Gerald L. Roush (1941-2010)

Here are my comments about my father, Gerald L. Roush, at his memorial service, attended by more than 200 people on May 28, 2010. My estimate is that more than 150 of those people were Ferrari-related, either subscribers to his Ferrari Market Letter or otherwise connected to the Ferrari world.

My family thanks all of you for coming here today to celebrate the life of my father.

However, I must note that if my father was here, and I suspect he is looking in on us right now, he’d probably say something to the effect of, “What the hell are all of you doing? Don’t you have something better to do?”

As some of you may know, my father wasn’t much for church or pomp and circumstance.

I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to be different from my dad, and it’s only in the past year that I’ve come to the realization that, except for a few things, it’s useless.

My dad lived his life the way that he wanted, and nobody – not even my mother – was going to tell him otherwise. All of his family members – and some friends – told him in recent years that he needed to take better care of himself. Again, my dad life his life the way he wanted to live it.

You’ll hear from people from the Ferrari community later about my dad, so let me tell you about the man that few of you ever got to see but that I knew well – the father.

As most parents should, my dad had a tremendous influence on my sister and myself. Some of it was good, and some of it was bad. I will leave it to you to decide what I’m about to tell you is which.

Take, for example, the time my mother was too sick to take the two of us to Sunday school at the Baptist church in Auburn. So she asked my dad to take us to the Baptist church that morning.

When Dad brought us back home, my mom knew he had not taken us to the Baptist church. She knew because we had huge smiles on our faces. We had gone to the Unitarian church. And from then on, we went to the Unitarian church.

I cam remember my Dad sitting on the steps to our house in Auburn, waiting for me to walk home from school so that he could tell me that my dog Mitt had died before I found out from anyone else.

Much to my father’s chagrin, I was never much into cars, but I did tag along to enough Ferrari meets to know what I am looking at. My dad, however, always took the time to throw a baseball with me, which is what I was more interested in.

My Dad always made sure that I was educated on the finer, cultural things in life as well. I’ll never forget the time when I was 14 and my dad took me to see the R-rated movie “Animal House,” much to the consternation of my mother. That’s when I fell in love with the theatrical talents of John Belushi.

And we shared an affinity for Monty Python movies.

There was also the time that I drove my mother’s Mustang through the garage door at our house one morning when I was getting ready to leave for school. My dad spent the rest of the day taking away the destroyed garage door and installing a new one. And the two of us would have gotten away with it if he’d had time to paint it before my mom got home. She, unfortunately, was not amused.

While in high school, my mom and dad caught me and my friend, Jim Carruthers, drinking beer at their house one night when we thought they had gone to a Braves game. Any other parent would have been furious. My dad was just glad we weren’t drinking and driving around town.

And when I graduated from high school, at my request, my dad slipped a cooler with three bottles of champagne into the back of my car so that I could celebrate with my friends after the ceremony.

Just so you don’t think my dad was all fun and games, I can remember some of the times I got talked to as well. All of them were well deserved, including the ones that I knew he was laughing about inside, like the time I got an A for a grade but a U in conduct from my high school physics teacher because I insisted on calling her Mrs. Deadly instead of by her real name, Mrs. Lively.

After I left home, I came to rely on my dad less and less on a daily basis, but always for big issues. He helped me load a U-Haul and move to Gainesville, Fla., to go to graduate school. And he was my best man at my first wedding, even though he kept quiet about what he thought about who I had picked to marry. Yes, he was right, and I was wrong.

He was much happier with my selection of my current wife, and I enjoyed watching him with my two sons. Hell hath no fury like a grandfather beaten by a 13-year-old and a 9-year-old on a go-kart track, and I could swear that I saw him bump both of them out of the way the next time we raced. Yes, my father was competitive, even with his grandkids. It’s OK, they kicked his butt at Wii Bowling.

My dad, as you know, had a lot of principles. And I learned that from him as well. He believed what he believed in, and nothing could change his mind. He had strong beliefs, and he let you know how he felt.

My dad also believed in right and wrong, and that you should always try to do the right thing when dealing with people. Yes, there were people he didn’t like. But even if he didn’t like you, if you treated him with respect, he would help you out.

My dad was also upfront with people, and so I’m not going to lie to you about my dad either. Yes, he was a hard person to get to know. At one of his early jobs, they called him “Lemon” because of his sour disposition. But once he trusted you, he would talk your ear off and do anything you wanted.

I saw my Dad twice in the weeks before he died. At one time, I got him laughing when I threatened to pop a wheelie while pushing him in his wheelchair. The other time, he complained about how the nurses would ask him if he had gone No. 1 or No. 2. Dad wanted a more adult term until I told him what my two kids had taken to calling the latter “Dropping the Deuce.”

Yes, even until the end, his dry sense of humor remained intact.

I can’t help but think about what my Dad would be saying right now if he saw all of us together for him. He’d have that grin on his face that always told you he’s slightly amused at the situation.

I’d like to end with a poem from Dylan Thomas that I think accurately described my Dad’s life.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thank you for your time. Wherever all of you are tonight, I hope you raise a glass of grappa, or sambuca, or single malt scotch, or whatever was your favorite Gerald Roush drink, and give him a toast.

 

Here is a draft of the story I wrote about my Dad's career in Ferraris that ran in the Ferrari Market Letter.

The Roush family appreciates the outpouring of support for the Market Letter since his death.

Gerald L. Roush, the founder and longtime editor and publisher of the Ferrari Market Letter, believed passionately in a number of things.
He believed in good wine and good food, both preferably Italian.

He believed that he should never tell anyone what their Ferrari -- or the Ferrari they were thinking about purchasing -- was worth. My dad believed that a Ferrari was worth whatever someone was willing to pay for it.

My father, who passed away last week at the age of 68, believed that Ferraris were meant to be driven, and the owners who kept them locked away in garages or storage areas were losing out on the true essence of the vehicle.

Roush also believed that facts -- particularly about an old Ferrari -- were sacrosanct. He hoarded those Ferrari facts for decades, first on 5x7 note cards that he typed himself and then on a computer database.

His tireless devotion to finding information about every Ferrari ever built was fascinating to me as a young boy, a teenager, a college student and then an adult. It was as if this information was gold, and no one else could do these nuggets justice. What was the value in collecting data about old cars?

That value was priceless, we later learned, and it is has been the backbone of the Ferrari Market Letter for nearly 35 years. Collect information, and people buying these cars will want it. For the next three-and-a-half decades, if you were a subscriber and you called my father, he happily told you the history behind a car you were looking to buy, or had just bought. All he asked in return was that you provided information as well.

“Gerald was very influential and clearly set the trend, how to build up a proper database and how to keep track of all the cars and collect information,” said Marcel Massini, a Swiss-based collector of Ferrari data and a friend of my dad. “In many ways he was also my mentor. I am most grateful to have had the chance to meet him over all these years and to share the passion: Ferrari.”

Now, as the FML plans to continue, the Ferrari data that Gerald Roush collected for his entire adult life will become his lasting legacy. The Roush family plans to continue operating the publication and collecting data about Ferraris.

My father was born in Durango, Colo., to Maude Catherine and William Elbert Roush. Nothing in his background suggested he’d become a car freak. His mother had grown up on ranches and thought nothing of getting off her horse to kill a snake. His father would serve in the Navy in World War II and spend an entire career working for one company – International Harvester, now known as Navistar.

After a childhood in Colorado, Oklahoma and Chicago, the Roush family settled in Birmingham, Ala., in the early 1950s. Roush’s first encounter with a Ferrari was in 1955, when he bought a Revell plastic model of a Ferrari 340 America Touring Barchetta. It remains a family heirloom.

The September 1958 issue of Sports Car Illustrated, now Car and Drive, got him hooked on Ferraris. The issue featured the Ferrari 4.9 SuperFast, the new V-6 Ferrari Dino and Phil Hill, who became his favorite Formula One driver. The same year, he saw his first Ferrari on the streets of Birmingham. “I heard it coming several blocks away, watched it go by, and then heard it stop about a block away,” he wrote in 1989. “This meant a short walk to see exactly what this loud and unusual Ferrari was, and to chat with the driver about his wonderful automobile.”

He married in 1960. For Christmas that year, he asked my mother Carol for a Ferrari. She presented him with a model of the SuperFast. Two children came soon thereafter, a daughter named Cathy and a son. After a debate as to whether I could be named Phil after his favorite driver, my parents settled on naming me after St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers (race car drivers) and Stirling Moss, at the time the greatest Formula One driver.

My father was in college at the time, studying to be an architect. Ulcers forced him to change his major to history, and he began applying historical techniques to his Ferrari passion. Instead of working on his master’s thesis on reconstruction in Alabama, my mother often found him researching a particular Ferrari.

In 1970, he joined the Ferrari Club of America and started that organization’s monthly News Bulletin. He also started dragging his family to various Ferrari races and functions. The FCA annual meeting outside St. Louis meant a family vacation to see the Gateway Arch. A trip to Watkins Glen meant a stopover to see the Baseball Hall of Fame in nearby Cooperstown.

My father started working on a prototype of the Ferrari Market Letter in 1975 while he was teaching history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Ga. The campus library provided access to the classified ad sections of newspapers from across the country, and he scoured them for Ferraris for sale. The first issue of the FML was printed in January 1976 using the history department’s mimeograph machine, which he’d convinced the secretaries he could run himself. There were 131 subscribers.

The early years of the FML were truly a family affair. My father performed most of the work, but after it was printed, we sat around the kitchen table and put it together. One of us collated. Another stapled it together. A third folded it in half. A fourth applied the mailing address. As the Market Letter grew, we spent more time together around that table. Because of our dad, Ferraris became our life too.

In the fall of 1976, we all moved to suburban Atlanta so that our dad could work for the local Ferrari dealer, FAF Motorcars. But two years later, he left and made the Ferrari Market Letter his full-time occupation in addition to it being his passion. He created an office out of the family garage where he typed each issue, made plates for the printing press and ran the printing press himself. He also knew how to take apart a manual typewriter and put it back together.

The business grew quickly, and the Ferrari Market Letter reached nearly 5,000 subscribers at its height, before the economy and a drop in Ferrari prices dampened the enthusiasm of many potential buyers and sellers. Our father wrote the front-page article for many issues. He wrote about every well-known Ferrari, all the while collecting information on them by requiring subscribers and others with cars for sale in the publication to provide the serial number and other details. Along the way, he co-authored a book about the 365 GTB/4 Daytona.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he bought two Ferraris. The first, a 166 Mille Miglia Barchetta, was found in the back yard of a Houston home, with a tree sprouting up through the engine compartment. My father and I, along with an FAF employee, left Atlanta on a Friday afternoon hauling a trailer and returned late Sunday night with the car. Soon after came a 250 GT PF Coupe that could be driven, unlike the Barchetta.

Those cars didn’t last long. My father was always more interested in the history of the cars, and when there came an opportunity to purchase the records of the longtime North American importer, Luigi Chinetti Motorcars, which had recently gone out of business, he sold the two Ferraris for a handsome profit to add to his Ferrari archives. He now had the records of every Ferrari brought into the United States, as well as hundreds of canceled checks with the signatures of Chinetti and Enzo Ferrari.

He had enough friends in the Ferrari world to keep his appetite for driving Ferraris satiated, however. In the 1980s, he began driving the recreated Mille Miglia race in Italy with his longtime friend, Steve Barney, the former owner of Foreign Cars Italia, the Ferrari dealer in Greensboro, N.C., and writing about their adventures in the FML.

Barney, perhaps our father’s closest friend, remembers their first trip in 1986 through the Italian countryside. They drove Ferrari 212 Inter S/N 0289 – only it was unprepared for what it was about to experience. “With balding and flat tires, worn out brakes and a major overheating issue, we proceeded to rectify what we could,” remembered Barney. “A giant yellow fan in the egg crate grill became our trademark for the next week.”

Barney and my father persevered, with my dad hitting the carburetors with a hammer every so often to loosen them. “We shared the driving duties over the next three days and somehow brought the old Ferrari home to a decent finish,” remembered Barney. “I have photos of Gerald fixing the tire at Milan airport, the yellow fan, and of Gerald with Enzo Ferrari at the Modena checkpoint.” Barney and Roush would be a team for four more Mille Miglias.

His fanaticism with data collection began to pay off, and the Ferrari Market Letter began to be considered the Bible of the Ferrari world. My father promised that it would be published 26 times a year, and while it was sometimes late, he never broke that promise despite heart bypass surgery in the early 1990s and other family emergencies. Subscribers who wanted to read the tea leaves of the Ferrari market followed his Asking Price Index closely.

As his prominence grew, my father began judging concourse and performing other Ferrari-related tasks. In 1984, he was chosen to be a judge at the prestigious Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, and he gave sworn statements in legal cases involving Ferraris through depositions and courtroom testimony. For a while, he was regularly visited by an FBI agent who was interested in stolen Ferraris and Ferraris brought into the United States illegally. He also became an original member of the International Advisory Council for Preservation of the Ferrari Automobile, and later, one of a hand-picked few by the Ferrari factory certified to assess the authenticity of one of its cars.

The Wall Street Journal featured my father on the front page in 1997, calling him “The Dear Abby of the Vintage Ferrari World” and bringing him national and international fame to those outside Ferrari circles. He was quoted in Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, USA Today, Fortune, Money and other publications.

In later years, his research into Ferraris became much more intense. He visited the Ferrari factory regularly, gaining access to records few outside Modena have ever seen. He swapped copies of official factory records with other Ferrari historians, now a budding field. The basement of my parent’s house became – and remains – a Ferrari museum.

Give my father a serial number, and he could tell you the original paint color when it left the factory, or whether the car still had its original engine. He amazed his grandchildren by correctly telling them the correct Ferrari to a computer game that just played the sounds of Ferrari engines.

He became a Dinosaur, a close-knit group of old-time Ferrari people who took it upon themselves to preserve the history of the cars and the quality of what was known about them. Yes, many of them eschewed the newer models. But Gerald Roush came to appreciate some of the more recent cars produced in Modena.

In fact, it’s safe to say that my dad loved Ferraris about as much as he loved his family, Walsenburg, Colo., his cat Frank and single malt Scotch. He was also a cantankerous guy when in the right mood – like when someone would call him and ask him what he thought a certain Ferrari was worth, or when you questioned something he considered to be fact. (His sister Elouise said a younger Gerald was never wrong when growing up.) We’ve all gotten our ears pinned back more than once.

Yet, as his best friend Steve Barney said, “He was one of the few people I trusted with my life, and we really risked far more than we should have in some of our escapades.”

My sister and I moved away, but we never disassociated ourselves from the business. Cathy has overseen the books of what has become Roush Publications for nearly two decades and will become the publisher of the Ferrari Market Letter. My father often asked me for grammar and writing advice. I will continue in a role overseeing the editorial content as managing editor. Employee Chad Ensz will become the editor.

I also learned from Dad how to scare the crap out of anyone driving a Ferrari. Take, for example, the guy I stopped at the entrance of my local Harris Teeter in Chapel Hill, N.C. I proceeded to tell him he was driving a 250 GT Berlinetta Lusso and the likely year it was produced, and I asked for the serial number, even though I knew Dad probably already had it.

Only after I told him I was Gerald Roush’s son did he stop backing away from me like I was some crazed lunatic.

Hey, Dad taught me how to collect Ferrari serial numbers with the best of them.