Mr. Gavin Conway has now spent a fair amount of time in the editor’s chair at Automobile Magazine. He is a man of calm demeanor and well-modulated voice, apparently unflappable. This must be a very pleasant change for the unfortunate morlocks who toiled under his predecessor, Mrs. Jean Jennings, as she slowly drove Automobile into the ditch.

Gavin Conway is a Canadian who spent some years learning the automotive magazine craft in Great Britain. The entire world makes fun of English cuisine, but clearly there’s something in the British diet that grows better-than-average magazine editors. As I understand it, Angus MacKenzie—who came across from England’s CAR Magazine to take over Motor Trend—recommended Gavin Conway and helped in the process of recruiting him. Motor Trend was a tired old jade when Angus plucked her from the bar-room floor and restored her to respectability. I expect Gavin Conway to work similar magic on the magazine that I created for Rupert Murdoch.

Primedia—owner of Motor Trend and Automobile, along with a small fleet of lesser enthusiast magazines—is now doing its best (if that’s the word) to get out of the enthusiast magazine business altogether. Primedia has been the bag lady of automotive magazine publishing ever since they got into that business in 1991. At that time the company was called K-III. The chairman’s name was Bill Reilly, and he told the press that there was nothing to it: “Believe me, there’s no mystery in this stuff.” With that deathless utterance he established a pattern of feckless incompetence that has persisted to this day. Now Mr. Reilly’s successors have admitted that they really weren’t cut out for the magazine business and they’ve put the whole shebang up for sale. Let us hope that new owners will encourage Messrs. Conway and MacKenzie to take wing and do everything they’d like to do with their respective magazines.

Gavin Conway replaced Jean Jennings as a judge at the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance this Spring, and he and I were standing with our wives in the middle of the cocktail party that preceded the gala black-tie dinner that would honor the great Derek Bell. (A highlight of the evening was a brilliant piece of film that took all of us around the Le Mans circuit at full chat with Derek Bell in a Porsche 956.) I kept spotting friends in the crowd and calling them over to meet the man who now does what I used to do at Automobile Magazine. After I had introduced him to eighteen or twenty people, he leaned toward me conspiratorially and said, “It’s Conway.” Aaaaack! I’d been introducing the unfortunate man to all of these automotive heavies as “Gavin MacLeod!” He looks nothing like the captain of The Love Boat, and I never watched an episode of The Love Boat, yet my brain, handicapped by a couple of glasses of champagne and the onset of senile dementia, somehow came up with that name. I apologized about nine times, until he was sick of me.

I have no defense, except to say that people tend to get my own name wrong pretty regularly. The worker-bees who prepare press passes are especially imaginative where my name is concerned. In her old age, my own mother tended to call me “Jim,” the name of her younger brother.

Somewhere I have a handwritten letter from author Tom Wolfe in my untidy files. We became acquainted when he was researching The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby in the Sixties. We ran into each other in a Greenwich Village restaurant called Sayat Nova, and wound up having dinner together. A day later I got his letter. It said, “I just realized that I spent an entire evening with David E. Davis, Jr. and never stopped calling him ‘Don!’” More humbling still, I was invited to his publisher’s party when the book came out. As I wandered among the buffet tables and the bars I realized that two very pretty girls—who looked like recent Bryn Mawr graduates—were trailing me. I smiled, and swung around to introduce myself. The young woman who was apparently acting as spokesperson approached tentatively and asked, “Are you someone?” I replied, “Well, yes and no, but probably not.” They dropped me like a hot rock and disappeared into the crowd.

Tom Wolfe’s book changed the course of automotive journalism, starting at Car and Driver, where I was just beginning to find my way as an editor and publisher. Sometimes Tom Wolfe and I see one another on a New York street, or in the terminal at LaGuardia, or at some publishing function, and my reaction is always the same: “Call me anything you want to, Tom. You and your ‘New Journalism’ made it possible for me to enjoy a lifelong joyous adventure among the car magazines.”