[david c.]

Although I've never met Mr. Egan, he and I have a mutual acquaintance that I met when I was in law school. I have a few black and white photos that our mutual friend took of Peter sitting in the garage he built in Wisconsin when visiting a few years ago.

This may sound difficult to understand if you're not a lifelong Egan disciple, but seeing the inside of that garage - in which his readership has vicariously done just about everything from listen and play blues to wrestle with and restore an E-type Jaguar - is so familiar that it's eerie. We've all had such similar coffee-drinking moments in our garages, or shared a sense of frustration followed by laughter at this goofy hobby of ours. Peter, however, has a unique talent for reducing our common experiences to words.

I have not a doubt in my mind that Peter Egan is one of the greatest writers of the last 25 years, and I do not limit that to automotive journalists. Consider the relative intellect of the readership of Road & Track, or his other rags. Consider the breadth of his audience independent of the focus of those magazines. When I was 13 I was reading the same copies of Road & Track, and enjoying Egan's articles in the very same way as any executive in an airport waiting for a flight. The near universality of his appeal to the broad spectrum of otherwise unrelated car nuts illustrates well, I think, that had he chosen to write literature or a regular column in, say, Rolling Stone, my sentiments would be held axiomatic. The only reason he isn't more famous, I think, is because the car hobby has a certain anti-intellectual stigma to it.

People who aren't car nuts will never understand the romance of it all, but those of us who are afflicted with the bug will always admire Peter Egan for providing proof, if only once a month, that we aren't truly alone out there in the garage late on those Sunday nights.