Allan Girdler, at the time of this letter, was Court Reporter for the Tulsa World, a morning newspaper. This is where I met Allan when going to work as a copyboy in the Summer of 1963. Then Allan was the Police Beat reporter, working late hours covering "rime running crampant" as a famous super duck on the Kansas City radio would say.
I was his junior by a few years and a freshman in college. He was married and had a couple of kids.
At the time I met Allan, he was writing freelance articles for several major car magazines, including Road & Track and Car Life. There are some very good articles that he wrote from that freelance period but the writings that I like and remember the best are those he wrote later as Editor of Car Life.
Allan had a variety of cars at the time including a Chrysler 300 with a hemi and an MGTC with a Volvo P1800 engine/transmission set up which he'd just taken to some big NHRA drag meet and had sold the story to a magazine.
Not long after I got to the World, maybe he already had it in fact, he showed up to work with a BRG and aluminum Lotus 7, one of the strangest cars I'd ever seen up to that time. It changed my world from drag strip/street racers to sports cars and road racing. I became part of his race crew and that was that as they say.
Allan went on, within a half-dozen years to become editor of Car Life, a magazine which he brought out of the doldrums but was then bought up by another magazine just as it was taking off again. He moved his family to sunny California, next door to a member of some major California-type rock band.
If memory serves me, Allan became an editor of Road & Track soon after Car Life was bought out. He was with R&T for some time and then, again if memory serves, freelanced for some time, went back to editing and eventually became editor of Cycle World, now owned by the same company that had bought R&T from its private owner and housed in the same building in Newport Beach.
During this time I quit the World, became editor of a small bi-weekly in a nearby town, then transferred to a university in Kansas and entered the Air Force days after graduating. I got to Vietnam, the place I was trying to avoid by joining the USAF, within a year. Allan's letters followed me on my adventures, even when I returned, served my enlistment, got married and had a kid of my own. My son is named after two of my racing friends...Allan is his middle name. It's often said that he's the "boy with three last names" although that's not technically right.
Since those days Allan has been freelancing and has authored several books on subjects ranging from photography to Corvette and Harley Davidson histories.
He's now living in California and is a grandfather several times over. I'm not.
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