The "dean of automotive journalism," David E. Davis died during cancer surgery at 80.
A memorial service for David E. Davis, who passed away on March 27, will be held later this week — more details at the end of this remembrance by TheDetroitBureau.com Contributing Editor Mike Davis (no relation).
Since the passing many years ago of “Uncle” Tom McCahill, of Mechanix Illustrated fame, there has been no automotive writer better known than the inimitable David E. Davis, Jr., late of Campbell-Ewald’s Chevrolet advertising copywriting, Car and Driver, Automobile and finally of his own corpus.
I was one of the legion of David E.’s followers and admirers, and my only claim to fame is that my acquaintance with him probably goes, er, went back further than anyone else in the auto writing trade still kicking.
Sometime in 1962, when David E. was still at Campbell-Ewald plugging Chevrolet, he got in touch with me at Lincoln-Mercury Public Relations, where I was doing likewise for its brands. Undoubtedly this was because before joining Ford Motor Company in mid-1960 I had been the moonlighting Detroit columnist for Sports Cars Illustrated, New York based magazine of Ziff-Davis publications. David E. was about to leave the advertising agency to become editor of SCI, which he would soon rebrand as Car and Driver.
To pick my brain about my experiences with SCI, he invited me to lunch with him at one of those curious little watering holes he became so famous for discovering, in this case the Danish-American Sportsman’s Club, in a run-down (soon to be torn down) neighborhood west of the Wayne State University campus in mid-town Detroit.
We soon established that, though we both were Kentuckians, it was unlikely we were related. Nor were we, unfortunately, related to the Davis of Ziff-Davis. However, I did already know David E.’s father, an antique dealer on Woodward Avenue in Birmingham, the fashionable northside suburb of Detroit.
Thereafter I saw him little and courted him rarely as we practiced our respective trades.
In the 1970s, Ford nominated me to be its domestic PR expert on the forthcoming Fiesta from Europe, and I delivered the first prototype to David E. for test driving, just as he was moving out of a high-rise apartment overlooking Lake St. Clair on the way to new digs in Ann Arbor.
In the 1980s, we both attended, at the same time, a program at the Detroit Institute of Arts on the art deco design of 1930s automobiles, and my teen-aged son Matt and I happened to sit in the darkened auditorium in the row right in front of David E. He tapped me on the shoulder—the program had yet to begin—and I casually introduced Matt to him. I had no idea what a god David E. had become for teen-aged males.
When David E.’s obit appeared in the online New York Times March 27, my son called me from Louisville, where he is a medical doctor, to bring it to my attention and recall being introduced to this – for him — almost mythical character. David E. would have been tickled to hear this—and I hope that somehow he can.
(For TheDetroitBureau.com’s obituary of David E. Davis, Click Here.)
The next time I saw him was in 2006 when he was featured speaker at a Detroit Adcraft Club luncheon. I covered it for a story in TheDetroitBureau’s predecessor online magazine, TheCarConnection.com, in which I used David E.’s bio as a way into recounting histories of the various auto “buff” magazines. (That article was recently reprinted in Wheels, the publication of the National Automotive History Collection at the Detroit Public Library.)
What I recall best about his remarks was what novelist Elmore “Dutch” Leonard had taught him at Campbell-Ewald decades earlier: write like you talk, and read everything you have written aloud to yourself before submitting.
More recently, I recruited David E. as the speaker at a luncheon held by several dozen retired Ford executives. Of course, he seemed to know half the people in the room.
Late in March, David E. went into surgery for bladder cancer. I understand it was a difficult operation and a day or so later he died unexpectedly. Nearly eight years ago, I survived a similar but undoubtedly less complicated surgery for the same diagnosis.
So that’s my story about David E. and me. There must be thousands of similar tales out there.
A memorial service for David E. will be held 2 p.m. Thursday, April 28th at First Presbyterian Church, 1432 Washtenaw Avenue, Ann Arbor. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Knight-Wallace Fellows, 620 Oxford Rd., Ann Arbor 48104, a University of Michigan affiliate “that nurtures exceptional journalists.” If David E. was never invited to participate, he should have been.