I was 4 years old when my late brother Ray bought a new 1960 Oldsmobile 98 convertible (he was 13 years older), and I was hooked! Top down on a warm summer night, listening to “Fun, Fun, Fun” by the Beach Boys on the radio (with added reverb unit), that was heaven. At other times Ray owned a 1966 Austin Healey 3000, a 1953 Studebaker Starliner, and later an MG Midget and Honda S2000. My father owned a 1959 Pontiac Catalina at the time, a powerful black beauty with a silver metallic interior. Throughout the sixties Dad bought used Buick Wildcats. These powerful, stylish cars spawned my interest in all things automotive.

When I was 10 Ray took me to the Milwaukee Mile to see the USAC Stock Cars. For the first time I got to experience the sights, sounds, and sensations of those thundering Hemi- and 427-powered machines just feet away from me. I’ve been hooked on racing ever since.

My first story, on the Sesco Suzuki engine for Midget race cars, was published in Petersen’s Circle Track magazine in one of their first issues. I created a number of vintage race car stories for them, then in 1986 also began photographing for Collectible Automobile⎘ magazine. I started contributing to Dobbs Publishing’s magazines when they bought Corvette Fever in 1989, then followed friend and editor Paul Zazarine to the world’s first internet magazine, corvettemagazine.com⎘ in 1999. Paul then moved to Pontiac Enthusiast magazine a few years later, where he added several other Enthusiast titles, and I contributed to those magazines until they folded during the Great Recession. On the recommendation of Mike Yager of Mid America Motorworks⎘, I began writing auction analysis for Sports Car Market⎘ and their sister publications in 2007, and they are still a top client. In 2015 Motorbooks⎘, the world’s largest automotive book publisher, offered me a book, “The Complete Book of American Muscle Supercars”, which lead to six other coffee table books with them.

In 2022 Kelly and I began contributing to Linkage magazine, edited by Jim Pickering and Chester Allen, both of whom I’ve worked with for years. I also recently completed a number of catalog descriptions for a new auction house, Broad Arrow Auctions⎘ which allows me the opportunity to tell the stories of a wide variety of automobiles in 400 words or less.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana

I met my wife Kelly in June 1992 when I hired her to help me photograph a silver 1958 Corvette for Corvette Fever magazine, my top client throughout the 1990s. Her dad was a Ford guy, and over the years owned a 1951 Custom convertible, a mid-sixties Thunderbird, and a rare late-seventies LTD II 2-door coupe. Her brother Jeff also owned a Delorean and Mitsubushi 3000GT, so automobiles are in her DNA, too.

We made a great team right from the start — three months later we were engaged, and we were married in September 1993. Kelly is a fine photographer, too, toting her red Nikon D5500, and she shares my enthusiasm for vehicles that look good and perform well.

We are life-long residents of the upper Midwest of the USA. We have two incredible children, son Sean and daughter Keara, a wonderful son-in-law, Brandan Stobbs, and our two grandchildren who inherited the “can’t drive 55” gene from their mother and grandmother. I have recently retired from the corporate world, most recently as a Data Steward and Data Analyst, working for the same manufacturing company I joined in 1974. I now have more time to devote to faith, family, writing, photography and music (I still want to be a bass player when I grow up).

I took up photography in 1976, starting with a Practika 35mm SLR. After a few months of using that camera the revolutionary Canon AE-1 was introduced. I was getting serious about photography and needed something better than the East German Practika. That trusty AE-1 took a beating and continued to deliver excellent images for years. I upgraded to a Canon F-1 and later a T-90 and EOS A2. As much as I liked working with SLRs, the images were just not detailed enough, nor could the image be controlled enough in the camera. In 1978 I bought a Calumet 4×5 View Camera and was hooked. It was perfect for architecture, landscapes, and automotive images. I then bought a beautiful cherry wood Ikeda 4×5 field camera, a lightweight little gem that was great for hiking and taking landscape images. Many of my first automotive images for Collectible Automobile and Corvette Fever magazines were taken with that camera and a Schneider 210mm Symmar lens. I also attended a class taught by Mickey McGuire, founder of Boulevard Photographic, the pioneer of automotive photography for manufacturers, which had a profound effect on my technique.