Bedard

Patrick Bedard.

Pat Bedard (“beh-DARD”) has announced he is retiring from Car & Driver Magazine.
Bedard hired on in 1967 from Chrysler — that’s 41 years.

One-by-one the great influences on my life disappear.
First was David P. Morgan long ago, who was Editor of Trains Magazine when I first subscribed.
Morgan was already fairly old, and lasted maybe 10 years.
He was replaced by a railfan; a louver counter.
Various Editors have come-and-gone, and now the magazine is in fairly good hands; but not Morgan.
Morgan was impressed with the incredible drama of railroading, and related it.
It’s the same appreciation I have; that 89 bazilyun tons of hurtling steel can be kept on path by tiny flanges following a fixed guideway.
And the fact a train can move so much more freight than a truck.
An incredible triumph of technology.
Recently I’ve been viewing cab-ride videos.
A TV camera is placed on the locomotive pilot, and records the train gobbling up track at 60-70 mph.
It’s awesome, and I’m sure Morgan would be entranced, just like me.
And like me, Morgan was old enough to witness steam locomotives; although in my case it was because Pennsy and Reading (“REDD-ing;” not “READ-ing”) held onto steam long after most railroads dieselized.
Steam locomotives weren’t that well-suited to railroad operations, but they sure were sensory overload.
Morgan is long dead. —I think he smoked.

A few weeks ago Simon Pontin, the long-time morning-man at radio-station WXXI, the classical-music radio-station in Rochester we listen to, retired.
He was a purveyor of the jaundiced eye, like me; gentle humor poking fun at self-declared experts.
There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth at the station when he retired; and I myself will miss his point-of-view. (The weeping was probably because he generated so many listeners.)
On-and-on people went about their knowledge of classical music being expanded by him, but to me it was Karl Haas’s “Adventures in Good Music;” syndicated on WXXI in the ‘70s.
Thanks to Haas I was exposed to Copeland and Stravinsky.
Pontin had the jaundiced eye, and his programming reflected it. He’d air “Cows have Fun” and “Time to Hibernate.” Both are hardly classical music.

Bedard was the best writer Car & Driver had, even eclipsing Brock Yates. Bedard was spare and enlightening.
He had an annoying habit of being a Conservative tub-thumper, and often manipulated statistics to support his agenda; as Conservatives seem want to do.
Recently he panned mass transit as a boondoggle — that individual automobile operation was more efficient.
All we needed was more highway construction — engage eminent domain. (“Pave paradise,” etc.)
But I always dog-eared Bedard — a good read. Spare and enlightening.
Bedard bewails -a) the flip-flop of auto-demand over 40 years — how in 1967 American automobiles were supreme, and the ferriners cheap; yet now it’s the ferriners that are supreme, and American automobiles cheap.
Bedard also bewails -b) the gumint bailouts of Chrysler and General Motors, how doing so is degà vu British Leland (“lee-LIND”). British Leyland fell apart in the ‘80s, after extravagant gumint spending.
Yet “Hey, I’m not the official cheering section for the 130-some-year-old internal-combustion engine. My loyalty is to what works.” And “man is the cleverest of critters...... mankind will dazzle you with invention.”
He’s right — our only hope against the ravages of global warming and rising sea-levels.

• I am a railfan, and have been since I was a child. I am also a car-guy, and an appreciator of classical music.
• RE: “A louver counter.......” —Railfans seem to come in two genres: -a) those like me, who are smitten by the drama of railroading, and -b) the “louver counters,” those who claim superiority based on their knowledge of railroading. A GP7 can be distinguished from a GP9 (later), by the number of louvers in a certain side-panel. I never cared about this, so I couldn’t distinguish a GP7 from a GP9. (“GP” stands for “General-Purpose;” the road-switcher format as interpreted by General Motors’ Electromotive Division [EMD]. The road-switcher format was pioneered by Alco. (“Alco” is American Locomotive Company of Schenectady, NY. For years, American Locomotive Company was a primary manufacturer of railroad steam locomotives. [It was originally a merger of many steam locomotive manufacturers.] —With the changeover by railroads to diesel-locomotives, American Locomotive Company brought out a line of diesel-electric railroad locomotives much like the railroads were switching to, and changed its name to “Alco.” Alco tanked a while ago; they never competed as well as EMD.) —GP is four driving-wheels per truck — SD [Special-Duty] is six driving-wheels per truck. The GP7 was EMD’s first road-switcher offering.)
• I saw my Pennsy and Reading steam locomotives on Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines.“Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines” (PRSL) is an amalgamation of Pennsylvania and Reading railroad-lines in south Jersey to counter the fact the two railroads had too much track. It was promulgated in 1933. It serviced mainly the Jersey seashore from Philadelphia. —We lived in Erlton at that time, a small suburb of Philadelphia in south Jersey until I was 13. Erlton was founded in the ‘30s, named after its developer, whose name was Earl. Erlton was north of Haddonfield, an old Revolutionary town. (PRSL went through it, which is where I first watched trains with my father.)
• WXXI-FM, 91.5, is the classical-music radio-station in Rochester we listen to, publicly supported.
• “Brock Yates,” an automotive writer based in Western NY, was a founder of Car & Driver magazine, when it took over and renamed “Sports cars Illustrated” in the ‘60s. Yates is retired.
• “Ferriners” is foreigners.
• “British Leland” was a massive government conglomerate of the many British automobile companies. It was promulgated to offset the fact those companies were failing. It too tanked.