C. Baskerville, 66; Senior Editor of Hot Rod Magazine
Charles Gray Baskerville, whose colorful reportage in Hot Rod magazine brought the world of custom cars and high-speed racing alive for thousands of readers every month for 28 years, died Feb. 1 of complications from prostate cancer. He was 66.
A fixture at hot rod shows, drag races and speed trials across the continent, Baskerville was easily recognizable to his legions of fans in his trademark rubber flip-flop sandals and baggy shorts.
Only days before his death, he had a group of friends carry him from the bedroom of his Pasadena home so he could take a last ride in the beloved 1932 Ford roadster that he had driven daily for almost 30 years.
“His brother drove and they went to see his mother,” said Baskerville’s widow, Susan. “That was beautiful.”
Gray Baskerville--he never used his first name--held the title of senior editor at Hot Rod, but refused to sit behind a desk and read other writers’ copy.
Baskerville covered most of the famous hot rods and hot rod builders of the last quarter century, and by his own reckoning put about 250,000 miles on his roadster visiting the car shops and car enthusiasts he wrote about.
“This is a guy who never sat still, who was always visiting someone’s shop, looking at the cars or writing away,” said Jeff Smith, editor of Chevy High Performance magazine and a former Hot Rod editor and writer.
“He’d work on pieces two, three months before they were going to run in the magazine, turn them in way before deadline and be off on another adventure and we just let him roll. He set his own agenda, and that was fine with us.”
Founded in 1948, Hot Rod is one of the oldest and most influential journals covering the car culture, and Baskerville wanted to be out there with the drivers and builders.
“I don’t think there was a better individual on this earth in the writing business,” said car builder and former racing driver Art Chrisman. “He’d go from shop to shop talking to guys who build cars and writing about us and our cars, and 99.9% of the time he was 100% right. Not many writers can do that, but he could.” Co-workers at Hot Rod remember Baskerville as the soul of the magazine: a writer whose distinctive voice was rarely tuned by editors.
“He had his own style, and he’d make up words if that’s what he needed to get an idea across,” said former Hot Rod Editor Ro McGonegal, now a writer for the magazine. Fans of the wood-sided station wagons that surfers popularized as “woodies” in the 1960s are “fir heads” in a Baskerville piece.
A sample from a Baskerville tale when he was the passenger on an early morning run in a souped-up 1970s-era Mustang II that hit a top speed of 140 mph in 10 seconds on a deserted Detroit highway:
“But there at throttle’s touch is instant launch, guaranteed to snap tum-tums around spinal columns while causing a very real brain-draining case of the vertigos.” Baskerville, who referred to himself in print as “yer old dad,” had been a noted drag racer in the late 1950s and early ‘60s with a modified pickup-bodied roadster.
He was an outspoken proponent of the sport of auto racing, maintaining that “real hot rods were race cars first, everything else is silliness.” He often complained in print that the National Hot Rod Assn.’s acronym, NHRA, stood for “No Hot Rods Anymore,” a reference to the group’s thick rule book that prohibits many of the street rods he loved from competing on the track.
“He wasn’t an enemy of the NHRA, but he remembered that it had been formed to provide kids with fast cars a way to get off the streets to race, and he thought that by professionalizing drag racing it didn’t provide that anymore,” Smith said.
Baskerville was born in Los Angeles and spent much of his youth in Hermosa Beach. He was drawn into the car culture at an early age in part because Southern California in the 1940s and early ‘50s was the birthplace of the hot rod and custom car movements.
“You became a man when you had your car,” Baskerville recalled in a 1998 interview on CNN. “It was like long pants in the generations before us ... hot rods were the essence of manhood in the ‘50s ... when you were going 100 miles an hour down a street--yeah, that was a rush, tremendous rush, especially if you were ahead.”
Baskerville got his start as a writer working for the family publishing business after graduating from UC Santa Barbara in 1958 with a degree in history.
One of the titles the company published was Motorcyclist magazine, which had been owned by his grandfather since 1919, and Gray started doing bike reviews when he wasn’t down at the local drag strip racing his own car.
Although he never considered himself a photographer, Baskerville--like all Hot Rod writers--took his own pictures and was noted for the effort he put into them.
“When you do this for a while, you quickly find a couple of good angles that always work and you can get your shots in 15 or 20 minutes,” Smith said. “But Dad would get up before dawn on a Saturday to go take a picture of a car he was writing about just to get the best light. He’d say, ‘Hey, this guy spent five or six years building this car and getting it just right, the least I can do is spend some time making it look good.”’
At home, Baskerville was an avid gardener, reader and fan of early American jazz.
In addition to his widow, Baskerville is survived by a daughter, Elizabeth, and his mother, Lenore, both of Pasadena, and a brother, David of Hermosa Beach.
Baskerville’s remains were cremated Thursday and, at his request, no memorial service was held.
