The Dawn of HackBlog

Having just returned from Vintage at Saratoga and had my chance to shake sweaty hands with the Hack Mechanic minions (and as Yale Rachlin used to say, "anyone who says they get tired of hearing 'I love your column' is lying through his teeth"), it seems a particularly appropriate time to start this blog.

I resist this, as I resist anything that smacks of self-promotion and flagrant narcissism. 

However, I will freely admit that I now have a certain enlightened self-interest: I am writing a book (working title: "Car Guy: Why men (of which I am one) buy, fix, collect, sometimes sell, and love cars, and how they saved my sanity (the cars, not the men)"). Robert Bentley Publishers is very interested, but I do not yet have a deal. And in a world where the old media (publishing) seems to increasingly rely on the new media (blog hits)... well, here I am.

You'll have to buy the book to start at the very beginning, but the basic story goes like this. I imprinted on BMWs early, but for reasons its higher CMR (chick magnet rating), my first car was a 1973 Triumph GT6. It broke. I fixed it. Over and over. Once I started buying and fixing BMWs in the early 1980s, I didn't look back. I sent a few unsolicited restoration and repair articles to Roundel (then edited by Parker Spooner). He ran them. I was happy.

When the BMW CCA appointed Yale Rachlin editor in the mid-80s, he called me up out of the blue and asked me if I wanted to write for him every month. The first two months went ok, but then I panicked. I had nothing to write about. I called Yale.

"You DO fix cars, don't you?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Well, write about that."

I thought that, by dashing these pieces off, I was obviously short-changing the readership, but in fact it was the beginning of, as Satch Carlson (Roundel's current editor) says, writing about getting myself into and out of BMW-related trouble.

So when I meet folks at events like Vintage at Saratoga, and when they say "You do what I do," I say "I know! The only difference is that I write a thousand words a month about it."

Here we go...

--Rob