2008 Honorees Supplement

Presented by Emerald Queen Hotel & Casinos

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Are you a driver or a passenger in life?

I never thought of myself as a big "car guy." Maybe that has to do with the fact that I really wasn't exposed to muscle cars, flashy roadsters or pickup trucks that use tractor tires. Those sorts of cars weren't all that common on the military bases I called home, while I was growing up.

My lack of car enthusiasm only grew when I found myself owning cars. My first car was a 1981 Honda Accord. I loved that car because it was small, simple and got me from one spot to another without too much trouble. Then came my Subaru Justy, a car in which I could always feel the engine lose power every time I turned on the air conditioning. My wife called it a can on wheels, but I could go two weeks on a tank of gas. My next car was a 1993 Ford Escort that I inherited from my grandfather. I drove it until it found its way into an accident. It apparently doesn't take much damage to total a 14-year-old car.

I, frankly, don't think much about cars, except for when Business Examiner General Manager Emily West wants me to read through her car reviews for our "BE on the Road" feature. I have always thought that cars are just ways to get me from one place to another as reliably as possible.

That view has sort of changed during the last month, since I visited the LeMay Car Museum facility in East Pierce County for the photo sessions Dane Meyer was conducting to illustrate this year's 40 Under Forty theme of "What drives you?"

I thought of no better place to shoot photos than part of the world's largest privately held collection of cars in the world. LeMay folks liked the idea and graciously allowed us to invade the Marymount facility for a few days during our marathon portrait sessions.

During the down times, I walked around the rows of cars and talked to honorees about their "car stories." Everyone has a car story it seems. Then it clicked. The cars themselves are not always the interesting things – although the two-seater car in the shape of a high-heeled shoe was pretty cool. The interesting part is the stories these cars tell about America, or the people who drove them, or the times in which they were built. Each of our 40 under Forty class this year had a car story to tell. And those stories tell a lot about them.

One of the threads that wove its way through the car stories or the career paths these people told was that they actively thought about who they were, what they were doing, what they wanted and how they were going to get there.

They are drivers of their own lives, instead of backseat passengers complaining about what should be and what could have been.

Steve Dunkelberger, editor
Photos by Dane Gregory Meyer - DG Studio.
Design and Layout by Kelli Bell, senior graphic designer.
Special thanks to Kitty Hammer, of Harold LeMay Enterprises Inc. and
Trudy Cofchin of LeMay - America's Car Museum, for access to the LeMay cars to accent this program.

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