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AUTO GOSSIP
AFTER HAVING SPENT an eventful 33+ years following the world’s auto industry, it has been fun in the last ten focussing my interests primarily on automotive gossip: gleaning tidbits of the curious,...
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AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY YEARS
THIS IS A CELEBRATION OF WIFE DOTTIE, known to many of you as Dorothy Clendenin. A person-to-person get-together was planned for relatives and friends for today, July 23, the date selected as the...
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SAVORING LENNY LIPTON’S LABOR OF LOVE PART 1
MY ACQUISITION OF BOOKS arises occasionally from reading The New York Times Book Review or the London Review of Books. This time around, it involves the latter, but in a most circuitous way. I...
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SAVORING LENNY LIPTON’S LABOR OF LOVE PART 2
I’VE JUST STARTED Lenny Lipton’s astonishing 795-page celebration of The Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Age. It’s not the kind of book...
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GORE VIDAL’S VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET PART 1
“THE PURPOSE OF SATIRE, it has been rightly said,” humorist Michael Flanders observed, “is to strip away the veneer of comfortable illusion and cozy half-truth. And our job, as I see it, it to put it...
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GORE VIDAL’S VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET PART 2
MANY PLAYWRIGHTS PREFACE their dialogue with only brief descriptions of scenes and characters, the interpretation of the production left largely to the director. By contrast, Gore Vidal offered...
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A ’52 FORD—AND THOSE TESTING IT
A ROAD TEST VARIATION in Road and Track, April 1952, also provided staff automotive bios at the time. Here are tidbits on the test car, a Ford Customline, and its testers. This and other images from...
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KEEPIN’ PHOENIX KEWL
TURNING BLACKTOP GRAY is an innovative means of reducing the effects of climate change in Phoenix, the nation’s fifth largest city (news to me) and hottest (familiar from my visits, even in April)....
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SMALL-TOWN AUTO PRODUCTION
FORTY YEARS AGO, it seems like a perfect win-win: Locate an auto plant in a relatively isolated area, attract an eager workforce from miles around at bargain labor rates, and even have the states...
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PORSCHE 356—70 YEARS AGO
ROAD AND TRACK got several things right in its November 1952 first road test of a Porsche, but in other ways its crystal ball was fogged by adulation for Herr Doktor Ferdinand Porsche, who had died at...
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