6, 2019, represented a tangible people-to-paper-to-people culture that may not be sustainable as the world digitizes.
Kenny Duttweiler is in his 80s now and still working every day, bolting exotic contraptions to his engine dyno and getting every last bit of horsepower out of them. His engines have land-speed records and national drag records to their eternal credit. No one has ever said a bad word about Kenny. And he thought what I wrote, what he read in Car Craft, on paper, was worth sticking up on his wall.
I know change is inevitable, but Car Craft was my first home. I'm going to miss holding it in my hands, risking paper cuts. I love finding copies squirreled away in the junkier crevices of my life where 8-year-old and 38-year-old me stacked them away to one day revisit. I never suspected that one day would be now.
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January 14, 2020 at 02:22AM
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What We Lose When We Lose What Car Craft Was - Car and Driver
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