Walt Woron circa 1996, photo by Matt Stone. Text copyright and photos courtesy Michael Lamm.
Walt Woron passed away on 2 July 2012, at age 91. With him passed an era. Walt was one of my lifelong idols, a man I greatly admired and respected. I was fortunate enough to know him as a friend. I’ll miss Walt, as should anyone who grew up in that yesteryear of early auto magazines.
As a kid, I wanted desperately to work for Motor Trend. It seemed the ideal occupation – to evaluate cars, to learn more about them, meet people in the industry, study the history of automobiles and especially to write about cars. As fate would have it, I did work for Motor Trend – became the magazine’s managing editor for three years, starting in 1962. Dreams do come true.
Walt Woron inspired that dream. He was the man with the ideal job and, at that time, MT seemed to me to be the ideal car magazine. I finally met Walt in 1969, during his second stint with the magazine, but we lost touch until we bumped into each other at the 1975 VW Rabbit press introduction in Palm Springs. By then, Walt was editor of Road Test magazine and I was West Coast editor of Popular Mechanics. We reconnected, enjoyed each other’s company and had lots of fun catching up.
But Road Test folded and I got busy with books, so we disconnected again. I kept wondering what had happened to Walt (this was long before Google), but in 1995-96, I made a concerted effort to find him. I didn’t know at that time whether he was even still alive, and I started looking by simply checking phone books at our local library. Sure enough, I found a Walt Woron in Long Beach, California, but it was the wrong one. Can you imagine two people named Walt Woron?
I kept searching, and I finally found the right Walt Woron living in Calimesa, some 75 miles east of Los Angeles. I phoned him, and we re-reconnected.
Later, I happened to mention all this to Matt Stone, who was then MT‘s senior feature editor. Motor Trend was looking forward to its 50th anniversary, so Matt suggested we both go out to Calimesa, meet with Walt and record his reminiscences.
I interviewed Walt in 1996 for articles that appeared in Collectible Automobile and Motor Trend‘s 50th anniversary issue. Photo by Matt Stone.
That’s MT‘s Matt Stone and me with Walt and a fistful of early Motor Trend issues.
I’d brought along a handful of early issues of MT, and I asked Walt to tell us about the events that had shaped his life. How did he get interested in cars? As I usually do in such interviews, I asked Walt to start at the beginning – to tell us about his parents and childhood. Much of the following was published in Collectible Automobile and Motor Trend.
Walt’s Early Beginnings
Walter A. Woron was born on 5 March 1921. His parents came to the U.S. in 1916 from Russia, where their name had been Voronin. Walt had a four-year-older brother, Eugene, and the family initially settled in the Poletown section of Detroit. His father worked there as a tool and die maker.
In 1924, the family moved to Pomona, California, and soon afterward to Los Angeles, where Walt’s father took up with a five-man balalaika band that played in vaudeville houses and at Russian cultural events. When talkies displaced vaudeville, Walt’s father switched jobs again and became a chef at the Ambassador Hotel near downtown Los Angeles.
His brother, Eugene, got Walt interested in cars. As children, Walt and Eugene prided themselves on being able to identify cars by the sound of their exhaust. On a busy street, one brother would look out at traffic while the other stared at a blank wall and called out the names of passing cars. “Model Ts and As were easy,” Walt told me, “But Studebakers and Hudsons were hard.” In the mid 1930s, Eugene bought himself a 1932 Auburn speedster, and that added to Walt’s automotive enthusiasm.
When he graduated high school in Los Angeles in 1938, Walt joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and bought a 1928 Model A roadster to commute from his L.A. home to a CCC project at Lake Arrowhead. He used the CCC money to hop up his Ford. Walt also hot rodded his next three cars, a 1933 Ford three-window coupe, a 1935 and a 1938 Ford. After laboring in the CCC, he worked in a printshop briefly before landing a job in the parts and service section of Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica.
At Douglas, Walt began to write for the company’s in-house service magazine. He married his first wife in 1941 and, two years later, enlisted in the Army. He ended up in White Sands, New Mexico, producing reports on military rockets, including captured German V-2s. After the war, he went back to Douglas, where he became a technical publications editor.
Walt and a friend from Douglas, Herb Conover, became very involved with the Southern California hot rod scene, and they were planning to bring out a new magazine called Hot Rod when Conover got killed in a plane crash. Meanwhile, Walt had bought himself an MG-TC powered by a Ford V-8-60. He became a regular at SCTA dry-lakes events and began freelancing for Speed Age magazine. Concurrently, a very young Robert E. Petersen began publishing a magazine actually called Hot Rod, and Walt wrote for that, too.
Creating Motor Trend
Walt was at his side when Pete Petersen decided to start a second magazine. “At first, the new magazine was going to be called something like Motorsports,” Walt told me, “but I objected, because I couldn’t see doing a magazine strictly about automotive sports. I felt it ought to be more about…all [different] kinds of cars and not just sports cars or racing or competition. There might be some of that, too, but the idea was to do a magazine for people who liked all sorts of cars, from production to exotic…styling, new engines, everything.
“And that’s where I came up with the idea of trends – trends in motoring, trends in styling, trends in all things automotive. I thought that trends was the key word even more than the word motor. So that was my big contribution in the beginning. I came up with the name Motor Trend.”
Petersen immediately made Walt MT‘s editor, and road tests became a major component of the new magazine. Walt patterned them on the British magazine Motor. “We started with just a stopwatch and a clipboard, using the car’s speedometer as our primary instrument. It wasn’t very scientific,” he told me.
MT‘s early tests were called Motor Trials, and the first two, in the October 1949 issue, tested an MG-TD and a 1950 Studebaker Champion. Next came a 1949 Cadillac, but this took the form of a feature article written by an engineer and freelance writer named John Bond, the young man who would later edit and publish Road & Track. Bond called the Cadillac “the outstanding car of 1949,” basing his opinion on its new overhead-valve V-8. Yet there was no award nor any attempt at that point to establish a formal Car of the Year.
MT tested 1954 station wagons. This was the fuel-mileage staging area.
“We nearly always did our testing on public roads,” Walt told me. “Later on, we got more sophisticated and bought a fifth wheel for an accurate measure of speed. We’d usually take the cars out to the desert, near Indio, and we’d put on the fifth wheel…rarely saw any traffic…[and] we did acceleration and braking tests on the roads around there, using a stopwatch and the fifth wheel. That’s also where we did our fuel-economy tests.”
Walt recognized from the beginning that being original, being first and scooping the competition boosted newsstand sales. He made a conscious effort to keep MT fresh; never to run an article or a picture that had appeared elsewhere. As a result, readers looked forward to each new issue, and being first had a lot to do with the magazine’s meteoric success.
Circulation began with a print run of 40,000 for the first issue in September 1949. By August 1950, sales jumped to 138,000, then 254,000 in 1951 and 343,000 in 1952. By May 1953, Motor Trend‘s readership nudged half a million.
As circulation grew, Walt began to take on staff: Griff Borgeson as assistant editor, Harry Cushing as Detroit editor, Don Francisco and Fred Bodley as technical editors, Bob Gottlieb as classic-car editor. When Walt became editor-in-chief, he made Borgeson editor and, together, they started planning the first Car of the Year award.
“We initially called it Motor Trend‘s Engineering Achievement Award, and the first one went to Chrysler for the 1951 Hemi V-8 and power steering. To choose the winner, we compared 14 different cars in 13 engineering and performance categories, and Chrysler won hands down, no contest,” Walt noted. The awards ceremony took place in Detroit but was no big deal. “I think the Chrysler guys just sort of tolerated me,” he said.
The second award went to the 1952 Cadillac, and by then it was called Car of the Year (COTY). MT‘s editors voted the 1952 Aero Willys runner-up and, because Cadillac couldn’t have cared less about the honor, Ward Canaday of Willys decided to make the most of second place. Willys ran ads that showed a 1952 Cadillac and an Aero Willys side by side, the headline saying, “Hats off to Cadillac!” The explanation and implication was that Willys was right up there with the Standard of the World. After that, Detroit began to take notice of MT‘s COTY.
Walt met Ford design vice president George Walker in the mid 1950s, when Detroit began showing some respect for car magazines.
Walt presents Pontiac general manager Bunkie Knudsen with MT‘s 1959 Car of the Year award.
Suddenly, too, car magazines began to influence America’s auto industry. Magazines were becoming the catalysts and popularizers of automotive fashion. The 1952 Mercury’s frenched headlights came directly from photos in Hot Rod and Car Craft showing George Barris kustoms. The 1955 Thunderbird was essentially a Ford convertible radically shortened and sectioned. The Corvette took inspiration from sports cars depicted in that era’s racing publications.
And the horsepower race wouldn’t have accelerated nearly so rapidly if car magazines hadn’t run 0-60 MPH times in every road test. Motor Trend was a driving force in those and countless other automotive developments of the 1950s and 1960s.
I personally remember a couple of road tests that set the early standard for 0-60 times. One was the 1950 Oldsmobile 88, the other the 1951 Chrysler. Oldsmobile posted a 0-60 time of 12.22 seconds and a top speed of 92.11 MPH. The heavier Chrysler Hemi V-8 did 0-60 in 14.39 seconds and topped 106 MPH. To show how quickly the horsepower race took off, by 1957 the Chrysler 300C turned 0-60 in eight seconds flat.
In the beginning, Walt ran every conceivable type of automotive article, from reports on atomic cars to a test of the Soviet Moskvitch. This was long before auto magazines became formulaic, so readers never knew what to expect next. Walt was just as likely to run a piece about Italian one-offs as about elegant coachbuilt customs, hot rods, sports cars, race cars; anything that struck his fancy. And to me, every topic brought something new and fascinating. Walt was the archetypal natural editor.
Ruthie Yamazaki was Walt’s editorial assistant for years. Here he shows his appreciation.
Ruthie Yamazaki, Walt’s longtime office assistant, once told me that he came up with story ideas by the barrelful, and he himself says, “I believe that was one of my failings. I had too many ideas. I wanted them all to go into effect immediately. I had this concept of what Motor Trend should be, what it should cover, how it should approach specific topics, and I’d pick up a new issue just back from the printer, leaf through it and say to myself, Dammit, that’s not the way it should be! We ought to have done this or that differently. I was in a constant state of trying to improve the magazine, and I just loved doing that. To me, the whole world of automobiles was so tremendously interesting, and I was so full of enthusiasm, trying to inject my personality onto those pages.”
Some Highlights
What were the highlights, I asked him.
“One of the great drives I had in all my life was with Enzo Ferrari. I visited his factory in Maranello, and he drove me there from Modena. The eight miles from Modena to Maranello seemed like seconds. He drove just like one of his race drivers. Ferrari was up in years even then, but boy, what a ride!
“Bernard Cahier, our European editor, was the craziest driver I’ve ever ridden with,” Walt continued. “He’d pass on blind curves…didn’t care where he was. He’d say, If I meet somebody, they’ll get out of the way. Scared me to death!
“The fastest car I drove personally up to that time was the Mercedes 300 SL. This was on the dry lakes. We set out a course, not the normal course…it wasn’t straight. I got the car up to 130 MPH, which was as fast as I could make it go, and I felt the car begin to drift. That was exciting. That was really exciting!”
Walt bought one of the first imported Austin-Healeys and added a McCulloch supercharger. He wooed and won Anne in this car.
In 1953, Walt bought himself a new Austin-Healey 100-4 and added a McCulloch supercharger. When Donald Healey visited Los Angeles and dropped in at the Petersen offices, Walt took him for a ride. Healey was suitably impressed.
Walt’s first marriage had deteriorated over time and, in 1953, he met his second wife, Anne, who’d been a receptionist for the New York periodical distributor who handled Petersen’s magazines. Walt met Anne, they dated, and Walt invited her out to California. She flew to Sacramento, where Walt picked her up in his Austin-Healey. The two of them drove the entire distance back to L.A., some 400 miles, with the top down. They were married in 1955.
Anne Woron stands beside the family’s concours-winning 1948 Lincoln Continental, one of Walt’s favorite cars.
“The most interesting car that I’ve owned personally was a 1948 Lincoln Continental,” Walt said in our interview. “I bought it from a fellow who’d made only one modification. He had the top lowered a bit so he could get the car into his garage. He told me he’d sell me the car on one condition – that I never let it sit out in the rain. I never did. That was in 1958. Anne and I took the Continental to a concours up in Santa Barbara and won our class. I owned the Continental until about 1960.”
After leaving MT for the second time, Walt opened a PR agency in New York. His primary client was Peugeot. At this press intro for the Peugeot 403, that’s Road & Track publisher John Bond second from the left and Walt at the far right.
On that same press junket, Pete Petersen sits second from the left, British journalist Gordon Wilkinson is flanked by various wives, Bernard Cahier second from the right, with Walt beside him.
Walt edited Motor Trend for the first 11 years of its life. Then one day he decided he’d been doing that job long enough, so he quit. His last issue was March 1960. He and Anne moved to New York, where he opened a public relations agency. His primary client was Peugeot. A year later he took a position as advertising director and head of PR for Renault. He stayed with Renault for three years and then took a similar job with Jaguar.
In May 1966, Petersen asked Walt to come back to Motor Trend as publisher. Walt accepted. “What followed,” he said, “was unlike anything I could have imagined, a totally different working climate…full of meetings, bottom-line discussions, pro formas, the need to slant editorial toward advertising, including the virtual selling of MT’s Car of the Year awards.
“Instead of concentrating on magazine content, these meetings focused on upcoming promotions, ways to increase ad revenue and circulation, covers created by committee; all this coupled with intolerable office politics. I thought the magazine had lost its direction. It certainly lost its personality.
“Finally, they sensed that I didn’t have my heart in the job, and they offered me the publishership of Sports Car Graphic, which I didn’t want, so they fired me. The first time I quit; the second time I got fired. But getting fired was such a tremendous relief, you can’t imagine. When I got home that evening, I said to Anne, ‘Well, they fired me.’ She said, ‘Great, great!’ She knew how unhappy I’d been. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders.”
Walt (left) later became West Coast editor for Automotive News. He’s shown here with his colleague, Bill Carroll.
And on the back seat of a 1968 Pontiac GTO.
After his second go-round at Motor Trend, Walt became West Coast editor for Automotive News, the respected Detroit industry journal. He wrote a number of articles having to do with the Dale three-wheeled car and eventually gathered enough material on the Dale and its transsexual developer, Elizabeth Carmichael, to write a book. Walt subsequently worked for Stanley Publishing and ended his automotive career as editor of Road Test magazine.
Anne had always had an interest in antiques, so after Road Test, the Worons opened several retail mall shops that dealt in antiques. Walt liked to cook, something he learned from his father, and he usually put on his chef’s hat and listened to classical music at the same time. The Worons were very content in their Calimesa semi-retirement.
As our interview was winding down, Walt looked at me and, quite unexpectedly, asked, “Do I still miss being editor of Motor Trend?” I thought at first that he was asking me the question, because of my time there as managing editor. But no, he hadn’t meant me: He was asking himself. And then he answered, “Well, yes, I do miss it. If somebody offered me the job today, I think I’d take it. Sure, I do still miss it.”
I’m writing this two days after Walt died. I feel guilty for not phoning and visiting him more often, and I already miss him as the inspiration, friend and mentor that he was – a kind, thoughtful, creative, gentle man and a gentleman in every sense of the word. Farewell, Walt.
Vince Gardner, left, won a Motor Trend sports-car design contest in 1950. That’s Walt, center, and Ford’s Bill Wagner on the right. Gardner built his winning design on a Ford Anglia chassis in 1953: the Vega roadster.
Walt poses in a Scaglietti-bodied Ferrari 500TCR.
Walt traveled often to Detroit and Europe to attend press events.
Michael Lamm grew up in South Texas. He has always loved cars and, after graduating from Columbia University in New York in 1959, took a job as editor of Foreign Car Guide, a magazine about VWs. In the mid 1960s, Mike became managing editor of Motor Trend and, in 1970, he co-founded Special-Interest Autos magazine in partnership with Hemmings Motor News. In 1978, Mike began to publish his own line of automotive books. For more information, go to www.LammMorada.com.