Book Review: “Cars That Drove Me” by Mark Janzen

I received this book for Christmas last year.  After I started reading it, I immediately came up with an alternate title: Cars of a Lifetime, The Book.

I’m not sure how this book ended up on my wish list.  When you get to my age, it gets harder to think of things your family can buy for you because you have pretty much everything you need.  My guess is that I was searching for car-related books on Amazon, and this book came up as a suggestion.  I don’t think I read the description and must have thought that it was the memories of a well-known automotive journalist that I’d never heard of.

Born in 1945, Mark is among the oldest of the Baby Boomers with a knack for things mechanical and has owned 34 cars in his 80 years (as of the publication date), a respectable number by COAL standards.  Maybe not as many as Chip Downs (78?), but still enough to make a good-sized book.  Since there’s no reference to Curbside Classic, I don’t believe he’s familiar with our well-regarded series.

The book takes place almost entirely in Kansas where Mark was born.  Each chapter/car starts with a technical specification sheet, then dives into the story.  After every few chapters, Mark inserts a technical article of some sort as a break between stories.  In the Technical Advancement category, he goes over different advancements in automotive history, such as hydraulic brakes, synchromesh gears, transistorized ignitions, etc..  In the Technical Bloopers category – which there’s only one of – he talks about many of the quirks of the Volkswagen Beetle.  These were quite informative for those of us not quite as familiar with the mechanical aspects of the automobile.

This is Mark’s one and only book, but I would rate his writing among the better of the Cars of a Lifetime series writers.  I very much enjoyed his early years, which included building his 1930 Model A hot rod, his first Corvette, and other various cars of the ‘50s and early ‘60s.  I particularly enjoyed how he traded in his 1966 427 Corvette Convertible for a 1965 327 Sting Ray because, with a wife and new baby, the small block and fixed roof with storage behind the front seats was more “family friendly”.  The guy knows how to have fun.

Mark spent a year in Germany and bought a ’49 VW Beetle, which he and a friend drove on a long road trip to Italy and the French Riviera. With 24 hp, it was quite the contrast the Corvette back home, which had been upgraded in its performance.

It’s still somewhat fun as he goes through the ‘70s and ‘80s.  Then the cars become Lexus, Lexus, Lexus, and I started hoping I was close to the end.

However, the most fun for me was some of the similarities with my own car history, including two Beetles, two Pintos (a ’72 and supposedly a ’74, a 1979 Dodge Omni, and a 1998 Lexus GS400 (OK, I enjoyed that one) with which I spent a whirlwind week when I was writing car reviews.

And that Ford Pinto was a prime example of my main issue with the book – several technical errors, mostly with the disconnect between the technical specifications page, and the car he was writing about.  I understand that he’s looking back 50 years when writing about this particular car, but as you read through the story, the chronology between that car and the following one makes it suspect.  According to Mark, he bought this 1974 Pinto used, kept it a few years, and traded it in on a new leftover 1975 Chevelle wagon in early 1976.  Then, of course, there’s a picture of his actual car, and it’s clearly a ’72 or ’73 with its small bumpers.  That would have been fine except when he talks about how the “new 2.3 Liter engine added some badly needed power…”  As regular visitors to this site know, the Lima was introduced in 1974, so his car couldn’t have had it.

That was really the only major faux pas in the text.  The rest were in the specifications at the beginning of each chapter.   There’s the 1979 Dodge Omni 5-door that shows the model as “024”, which was the 3-door fastback; the 1988 Nissan Hardbody that’s labeled 1980; 1994 Civic “EX Si” (no such car), and the 2^nd generation 2002 Dodge Dakota which clearly shows a stock picture of – and specs for – a 3^rd generation 2005 Dodge Dakota.  It turns out that Mark had contacted a site owned by a guy in Russia for the stock images and specs.  That explains a lot.

Overall, however, I really enjoyed following Mark on his automotive and personal journey.  When you reach the end of the book, you learn that his children had convinced him to write the book after finding himself in Houston, mostly isolated and frequently alone, while his wife was participating in a medical trial for leukemia treatment.  That at least made me feel good about putting the book on my list.

The book was published by a company called The Storybook Company.  He doesn’t mention anything about the company in the acknowledgements, and there’s not much additional information on the companion website, so I tried to find the company online.  The only company with this name I could find exclusively publishes children’s books, so I’m not sure how this one slipped through the cracks if it’s the same company.  For those of you COALers out there who dream of maybe publishing your series into a book, you still have a long hill to climb.  It’s nice to know that someone was able to do it.