My name is Barbara Bobit. I’m 22 now and a lot has happened since my last missive a year ago. After Pop offered me a career in publishing, I had a chance to meet many of you at the NAFA and AFLA meetings in Pittsburgh. In June the whole office moved out west to California. And now I am happily engaged to be married. Pop is on the convention circuit again and it’s hard for us to understand his schedule with all that impossible weather back in the Midwest and East. First there was Miami (AALA), the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, San Francisco (NADA) and Scottsdale for NTLS. Southern California has spoiled him so much that he now only tolerates sunny days over 65 degrees so he can tan and the ice melts in his gin.

After learning a bit more about your industry and its problems, it is difficult for me to understand how you tolerate all the governmental intervention in your business lives. As if Chrome City did not have enough problems trying to hype sales, coping with hundreds of thousands of call-backs and the heavy pressures of more stringent emissions levels; now they really have to address themselves seriously to the task of masking fuel-sippers out of gas-guzzlers. Why, that is going to be as hard as putting Pop on a permanent diet to lose forty pounds and restricting him to a single shot of Beefeaters once a week! In either case, the prescription is going to nearly kill the patient or certainly change the entire product.

If you truly believe that Washington’s automotive legislation is quite intolerable, you should know Pop’s reaction to President Carter’s proposal to put the whammy on the three-martini lunch. He is really up in arms. He says that if you know car people at all, it would put most of your better bars and restaurants (including Papa Stevens, the Blue Moon Saloon, Delmonico’s, etc.) out of business; not to mention the obvious hardship of attempting to talk serious business in the stark surroundings of a buyer’s office. Just think of it: everyone making sales calls all morning and when 11:30 comes, they all split and head for Jack-in-the-Box. President Carter just doesn’t know those people I met in Pittsburgh.

Recently, and in all innocence, I asked Pop just how one of the leading car buff magazines actually picked and proclaimed its “Car of the Year” Award (I didn’t know what I was getting into). Pop tried to explain that the editorial staff goes through a series of superficial evaluations and tests but it seems that there are always similar cars delivering better mileage, or with more space, or selling better or with better resale. From what he showed me, it must have a lot to do with the amount of advertising the maker does in the magazine. He then went on to explain what we do not arrive at a “Car of the Year” Award in the fleet market in quite the same way. He calls it editorial integrity.

Pop sat me down and told me that he had a major decision to make about fifteen years ago just after he had sunk all his savings and hopes in AF and things were mighty thin. At that time, Studebaker was big in the fleet business and one of his most important accounts. It seems that People’s Cab Co. in Pittsburgh filed a huge suit against Studebaker because its cars began literally falling apart after a couple of months’ service. The car maker tried to hush it up, but AF printed the story because it was fleet news. Pop lost the Studebaker ads ($$$), but people kept reading the magazine and AF became a strong voice in the market.

Pop says that our so-called “Car of the Year” Award is not determined by the AF staff. He lets the buyers decide. It started a few years ago when Xerox developed a professional fleet policy of purchasing what it thought would be the best car for the company. It just happens to the the single largest commercial fleet order each year. Well, it seems that the first time, they chose Granadas (nearly 5,000 of them). While this made Pop’s friends in Dearborn happy, there was a somewhat different reaction elsewhere. Last year Xerox did about the same thing, but this time chose the Caprice. Again, there was a flap. This year Xerox’s choice is the LeMans and Pop fully expects to hear about it.

His point is that the fleet buyers make the choice and it is a much more valid standard on which to base any kind of an award. And he hopes that the other makers will be tolerant until next year; just as Pop is tolerant of anybody who takes a three-martini lunch.