Richard Gordon is no longer with us, and I am the less for his passing. I hate to lose friends by distance, death, or disaffection, for the older I get, the more I am convinced that friendship is the most valuable of all intangible assets.
And Richard was a valued friend indeed.
I first made his acquaintance in the 1970s, when I was peddling sports-car parts and accessories at the Rally Stripe, a small shop in Anchorage. One day I ran across a mimeographed booklet of racing parts for–wait for it–Volvos. Since I was racing Saabs at the time, I concluded that there was indeed one character in the world who was even nuttier than I was, and sure enough, that was Richard Gordon.
Based in Portland, Oregon, he had been racing Volvo 142s, which had all the latent speed and agility of a Bösendorfer grand, and like those of us rare, stubborn scapegraces racing those other Swedes, he could only be competitive by creating his own modified racing bits. And in order to support this mania, he formed a small company, IPD–the meaning of those initials seemed to change with Richard’s whims, but at one point they stood for Import Parts Distributors, I think–and began selling Volvo hop-up parts to other non-conformists.
Richard’s business success matched his racing success, but his real genius lay in his enthusiastic pursuit of the unthinkable. Again, his racing pursuits led to new directions, because he procured a motorhome with which to tow his car to distant race tracks. Returning from California along the coast, he went through a couple of hair-raising mountain switchbacks–and changed the focus of IPD.
Hey, if he could make a Volvo handle like a sports car, why not a motorhome?
By this time, IPD suspensions were de rigueur for anybody racing or rallying Volvos–my friend JW Ray rallied an IPD-equipped 145 wagon, with me learning to navigate on the fly–and when Saab graduated to the 900 model, IPD kindly stepped into the breach for that car as well. That’s when Richard and I became close, for he took on my 900 SPG as a special project. He developed parts for the car, had it pinstriped and polished to show-car perfection, and presented me with the results when I flew into Portland for a visit. We called that car the Blackbird, after the Lockheed SR-71, and I discovered another fanatical quirk of Richard Gordon: He used only water to wash his cars, never any soap or detergent, and he had one special mitt for use only on black cars.
And then there was the rally Rockwood.
By the early 1980s, IPD was fully into the motorhome-suspension business, building sway bars the size of your forearm for Class A motorhomes. Richard delighted in showing off his wares by hurling before-and-after RVs around Portland International Speedway, and when he heard that the Blackbird and I would be running the 1985 AlCan 5000 Rally, he came up with a brilliant plan: In order to show off the IPD suspension, he would enter a Rockwood motorhome in the rally.
Well, yes, a 5,000-mile jaunt up and down the AlCan ought to prove something.
Neither of us won the AlCan 5000 rally that year, but that sort of adventure is more about the doing than the competition anyway. Somewhere in this mess I have pictures of Richard Gordon drifting Rocky, as this behemoth was known, through a 90-degree gravel corner; the trick, he told me later, was to let the rear end start to slide, then countersteer and keep on the gas, correcting the vector as necessary with the steering wheel. Easy to describe, a little harder to do–like developing a shocks-and-suspension kit for a multi-ton motorhome.
And laughing through the entire affair.
That’s the thing about Richard Gordon and others like him: They have an infectious sense of fun, and an acute appreciation of the truly ridiculous. Gordon had a gleeful sense of mischief, and he laughed at himself as hard as he laughed at the follies of the world. I remember a time on the AlCan when we were on the radio, and I was whining about the scant rations we had in the Blackbird. “We’re down to our last pack of beef jerky,” I moaned.
“You should be in here with us!” laughed Richard. “We’re just microwavin’ some popcorn!”
I could go on with Richard Gordon stories for any amount of time. Exhibit A: When we lost the oil in the Blackbird, Richard towed us behind Rocky the entire length of Vancouver Island. Then he towed us directly onto the ferry–without pausing when the Blackbird passed the collection booth.
Perhaps one measure of our place in the world is whether people tell stories about us when we’re gone. I know Richard Gordon endured Parkinson’s and the attendant depression that goes with that disease, but I knew him best in his years of joy and high spirits, and that’s how I’ll remember him. One could do worse than leave a perpetual image of sliding sideways in a souped-up motorhome, I think, because damn few fools would try it–and only one or two could carry it off.
I am glad to have known Richard Gordon. I wish you could have known him, too.
