Bob Petersen is dead. He changed my life, and the lives of too many others for me to possibly count.

He was an example of how someone could endure unbearable hardship and yet soldier on.

He made hot rods respectable, and gave hunting a cachet it might not otherwise have had out here on the West Coast, in the 1970s—when Hunting magazine (Petersen's Hunting) was founded.

I worked for his staff on Hunting as a copyeditor, and after his company was sold I was Assistant Managing Editor on some of the Outdoor Division one-shots. Later, I moved to Automotive, and spent some time on-staff at Hot Rod Bikes, Custom Classic Trucks, and the Automotive newsstand publications.

Finally, I landed for a year at Sports Afield, which Pete had bought just to keep it from folding. It was a noble effort, though he eventually let it die when 9/11 worsened the recession that was starting anyway in 2001.

Pray for his wife; she's endured tragedy in her life, and needs our best thoughts and wishes.

Thank you, Mr. Petersen. The company you founded did a lot for me, and I'm grateful. I got to taste the prosperity print media used to represent, right before it started to die—or to transmute into something else.

I hope they have many classic cars in heaven—heavily customized, and in cherry condition.

UPDATE: We're losing our shootists: David Arnold, and Jeff Cooper, and Bob Petersen. And the one whose death hurts almost as much as Dave's: Gary Sitton, whom I used to copy-edit at Hunting. The amazing guy whose writing was utterly magical. (And I stole that word from him, by the way: he once wrote in a column that Ernest Hemingway had been both "a magical writer, and a fairly sorry human being." If Gary was in any way a "sorry" human being, he saved most of his wrath for himself.)

Aw, fuck. I'm not good at death. I'm just not.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:56 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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