Cover

Dedication

For Neetha

Foreword

I grew up surrounded by car imagery.

Back in the 1950s and early ’60s, if you were to flip through the pages of Life or Look or the Saturday Evening Post and looked at the automobile ads, or if you picked up a brochure from your local Ford dealer, you might have noticed that all the pictures of these cars were illustrations, not photographs.

These beautiful, airbrushed renderings weren’t always one hundred percent accurate. These cars were longer and sleeker than the real ones. The wheelbases were extended. They sat lower to the ground than the actual cars did, appeared to have a wider stance. The chrome sparkled. The glass glistened.

My dad drew those cars.

Dad—his name was Everett—spent much of his life in the advertising world as a commercial artist. He wasn’t one of the execs knocking back scotches in fancy offices like those guys in Mad Men. He was in the trenches, hunched over his drafting table, airbrushing a fin, blending a reflected tree into the car’s graceful sheet metal, executing the outline of a perfectly round hubcap, freehand. (A sample of his work graces the title pages of this book.)

I loved to watch him work, and once, when I was three and Dad had stepped away from his workstation (this was when he had a home studio), I got into his chair and, with a crayon, proceeded to improve upon a $5,000 Cadillac job. (I am lucky to be alive.)

Dad bought me loads of toy cars because he loved them as much as I did. Dinky Toys, Corgis, kits that I had to paint and assemble myself, slot car sets where we would engage in races, shoulder to shoulder, our hands gripping the controllers.

And yet, until I reached the age of fifteen, Dad never had a car as beautiful as anything he created on a piece of art board. But we had been strolling a dealership lot one day, and spotted a discounted 1970 Dodge Charger, not unlike the car the bad guys drove in the Steve McQueen movie Bullitt. (Okay, it had a bench seat and a column shift, but it was still a Charger.)

“You should get that,” I said.

“Your mother would never go for it,” he said.

That was probably true. But he bought it, anyway. And in less than a year, that cool car would essentially become mine, although I would have given anything not to have had that happen the way it did. Dad was diagnosed with lung cancer, and in seven months we lost him. My mother did not drive, so I was her chauffeur, and whenever I needed a car, I didn’t have to ask whether it was available.