While

["Mahoney, John" <jmahoney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In recent days, while Asian carmakers continued to gain US market share (a
sadly still-sinking 58.7% of new vehicles bought by Americans now being
"domestic" makes), while many American activists cast their ballots (and
some American Motors activists cast the casting of an American Motors
activist on/offline from their listing American ship), while the speaking
well and/or the writing poorly [of English] became an un-American activity
(So where were words on the American Motors cameo appearance in Robert
MacNeil's "Do You Speak American?" last night, eh?), and while fingers were
poked in eyes (or in ears) and snakes were rattled around dens done up
warmly by <goll-ee, gee> Motorola, I thought about new things I learned
about America's American Motors Corporation in 2004.

I learned that, of three people "present at the creation" of what surely was
the most exciting --- at least to late-sixties/early-seventies AMC lovers
--- era in American Motors' history, only one had ever been approached by an
AMC hobbyist-type (leader, author or just fanatic AMC fan) to tell their
tales of "back when."

I learned a little --- or a lot --- from all three of them.

(And I didn't meet them anywhere in AMC land...)

Elsewhere I learned that, on what surely was the most important vehicle ---
save Rambler, Hornet and Gremlin --- in modern AMC history, so much was
still unwritten and/or unspoken that I found myself just "truckin'" (and I
do trucks the way I do trains --- as an interested, but totally uninformed
bystander...) back to the world of "AMC then."

I learned a little --- or a lot --- about Jeep's Cherokees.

(And I didn't find that trail in an AMC atlas ...)

Most of all, I learned that there's still much to be learned, whether
American Motors' ship is slowly sinking or it has been sunk for decades.
Someday, someone might enjoy learning what I learned as well.