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Right now, Jack Kerouac is being remembered and celebrated on university campuses and in bars catering to the would-be literati. His original manuscript for On the Road was typed in a mere three weeks in 1951 on a single roll of paper that he somehow forced through the typewriter, and that original version has now been published as a book in its own right, as On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking, 416 pages, $25.95).

It is widely believed in those circles that we all piled into cars and set off for unknown destinations as a direct result of reading Kerouac’s opus. What they forget, however, is that millions of us were on the road during the Great Depression, and millions more set out to see America after World War II ended in 1945, and President Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway System.

By the time I read On the Road in the Sixties I had crisscrossed the United States more than twenty times, often in very cool cars—though unlike Jack Kerouac never in cars stolen by some mythic bisexual buddy. If Kerouac’s Neal Cassady had dropped into my life with a stolen ride I would have called the cops. People somehow knew that I was available to deliver cars over great distances—often very nice cars—and they often asked me to deliver them. Sometimes I even got paid for the service.

Then came car magazines—to my mind, the best job anybody could have. We drive interesting cars to interesting places, and we talk to interesting people when we get there. Even now, every time I meet some new car that intrigues me, one of my first thoughts is, “What’ll it be like on the run from New York to Los Angeles?” And, just often enough to keep the mind alive, I get to find out.

The recent death of Luciano Pavarotti affected me in a characteristically odd way. I admired him greatly, as a personality, a singer, and as a great man who was determined to enjoy himself to the fullest, regardless of the cost. He had an appetite as big as the Hollywood Bowl, and was known to host brilliant alfresco lunches at his villa in Santa Maria del Mugnano, just south of Modena.

I first went to Modena to visit Ferrari in 1965, and one of my recurring fantasies in the last couple of decades was that I would be visiting in Modena and some friend of a friend would call me at my hotel and ask if I’d care to motor down to Pavarotti’s house for a late lunch in the garden. I suppose that it might be possible to have a disappointing lunch in Italy, however I can say with absolute certainty that I have never had a disappointing lunch in Italy. Thus, my fantasy about lunch à la Pavarotti automatically assumed that his food would have been the equal of his voice at its best. Speaking of voices, there would have been gorgeous people there and they would have arrived in gorgeous red cars built in nearby Maranello. And since we’re dreaming, I would have arrived in the Ferrari 250 Tour de France that I drove in 1960 and ’61. It was destroyed in a garage fire, but it would have returned from the dead just so I could show it off on this unusual occasion.

But sometimes the magic happens. I went to Lime Rock, Connecticut, one Saturday in the early 1960s to visit John Fitch, who was then building a very nice modified version of the Chevrolet Corvair called the Fitch Sprint. It had better suspension and more power and a mildly custom-trimmed exterior, making it recognizable as a unique make in its own right. I was and am a great admirer of John Fitch, because of his success as a driver with Briggs Cunningham’s racing team; for his epic drive in the 1955 Mille Miglia in a factory Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing; and for his brilliant career in World War II as a P-51 fighter pilot.

We spent the morning in his shop and drove a couple of his cars. This day was all sunshine and good feelings, and John astonished me by asking if I’d join him for lunch in the next town at the home of the great and oft-married band leader, Artie Shaw. I leaped at the opportunity, and soon found myself in Artie Shaw’s home being entertained by the great entertainer himself. His eighth, last, and longest-lasting wife was Evelyn Keyes, who was every inch a movie star, and who prepared and served an outdoor lunch for us just like anybody else’s put-upon helpmate.

It turned into a fantastic afternoon. Shaw was a great raconteur with an opinion, right or wrong, on any and every subject—a sort of walking Wikipedia. I had come of age listening to his records, even dancing to his music at proms and lakeside dance pavilions, and I was in my element. Now I realize that my “lunch with Pavarotti” fantasy wasn’t so far-fetched after all. Hell, I had lunch with John Fitch, Evelyn Keyes, and Artie Shaw! Pavarotti probably had fantasies about having lunch with me.

Jim Press is the best automotive executive of the current generation. He can hold a hotel ballroom full of dealers spellbound, speaking in an easygoing, conversational manner. Only Lee Iacocca, of recent memory, had the same sort of power. To share the platform with Jim Press as a speaker is to suffer a sort of lingering death as you realize again just how much better than you he really is. He is the one human constant that we perceive when we study the enormous success of Toyota in the United States. Everything looks a little better at Chrysler as you read this, because Jim Press has left Toyota and—as vice chairman and co-president with Tom LaSorda, under ex-Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli—taken the wheel at the company Daimler-Benz couldn’t manage at all.

http://magazine.windingroad.com/windingroad/200712web/?folio=9

Magazine Issue: Winding Road Issue 27