5/2/2007
Remembering Roger Huntington: 1926-1989
I probably wouldn’t be writing these words if it wasn’t for Roger Huntington, my favorite automotive journalist of all time. While there have been many great writers over the past half century, guys like Ken Purdy, LeRoi “Tex” Smith, Gray Baskerville, and others
, it was the work of Roger Huntington that reached out from the page and really pulled me in when I discovered that first box of musty old car magazines in 1974. I was ten years old and that early exposure ignited my passion for reading and collecting car magazines as well as writing for them.
Huntington’s unique writing style was characterized by a combination of the informative and the informal. His work delivered hard technical writing tempered by a choice of colloquial words and sentence structures that made it feel like you were reading a personal letter from him to you. He was one of the few to use italics, exclamation points and the first person “I” perspective to make the stories come alive. He’d start sentences with phrases like “Have you heard…”, “What do you think about…” and “I’ve heard that…” Roger made you want to read every word.
Huntington was born in Flint, Michigan in 1926 and remained a resident of the state until his death in 1989 at age 63. Being so close to the Detroit automakers, he was a virtual insider with access to the latest factory high performance news as soon as it was available. Though his first published article was a 1945 comparison of WWII combat aircraft engine designs that ran in a now defunct aviation magazine, his main attention was focused on the American auto industry.
Thanks to his political abilities and solid reputation for technical accuracy and unbiased views, he was just as welcome at the GM Tech Center as he was at Chrysler’s Chelsea Proving Grounds. As such, a major part of his professional repertoire was writing breaking-news columns like “Spotlight on Detroit; Forecasts, Facts and Rumors” for Motor Trend, “Motor City Memo” for Car Life, “Huntington’s Corner” for CARS and “Detroit Notebook” for the British publication Autocar. If you can name a newsworthy high performance vehicle package, speed equipment development or racing breakthrough made between 1955 and 1983, chances are good that Roger wrote about it as it happened. He also authored several books, including the superlative American Supercar (1983), a great historical review of Detroit muscle car development which may still be available from HP Books (If not, you guys should crank up another run. It’s among the best of its type).
