“Did Yates have a Facebook?”

Brock Yates, 1933-2016.

“Pardon me for this heresy, but the launching pad for this magazine was not a better road test, but rather the vitality of the written word as energized by operating in the world’s center of literary and artistic creativity. And that was New York City.” —Brock Yates, 1933-2016, a founding ne’er-do-well of Car and Driver magazine.
My most recent issue chronicles the death of Yates.
There’s little to say I haven’t already said in an earlier blog.
Except that above quote about sums it up.
I’ve subscribed to Car and Driver since college; that’s over 50 years. I discovered it discarded in a laundromat, and it was much more interesting than Hot Rod Magazine, to which I subscribed at that time.
Hot Rod seemed aimed at teeny-boppers.
I subscribed AFTER Car and Driver’s infamous G-T-O flap, which got the sportscar guys all upset.
Car and Driver had the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to suggest Pontiac’s G-T-O was better than the Ferrari G-T-O.
It was, sorta. And Pontiac’s G-T-O was a cheater — a 421 cubic-inch motor, to make it equal the Ferrari.
A G-T-O Ferrari is more desirable, but ya don’t buy groceries with it.
To just start it ya’d need a phalanx of mechanics. With the Pontiac ya just hop in and turn they key.
After the war the sportscar guys became elitists.
And well they did. Detroit’s cars were turkeys.
Pontiac’s G-T-O gave people like Yates reason to inflame the elitists.
Sadly, that tendency toward bombast and rebellion overhung most of Yates’ later endeavors.
Yates lived near me, and I met him a few years ago.
“I’m a long-time Car and Driver subscriber,” I told him.
“We gotta set you straight,” he declared. That was after he was fired for costing too much.
Yates suffered from Alzheimer’s, and had to leave his estate in Wyoming, NY, where I met him.
Yates was forever hornswoggled by his desire to appear rebellious, but there was that penchant for “vitality of the written word.”
Would Yates have a Facebook?
“Vitality of the written word” is DOOMED!