IMPA honors for Crankshaft’s story on Tucker 1044’s restoration

I’ve received journalism awards throughout my career, I say gratefully, but I was profoundly stunned to learn yesterday that my story for Crankshaft‘s first issue on the restoration of 1948 Tucker number 1044 has been selected as winner of the Ken W. Purdy Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism from the International Motor Press Asssociation. It was the first time the award, which has honored the very best in automotive writing since 1972, has been presented in three years. The award is named in memory of Purdy, arguably the finest journalist ever to put word to paper about automobiles. This is the most important accolade I’ve ever captured.

“Preston’s Prodigy” tells the story about the rush to complete this Tucker to show quality under crushing time pressure to get it ready for display at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in 2018. This impossible job was successfully completed by the artisans at Ida Automotive in Morganville, New Jersey, with direct participation in the project by the descendants of Preston Tucker, making it the only Tucker so restored. Sincere thanks to Rob Ida and Sean Tucker for attending the award ceremony in New York, and to Howard Kroplick for commissioning the work and seeing it through to a glorious conclusion. I’d like to say, right here, that I’ve been a working journalist since 1979 and have always been lucky enough to be surrounded by people who cared about my work and tried to improve it, no matter which publication I worked for over the years. It’s a big group of good people, and I’m sincerely grateful to them all.