Yahoo Autos That Summer Month I Spent among 7000 Car Books
This is just a story. It's true, except for the parts faded from memory or distorted by nostalgia. If there's a moral, I haven't found it or intended it. It's about how I wound up spending a month in a Car and Driver editor's bathroom.
In 1972, I was 11 years old, and my family decided it needed an adventure. My mom wanted to take me, my brother, and my sister from our home in Santa Barbara, California, to where she grew up: New Rochelle in New York's Westchester County. Flying? This was 1972, before deregulation made airline travel affordable. Back when American families were expected to take long car trips. My mom wanted to drive.
My parents looked at buying a new station wagon for the journey. Dad really liked the Dodge Monaco, which, in retrospect, with its hidden headlights, fake wood trim that extended up the rearmost pillar, and hard-core dual-air-conditioning system, would have been a lush yacht for the cross-country adventure. But my mom thought it was appalling. Nope, she wanted to drive the car she already had.
That car was a 1971 Fiat 124 Special. Our next-door neighbor in Santa Barbara was the local Fiat–Alfa Romeo dealer back then, and it was out of loyalty to Emilio Valsecchi that our family drove two 124s-a white '69 sport coupe for my grandmother and the cream-colored 124 Special sedan for my mom (that's the right color in the photo up top, although the car is from a later model year with big bumpers). Dad kept driving our beat-to-hell 1965 Ford Country Squire.
Mom's 124 was "Special" because of its 1.4-liter four, rated at 76 horsepower, in place of the standard 65-hp 1.2-liter. When Car and Driver road-tested one in 1970 it ran a quarter-mile in 19.5 seconds at 66 mph. With its four-speed manual transmission, and without air conditioning or power anything, it was state-of-the-art family transportation if your family lived near Turin and kept goats. But we were going to use it on a transcontinental trip across America.
My mom loved that Fiat. So she had Emilio fit the luggage rack from a 124 wagon on the roof, and we piled into it that June and headed east. It was my mom driving, my grandmother DeDe riding shotgun, and me and my nine-year-old brother Linus in back, with my seven-year-old little sister Cady planted between us like a carbon rod to control the violent fissionable reaction. The idea was to drive to Detroit, where my dad would fly out to meet us, then we'd go six up from there into New York.
Once in New York, we'd spend the month in a borrowed house in Pelham Manor, a tony town near New Rochelle. "Someone else's house!" I rebelled. "That's insane. We can't live in another family's house." But my mother was content that her good childhood friend Maureen had found something perfect. After that month-long stay, Dad would fly back home and we'd set out westward in the Fiat.
The eastward trip was frantic. My mom hated Vegas, my grandmother always took my side in the fights between Linus and me, and Cady ducked. I almost didn't eat the entire two weeks, but did drink a lot of orange juice. The highlights for me were driving through locusts in one of the Midwestern states, touring Ford's River Rouge plant where we watched Mustangs being assembled, and staying at a motel called the Lazy A in Wyoming that was so awful it has been a reference point for lousiness in my life ever since.
But as July began, we inevitably arrived in Pelham Manor. I dreaded the idea of living amid other people's filth and squalor. I imagined a place where there'd be dead cats on the overgrown front lawn and the hulk of an Edsel in back. Pelham Manor, though, is a nice town, and the house we had rented was, well, stately. A big thing on a leafy road. I remember it as vaguely Tudor in style, but I was 11 and couldn't have distinguished Tudor style from a Quonset hut.
"This is a very nice home," my mom told us. "It belongs to a family that's in Europe for the month. We will take better care of it than our own house." It truly was a house nicer than our own.
There were two places in the house from which we were banned. One was the garage. The second was the owner's home office. I was curious. But, I behaved. At first.
In one of the rooms was a snapshot. It was of a kid I assumed to be one of the people who lived in the house. But what was intriguing about this snapshot was that it was taken in the Houston Astrodome near an AMC Javelin. Well, not just a Javelin, but the Javelin that was performing the legendary Astro Spiral Jump in that arena. That's the stunt where a car speeds into a spiral-shaped ramp, does a barrel roll in midair, is caught by another ramp, and drives off. It was first publicly performed in the Astrodome in January 1972 and was featured in a story in the April 1972 issue of a thing called Motor Trend. My 11-year-old mind remembered the story, assumed that whoever was living in this house had something to do with it, and, suddenly, getting into the owner's office became a critical mission.
It was a forbidden place, but the door wasn't locked. And as soon as I could I snuck in. What I found was shelves and shelves of books. And every one of those books was about one subject: cars.
There were books on Ferrari and Porsche and engineering and marketing. Books with photos of great races and long-ago car shows. Books whose authors' names I didn't know then and know well now. It was car-nerd heaven. And for that month of July, whenever I could, I'd sneak into that library and just read. Often using the excuse of using the attached bathroom . . . for hours.
It turns out the friend of my mom's friend Maureen from whom we had rented that house was Karl Ludvigsen. That's the same Karl Ludvigsen who was Editor-in-Chief of Sports Cars Illustrated when it was decided the magazine needed a better name, and so he became the first editor of Car and Driver in 1961, a story he related for our 60th-anniversary issue. He was even the writer of that first cover story about driving a Birdcage Maserati.
The Michigan-born, MIT-educated Ludvigsen's career is incredibly long and varied, including stints with General Motors and other carmakers, work in public relations and periodicals, and the authorship of dozens of books including definitive histories of the Corvette. I'm sure many of the books in his library that I inhaled that July were actually his own. And, yes, it was Ludvigsen who had written that article on the Astro Spiral Jump I remembered so well.
When the month ended, I didn't want to leave. But the Ludvigsen family returned, and I met him for a moment. I still didn't really know his name, or all that he had done, and was convinced that he'd summarily execute me if he knew how I had violated his sanctum and put my grubby fingers all over his books. But I still knew enough to be gobsmacked when I met him for that moment. It was a good moment. And from then on, all I've ever wanted to be was someone who wrote about cars.
We piled back into the Fiat and headed back to California. The rest of the trip was uneventful; about all I remember is the buzz of that tiny engine as we covered the miles.
In 2011, while I was writing for the New York Times' Automobiles section, an item appeared on its blog. Ludvigsen had sold his library of 7000 books and 300,000 photographs to the Collier Collection in Florida to incorporate into its massive reference library. So, I shared the story of my month among those volumes with James Cobb and Norman Mayersohn, my editors at the Times. They forwarded it on to Ludvigsen. He wrote back from his current home in England.
"This personal history matters to me," he wrote in that short email. "Needless to say, I would have done the same thing! Curiosity is a great asset for a journalist!" I consider that absolution for my sin of invading his library.
The world moves on. When I got my driver's license I taught myself to do Rockford-style reverse 180s in that Fiat until I ripped the front end off the car while doing one. My grandmother and dad are gone now, but my mom is still active with a radar lock on her 87th birthday. And Karl Ludvigsen, who is now 85, is still churning out books. He wrote one about Reid Railton that was released in 2018. I still want to be him when I grow up.
But there's one mystery that persists. Despite several attempts during that July a full 47 years ago, I never was able to get into Ludvigsen's garage. At this point, I don't want to know what was in there, because my imagination is likely better than the reality.
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