I'm not really a magazine editor, I just play one on TV. In all seriousness, it's important to maintain a certain aura of humility when you have the opportunity to work side-by-side with a guy like Ro McGonegal. For the uninitiated, Ro has worked in the hot rod magazine business almost non-stop since 1968, when he became an associate editor for Super Stock & Drag Illustrated.
Ro is like a huge rock in the middle of the desert. Over the years, the climate may change, things may come and go, but the rock remains, unapologetic and unchanged. Car guys will know what I mean. Most people mark the passage of time with events like graduations, weddings, and the birth of children, but as car guys, we also remember the magazines, the articles, and the cars that punctuate our "car" life. They're the unmoving signposts on the road of life. For me, and many of you, his name is part of our collective car life. His byline was there when I was an illiterate, wide-eyed, 5-year-old staring longingly at the newsstand, and it's still there today (his byline, not my illiteracy).
The only difference is that now we have the honor of Ro McGonegal's byline on the pages of Popular Hot Rodding. How that came to be is a great story we won't be able to share for quite some time, but suffice to say that we are very fortunate indeed.
Over the years, Ro has worked for many familiar titles. After starting out in 1968 working for Jim McCraw at Super Stock & Drag Illustrated, he went to work for editor Terry Cook (and publisher John Raffa) at Car Craft in 1969. Ro told PHR: "My wife and I put our stuff in a '69 L72 COPO Camaro and drove all the way from New Jersey to California with 4.10 gears..." He rose to the Car Craft editor's seat in 1972 when Terry Cook was placed in charge of Hot Rod magazine, but left Car Craft in 1973 when his wife decided the East Coast was a better place to be.
Ro's years with SS&DI and then Car Craft were arguably the most formative of his career. In that time, he worked with some of the greatest automotive writers our industry has seen, including Steve Collison, Jim McCraw, Rick Voegelin, Al Kirschenbaum, Dave Wallace, Jim McFarland, CJ Baker, and Gray Baskerville. In that time, Ro also had the opportunity to drink long and hard from the unending river of Detroit musclecars. Today, those same cars make up the vast majority of what we alternately call Pro-Tourers and g-Machines. Unlike now, these cars were plentiful, and the editors of Car Craft, Super Stock, Hot Rod and Popular Hot Rodding were unafraid to bash (and sometimes smash) them without mercy.
After returning to the East Coast, Ro did a brief stint at Hot Rod in 1976, then was lured away, in his words, "to do stupid van books." By 1978, he had about as much of that as he could take, at which time he took a job offer from Petersen's John Dianna as feature editor for Motor Trend. "That got me exposed to other kinds of cars like imports, but I was definitely out of the 'hot car' scene by then," laments Ro. By 1981, he was freelancing for Hot Rod, feeding his jones for hot cars again. Then between 1983 and 1990, he built a variety of one-shot magazines for Lee Kelley at Petersen, stuff like sportscar annuals and new car buyer's guides. "It was a good living," deadpans Ro in his New Jersey accent.
Eventually, Ro moved back to California and began freelancing for Steve Collison (at SS&DI, which had been renamed Drag Racing Monthly) and Bob McClurg (at Mustang Illustrated). That put him in contact once again with Petersen's John Dianna, whom Ro was interviewing for a piece on the history of Junior Stock for DRM. That led to a job offer to be the front man for Hot Rod magazine in 1996. That position lasted until 2001, when David Freiburger ascended to the editorship. Ro worked dutifully under Freiburger until 2003, when he was asked to breathe new life (as editor) into sister publication, Chevy High Performance. That is exactly where Ro has been until now.
In all those years, Ro's byline, sadly, has never appeared in PHR. Thankfully, that changes now with his new monthly column, "Back In The Day." We can only describe ourselves as the luckiest magazine on the newsstand. To have him on board at PHR is like finding out you just bought the winning lotto ticket. Not only has he collected a vast body of first-hand experience from the days this stuff actually happened, he's also an accomplished writer. (In 2000, his peers bestowed the Ken W. Purdy Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism for a two-part series he wrote on funnycar racer, "Jungle" Jim Liberman).
Each month, Ro will regale us with true stories from the '60s and '70s. Call it a happy accident, but through mergers over the years, the archives and publishing rights of Car Craft, Hot Rod, Motor Trend, Super Stock & Drag Illustrated, and Drag Racing Monthly are the property of Popular Hot Rodding's parent company, Primedia. We can dredge up all the old photos, contact sheets, and magazine archives, and the guy who experienced it all first hand, Ro McGonegal, can tell the complete, unadulterated story, the way it really went down. It's hilarious, scary, and downright exciting.
Older readers will remember some of this stuff, and younger readers will be seeing it for the first time, but whatever the case, it's important to remember that musclecars aren't sacred, they're just sheetmetal. We hope you keep that in mind as you plan and build your next handling hot rod. We predict "Back In The Day" will become your favorite column in any magazine, anywhere. So get crackin' and turn to the back of the book for a wild drag-strip romp with Dickie Harrell in the original '69 ZL1 Camaro.