Matt Murray
mattm@optonline.net
Former AutoWeek publisher dies
March 06, 2002
SERVICES
Memorial service: Saturday, March 9, 11
a.m. at the Detroit Athletic Club.
Memorial tributes: VanElslander Cancer
Center, c/o St. John's Health System Foundation,
22101 Mack Avenue, Suite 102,
Detroit, MI 48236.
A SELECTION OF LEON MANDEL COLUMNS
You know about people by the speed
they drive - published Oct. 31, 1994
1952 Jaguar XK120C: C-Type chassis
No. 017 is reunited with old friends - published June 12, 1995
A personal note to the friends i've
met and the friends i haven't met yet - published Dec. 30, 1996
Jaundiced Eye - published June 26,
2000
Jaundiced Eye - published May 28,
2001
When Leon Mandel was a college student at Cornell in the early
1950s, he received a modest inheritance. He spent it all on a new
Porsche 356.
"Much later, when they were speaking with me again, my parents
asked "Why?" and the only answer I could offer them was that I
didn't have a choice. My parents, I came to understand, had
expected me to invest the sum in something like IBM," Mandel
remembered in a keynote speech at last summer's Porsche Rennsport
Reunion at Lime Rock. "If I had invested it, in IBM or something
like that, I would certainly have been wealthy within a decade.
"Instead, I bought a Porsche...and got a life."
That life with and among cars and car people ended when Mandel,
diagnosed with leukemia, died at age 73. Found in his Grosse
Pointe Farms, Mich., home on March 5, he appeared to have passed
peacefully, ending a long and heroic battle against the disease.
Last summer at Lime Rock, with hundreds of Porschephiles
including numerous accomplished racers, anticipating the rest of
his personal story, Mandel instead stepped down from the podium,
making a dramatic end to his presentation by curtailing it
unexpectedly. Most in the infield tent knew the rest of the
story, to one degree or another, either firsthand or by reading
what he wrote over 40 years in automotive journalism.
They knew how that 356 carried young Mandel and his beloved wife
Olivia across the continent in a memorable pre-Interstate drive
to San Francisco. That he had sold "foreign" cars in Kjell
Qvale's operation, and both Mandels had gotten deeply involved in
the sports car and racing communities. How that involvement led
Leon to activities like racing a Jaguar C-Type at Torrey Pines,
working as a track announcer and as a turn marshall, even doing a
little wrenching for Joe Huffaker. How he wrote race reports for
a San Francisco auto racing weekly called Competition Press, and
then followed the publication when it moved to Reno, and made
friends there with casino operator and car collector
extraordinaire William Fisk Harrah. That friendship led to two
books, one Harrah's biography, the other called American Cars, a
history that centered around Harrah's enormous collection (as
photographed by Lucinda Lewis), a book that was successful enough
to be named an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Mandel wrote six books in all, including co-authoring the
autobiography of Peter Revson, Speed with Style. He regarded
Revson as a close friend, and the racer's untimely death in an F1
testing accident in South Africa in 1974 affected Mandel deeply.
It would be years before he formed close relationships with other
drivers, notably Danny Sullivan, whose season in Can-Am with
Garvin Brown Racing formed the basis for Mandel's book Fast Lane
Summer, and the late Al Holbert.
Revson's death always figured in the background as Mandel
tirelessly campaigned on behalf of driver safety in all forms of
racing through his column, The Jaundiced Eye, and by bending the
ears of racing's most powerful leaders. He was a benefactor and
booster of the Championship Auto Racing Auxiliary, which raises
funds to help the families of racing drivers who die or suffer
severe injury in open wheel racing.
Although his magazine career included stints as senior editor at
Motor Trend and as managing editor of Car and Driver, it was
Competition Press and its successor, AutoWeek, for which he had
enduring affection, loyalty and an abiding sense of its mission
as America's only newsweekly for car enthusiasts. When Crain
Communications acquired the publication in 1983, he was lured to
Detroit from Reno as its editor in chief. In 1988 he became the
publisher, and stayed in that role through last November, when
Rich Ceppos was named to that post and Mandel became publisher
emeritus. At around the same time, he was suffering a recurrence
of the leukemia and had appeared to be beating it again.
Well-known as he was for his own writings, Mandel may be best
remembered by literally hundreds of writers and editors with whom
he worked over the years as a demanding, sometimes surly, mentor
and editor. His vision and spirit are at the core of what
AutoWeek has been and has become.
In 2000, he received an Automotive Hall of Fame Distinguished
Service Citation recognizing him for decades of support of auto
enthusiasm.
Mr. Mandel is predeceased by his wife of 42 years, Olivia. He is
survived by his son and daughter-in-law, Dutch and Rebecca of
Grosse Pointe, Mich.; daughter and son-in-law, Olivia and Leo
MacLeod of Portland, Ore.; and five grandchildren, Jacob, Matthew
and Clayton Mandel and Alexander and Madeline MacLeod.
-- AutoWeek
[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type image/gif which had a name of
pixl.gif]
[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type image/jpeg which had a name of
1702.jpg]
[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type image/gif which had a name of
spacer.gif]
[demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type image/gif which had a name of
largeDot.gif]
/// unsubscribe/change address requests to majordomo@autox.team.net or try
/// http://www.team.net/mailman/listinfo
/// Partial archives at http://www.team.net/archive
|