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Larry’s Memories
At Road Test we were mainly shooting production cars for the magazine. Some of it was shot to a formula of things that we knew we needed, such as interiors and engine shots, and then the side-front-rear pictures that went with the specification charts. Much of it was shot under less than ideal conditions, because perhaps we had the car for only a short time or the backgrounds weren’t the best, but he always came back with fully professional results.
He was particularly meticulous as a driver. While some of us would just jump in and go, he would take quite a bit of time adjusting the seat and the mirrors and anything else to get things just to his liking. And he was also pretty aggressive on the street. Not that I ever thought he was taking chances, but he was always on the move. But, then, so were the rest of us.
He was very specifically a dedicated fan of BMWs. He had a BMW 2002tii, which even then was a bit of a collector’s item, and he was not shy about expressing his affection for anything on four wheels with the spinning propellor for the emblem. And that gives us a little anecdote.
Upon the occasion of the introduction of the then-new BMW 320i, which would have been somewhere in ’76 or ’77, I believe, he and I made the run to BMW’s LA headquarters to pick one up for testing. So we got the keys to the thing, climbed in and then noticed we had a really brand new car. I believe it may have had less than 100 miles on the odometer. It was on a Friday afternoon, I was driving and we were in LA traffic on the southbound 405 from the Culver City area back to our offices in Compton, and I was hammering the thing, running it up to redline and with lots of hard throttle. Larry took this for maybe a couple of minutes and then started scolding me, pretty harshly and in no uncertain terms, that this was a brand-new car and it deserved to be broken in properly and I shouldn’t be abusing it like that. He was pretty pissed that I was beating on this brand-new 320i that, to him, represented the height of automotivedom.
Then I broke in and told him, also in no uncertain terms, that this was Friday afternoon, and on the following Monday I was going to have to take this thing to our test site at the old Irwindale dragstrip, for acceleration and performance testing, and then to the spot of our skid pad, in the parking lot of the football stadium for Long Beach City College, and I was going to have to get the best test numbers I could for printing in the magazine, and that this was a new, and quite tight new car, and if the numbers were going to be as good as possible it was going to need to be loosened up. That ended the conversation.
We got back to the office and were passing out the assignments for who was going to take which car for the weekend, and Larry said he wanted the 320i. Fine.
Monday morning we met at Irwindale. And that 320i had over 1,600 miles on the odometer. Larry had spent the entire weekend driving the shit out of that thing, thrashing it all over the mountains that surround southern California, doing all he could to get it broken in and loosened up as much as possible so it would deliver the best possible acceleration numbers. He gave up his whole weekend, just thrashing the shit out of that car. And it ran just fine. Ran like a champ.
And that’s a true story.
– Don Fuller
[Larry} was, I dare say, an odd duck. (Does anyone still use that expression?) I don’t mean that in a negative way; I just mean that he had more idiosyncracies than most of us, and I don’t think anybody really understood or knew him..…… Have you also heard about his incredibly cluttered office? You could hardly walk through it to his desk without knocking over a leaning tower of mail or motorsports mags. If you wanted to make sure he’d see a memo, you’d better leave it right on top of his keyboard. And yet when he handed in his copy, it was neater than anyone else’s. There weren’t many strikeouts or marginal amendments, no blurry typing over layers of Liquid Paper. I could always distinguish Larry’s copy from others’ messes at a glance.
And that was before we got computers. Larry was an early adopter of many things — I remember he had the first CD player I’d ever seen — and he started writing on what we then called “word processors” years before PCs were in common use. I recall his having a device like a fat keyboard (a Tandy? a Commodore?) with an oblong window above it in which you could read three or four lines of type. He bought a succession of such devices over the years, each a slight advance over its predecessor, and produced even cleaner and neater copy on them. It wasn’t until about 1984 or ’85, as I recall, that our corporate overlords finally sprang for “IBM clones.” Larry probably already had his own. Probably a better one.
In the odd-duck category, one might also mention his obsessive side. C/D did a project car every year or so, and we usually put just one writer in charge of each. Larry was assigned to Project Jetta, and as the months wore on and accessories were added and tweaks adjusted, it surely turned into one of our most expensive project cars, if not the most expensive. (I don’t recall the details, but you could look up the article or articles about it to find out just what Larry lavished on it.) Among other staff members, any mention of Project Jetta as Larry obsessed over it was usually accompanied by eye rolls.
A similar obsession took hold when Larry was assigned an article on automotive lighting. In those days, NHTSA regulations imposed strict limitations on the design of headlights and other driving lights. Those regs were beginning to change, but not fast enough for Larry, for whom the assignment became a crusade and the article a three-part series. It was the only three-part series in my ten years at C/D, and it was also a rare piece of more conventional journalism, requiring considerably more research than our writers usually did. Our standard fare of road tests, after all, wasn’t journalism so much as criticism.
-Don Coulter AKA “Ed”
The magazine moved from Manhattan to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in about 1978 (don’t hold me to that year; I was not on staff then). Larry rented an unfurnished apartment in, I think, nearby Ypsilanti and contracted with a rental company to lease furniture for the place. When I went back to the magazine as editor-in-chief in 1987 Larry had long since satisfied the terms of his contract but continued to make his monthly payments rather than go through the trials of taking possession of the furniture. Maybe, and I am playing amateur analyst here, he saw ownership of “stuff” as antithetical to his independence. At any rate, he was kidded gently over his status as permanent lessor.
Larry could be difficult to edit—for two reasons. One, despite his every written word being entertaining, virtually every article had to be cut by a significant number of lines (we dealt in lines back then). He had the not uncommon writer’s urge not to leave out anyone who had even remotely figured in his research (a characteristic that pleased two persons: Larry and the subject at hand. I remember a story he did on one of the ro-ro ships that brought Japanese cars to the US market (“roll on, roll off”). It was a fine piece of reporting but it went on for more than five thousand words. Our (my) absolute maximum for features (as opposed to hardware—cars) was 3000-3500 words. Larry sat across from me at my desk looking for all the world as if I’d just told him that we were going to surgically remove four of his toes.
Larry’s personality at the office was amazingly calm. When he was in the office he drank maybe five Mountain Dews every day—enough sugar to make an elephant twitch. His office, I should add, was a mini-museum. The subjects of his many articles tended to like Larry, and they would give him things. A Goodyear racing tire from NASCAR. The occasional helmet or pair of driving gloves. Posters, decals, pictures, and other racing memorabilia. It had never to my knowledge been straightened or cleaned. It was fun to visit.
-William Jeanes
Larry — as we knew him — was a childhood friend and neighbor of my late husband, Terry Lee Wood. Their houses stood just across the street from one another near downtown Independence, Kansas — close to the movie theater. They shared a love of cars from an early age, and a quiet understanding that came from growing up together.
I lived farther out, on North 8th Street, near Riverside Park. Back then, kids in town walked everywhere or rode their bikes: to the park and zoo, the swimming pool, the ballparks, and the movie uptown. It was a wonderful place to grow up, and though we came from different parts of town, Terry, Larry, and I all shared in that small-town freedom.
I had been in seventh grade with Larry, though we didn’t know each other well. Larry was quiet, thoughtful, and always a little distant — the kind of boy who probably wouldn’t have noticed me a few years later in my green Nash Rambler, “the Frog”.
At our 20th high school reunion in 1984 — for the Independence High School Class of 1964 — Lawrence Griffin arrived in a beautiful red Porsche. It was the talk of the reunion. Larry gave Terry and me a brief moment of celebrity, including us with his Porsche in a photograph that was later seen by millions of Car and Driver readers.
Sadly, Terry passed away the following summer, in June of 1985, after suffering a heart attack on the tennis courts here in Independence.
-Tina Swyers