Jean Jennings, The Woman Who Made Autojournalism Fun, Dead At 70

I think it would be impossible to know Jean Jennings and not like Jean Jennings if you had any sense of humor. Automotive media is always at risk of becoming extremely boring. All the free cars, rich food, and ad dollars can have a dulling effect on the soul. Jean Jennings, the first woman to edit a national car magazine and the first to win a national magazine award for one, was never dull.

Jean passed away from complications related to Alzheimer’s this morning at the age of 70. There will be people who know her better who will write more detailed obits about her. I’ll link to a few of those here, but because I was lucky enough to know her a little I wanted to share some of my experience.

If you’re an auto journalist, PR person, exec, or a subscriber to Car And Driver in the ’80s/Automobile from its inception, then you know Jean’s story. If not, I’ll do a brief summary, because it’s helpful to know how Jean became Jean. Growing up in a small town in Michigan, the daughter of a copy editor and journalist, Jean attended the University of Michigan for two semesters before dropping out and becoming a cab driver.

That’s not a great gig, so her brother let her know about a job at Chrysler’s Proving Grounds. After a few rejections, Jean finally landed a union position as a test driver (she had surgery for cervical cancer the week before she started because she didn’t want to miss the opportunity). Eventually, Jean was laid off, but not before starting a union newsletter called The Chrysler Crew’s News.

From there, she got a job working for the great David E. Davis at Car And Driver and became a “pioneer” at the magazine as a writer who also happened to be a woman. As groundbreaking as that was, it shouldn’t be forgotten that she was also brave, quick-witted, and shameless in a way that made car writing worth reading.

Joe Lorio writes in that site’s obit:

Aside from writing talent, though, Jean was special because of her madcap style and taste for adventure. She drove in a demolition derby. She rode in an off-road race with Walker Evans. She ran Brock Yates’s One Lap of America three times, first in the inaugural year with Walker Evans and Parnelli Jones (in a beer-delivery van), next with Canadian WRC driver Nicole Ouimet, and lastly with Hurley Haywood.

Her magnetic personality attracted both industry leaders—a trio of mammoth Rolodexes was a fixture of her office—and strangers alike. In the famously star-crossed Car and Driver road test “Greetings from Sunny Mexico,” author Brock Yates described how Jean repeatedly extricated her C/D compatriots from scrapes with the federales. First, when Yates was arrested for public urination, Jennings, the only Spanish speaker in the group, denounces him as a pig, and the cops let him off with a 10-dollar fine. Later, after a police ambush in La Paz, Yates wrote, “Lindamood is brilliant as she aborts impending arrest by demonstrating the Datsun’s idiotic synthesized voice to the awe-struck lawmen.” Still later, Jean and technical editor Don Sherman are carted off with a federale for failing to report the Dodge’s collision with a cow. But somehow, Jean ends up driving the patrol car and manicuring the cop’s girlfriend’s nails, and the incident nets a $50 fine.

David E. Davis eventually bolted Car And Driver with Jean and others to create Automobile magazine, placing Jean as the Executive Editor. Eventually, she’d take the magazine over and become the first woman to edit a national car magazine. She’d win tons of awards for her editing and hire many of the stars of autojournalism’s next generation.

She even got a profile from Susan Orlean in The New Yorker that is a hoot to read, and includes this great line:

“Feel sorry for yourself,” Jean said. “That’s my advice. That’s my slogan. If you have a shitty time, no one cares, so you might as well have a good time.”

By the time I met her, in 2008, the company had become part of Source Interlink, and Jean was somehow at every event. Tall and usually wearing one of her signature hats, you could always spot Jean. And if you couldn’t see her, you could hear her, as she was always talking or laughing.

Back then, writing for a car blog was not considered a prestigious position. Some of the buff book folks looked at us with a mixture of pity, fear, and contempt. Not Jean. Whether she sensed the shifting grounds of automotive journalism or was just being her usual gregarious self I’ll never know, but she always greeted me and other bloggers with warmth and humor.

I’ll never forget when I heard Source Interlink, which was in the process of becoming The Enthusiast Network, fired Jean and half the staff. It wasn’t a call I wanted to make. Jean picked up the phone and made it easier on me by being straightforward and not just a little funny:

Now former Editor-in-Chief Jean Jennings told me this afternoon that the rumors about Source Interlink and their content chief Angus Mackenzie were true, that she was “surprised” by the timing of the announcement but not entirely surprised that it did happen.

“It’s business,” she said, noting that Source Interlink tried to move the magazine to Los Angeles a decade ago until she says she intervened.

She says Automobile will close its Ann Arbor offices, leaving only a handful of employees, moving a few “cherry picked” people to an office in Royal Oak and moving the magazine to be closer to Motor Trend. None of those people will be copy editors, apparently.

“I don’t think Angus ever believed you needed copy editors, and I said ‘that’s why you have typos in your column Angus,'” she joked.

It was a shitty time, sure, and yet Jean was true to her slogan even then, having a little fun. Here’s a video of her in 2017 on her own YouTube channel talking about the Detroit Auto Show:

Jean is survived by her husband, Tim Jennings; her brothers Paul (Anita), Ted (Rosemarie), and Tom Lienert; niece Becky Lienert; and nephews Daniel and Phillip Lienert. Her dogs Jackey, Farley, and Ray the Stray will also miss her.

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorial contributions be sent to the Arbor Day Foundation.

UPDATE: The team over at MotorTrend is doing a great job gathering remembrances from people she worked with, and I thought this one from her longtime friend Joe DeMatio was particularly good:

 I was an editorial assistant, lowest of the low, but the first weekend I was there, Jean invited me to her house for a Super Bowl party. I brought a particularly good batch of my homemade guacamole, which was a hit, and I was part of the club. Before long, I was answering Jean’s mail, specializing in composing appropriate replies to her fans, many of whom happened to be prison inmates. Inmates are incredibly perverted.

Top image: Jean Knows Cars/YouTube