Last month we kicked off a nearly year-longseries of articles celebrating the 30-year history of Petersen's 4-Wheel & Off-Road magazine. We figured the best place to start this retrospective was by talking to the people who launched and nurtured the title-the magazine's editors.
In Part 2 of our editor interviews, we pick up the magazine's story in the early 1980s. 4-Wheel & Off-Road had become, in under 10 years, the leading publication in the off-road magazine marketplace. Michael Coates, the magazine's third editor, left Petersen Publishing to work in public relations. A couple months after Coates' departure, John Stewart, the book's technical editor, took the helm.
October 1985-September 1986
"The big deal in those days was monster trucks. We had had Bigfoot on the cover during the prior year and sold a lot of copies. At that point, other monster trucks began to be built. We worked with the Jamboree Nationals event producers to get monster truck racing added to their schedule. This was really packing the seats, as I recall.
"Big events at the time were Gravelrama, the Indy Jamboree, the Jeepers Jamboree, and a trail ride in Colorado put on by the Mile-High Club. Moab was still small, and trail rides were mostly club events.
"We did our trail testing at the now-closed Indian Dunes recreation area. To get to the rocky trails we had to cross a sandy stream bed, where usually there was water running. Sometimes, there was a lot of water. On one occasion, I braved a fairly stiff current and fell into a hole about half way across. The brand-new test truck (a Toyota?) came to rest with the entire front end submerged. I remember my panic, the thoughts of losing the truck, my job, the whole works. Managing to climb out the back window, I sprinted to the main trailer and got someone to follow me back with a road grader. After some serious swimming, I got the thing hooked up and dragged out, full of water and wet leaves. Much to my amazement, after a few minutes, it started...and ran. No water in the oil, no problem anywhere except wet carpet and seats. I ended up driving it home like nothing happened. I cleaned it up and brought it back to work, and to this day nobody ever knew."These days I work as editorial director for a small publishing company [the Action Pursuit Group]. I still run into readers who recall my name, and I see many friends from those days on the trails."
October 1986-August 1991
"In those days manual-locking hubs were being phased out in favor of automatic hubs, and a number of new midsize SUVs were introduced, including the Nissan Pathfinder and the Toyota 4Runner. Previously, only fullsize vehicles such as the Blazer, Bronco, Ramcharger, Suburban, and Land Cruiser had filled that niche. Tall trucks were also coming into vogue, and we were very conscious of trying to show only safe and properly built suspension systems. The Jeep CJ was discontinued, and the Wrangler came on the scene.
"I find that the industry has evolved in a pretty logical way. Rockcrawling has, of course, become far more sophisticated than when we were creeping over the Rubicon Trail in the '80s, and today's vehicles are like luxury motorhomes compared to some of the bare-bones pickups we tested. Still, I'm not surprised that things are better now than they were 25 years ago. The market continues to grow, and both the automakers and aftermarket companies continue to offer greater innovation and better technology.
"Among the things I'm proudest of is the Drivelines news column, where we were able to cover topics in a paragraph or two that otherwise would have gone unreported. We refined the 4x4 of the Year program, making it a model of consistency that other magazines adapted to their own uses.
"On the other hand, we got into a phase early in my tenure of placing cover vehicles in unnatural settings via airbrush. One cover depicted a monster truck surfing down the face of a tsunami; another superimposed a Nissan race truck over an image of movie star and martial artist Chuck Norris; and a third showed another monster truck superimposed over a nuclear explosion. They were all pretty infantile, but we were trying to be daring...sort of. Fortunately, we grew up.
"My most memorable experience was when Drew Hardin and I chased the Baja 1000 from Ensenada to La Paz. We were awake and on the road for about 24 hours straight. We ate weird tacos flavored with questionable goat cheese and photographed the race at various pit stops and jump sites throughout the day and night. I gained true respect for drivers such as Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart, who drove the whole race by himself. Oh, and we had one hell of a good time, too."
After serving as editor of Hot Rod, editorial director of groups of magazines, and content director for Petersen/emap/Primedia's automotive Web sites, Campbell became editorial director for the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) and then went freelance, writing, editing, and taking photographs for a wide range of automotive consumer and trade publications.
September 1991-April 1994
In a lot of ways I maintained the magazine formula that Stewart and Campbell honed. We still put monster trucks on the cover (though less frequently) and featured a whole lot of Midwestern show trucks and desert races. But change was in the wind: Coverage of the Easter Jeep Safari appeared in the Aug. '93 issue written by a guy named David Freiburger, a Hot Rod staffer who was also into four-wheeling. Ed Fortson amazed us all in the Mar. '94 issue with photos of radical rockclimbing Jeeps in Surprise Canyon. And the trend to beater trucks got its first foothold with "Ugly Readers Rides" in Aug. '92.
Some significant new 4x4s were introduced during these years, including the civilian Hummer, the Dodge Ram, and the Jeep Grand Cherokee.
The Baja race chase with Steve was the highlight of my stint as a staff writer; but in 1991 I got to actually drive in the Baja 1000 with freelancer Todd Kaho, thanks to the folks at Ford who set us up in a Stroppe-prepped F-150. It's a good thing I kept my day job. Kaho is skilled behind the wheel but I am anything but fast, and we ran out of time before finishing the race. Yet the experience of desert-race training, hanging out with the pro drivers, and seeing first-hand just how brutal-and beautiful-the Baja can be are memories I'll be talking about for the rest of my life, I'm sure.
I cringe now when I see some of the gawd-awful-looking project trucks we built back then. Those efforts reached something of a hideous pinnacle with the purple, green, and white Force 250. And speaking of hideous, I think I'm still apologizing to Freiburger for setting the wheels in motion for the American Gladiators story and then leaving the magazine, making him execute it in one of his first issues.
Like Campbell, I left 4-Wheel & Off-Road to go to Hot Rod and eventually moved through several editorial director positions. In 2000, I left the company but didn't go very far; I now freelance for this magazine and several other Primedia titles, as well as for a few non-Primedia publications.