The Society of Automotive Historians is pleased to welcome the following new members:
Tom McKernan, residing in Arcadia, California, has been in love with automobiles since about age 10; he loves the history of the automobile. Tom worked for the Automobile Club of Southern California for 46 years and was the CEO for 21 years. He achieved many mergers of AAA [American Automobile Association] clubs and the Automobile Club of SoCal continues to be the largest AAA in the country.
Tom enjoys all types of motorsports and one of his daughters races a dragster. He looks forward to learning more history as an SAH member.
Gordon Sayre, residing in Eugene, Oregon, is a professor of English and director of the Folklore program at the University of Oregon, where he teaches a course about cars. Gordon has recently published a short book titled Automobility and the Anthropocene: The Car as a Post-human with Cambridge University Press. It is a followup on an earlier article “The Humanity of the Car.”
Venice, California resident Benjamin Shahrabani is an automotive writer and researcher based in Los Angeles, with a background in auction cataloging and collector-car journalism. His work has included writing for Gooding Christie’s, Petrolicious, Porsche Club of America’s Panorama, and currently Sports Car Market, where he writes the monthly “Collecting Volumes” book review column. Benjamin’s interests center on Porsche history, postwar European sports cars, racing provenance, and the stories behind the people, machines, and ephemera that shape automotive culture. He also collects and researches original factory-produced Porsche posters and automotive literature, with a particular interest in period advertising, motorsport graphics, and the visual history of the marque.
The earliest memories of North Bergen, New Jersey resident Alexander Soultanis, have classic cars in them. As an artist, he found the different shapes and designs fascinating. Alexander grew up drawing cars and hotrods and eventually became an old-school sign painter, lettering trucks, custom painting motorcycles, lettering race cars and gold-leafing fire trucks. His best well-known lettering job is the large star painted on the street for the Macy’s Day Parade. This job resulted from the first street painting he did for the mayor’s office for the Grammy Awards at Radio City Music Hall in 1988. Alexander has been an AACA judge since 2002. He scheduled his vacation around the Hershey Fall Meet to judge every year until 2024, when the 1944 KdF-Wagen type 82e debuted. It was a 22-year restoration and is believed to be the 1st 1944 passenger car shown at a car show in the US. Alexander is an AACA Certified Team Captain.
From 2000-2001 he was part of a live automotive talk radio show in NY serving as the historian part for the show. He has volunteered at many Concours events and served as a Concours judge at Amelia Island, Greenwich Concours, Radnor Hunt, Turtle Invitational, LimeRock Historics, Keeneland Concours, Classic Motor Sports events, Palisades Concours and others starting this year. Now retired, Alexander is always looking for more opportunities to serve as a judge at other Concours. He thoroughly enjoys the camaraderie of the automotive community and promotes all automotive events he attends on social media. Alexander is a member of the AACA (life), CCCA, Porsche 356 Registry, VVWCA, MASCDCS, CJVWS, LIVWC, SAH and is founder of the KdF-Registry.
Vincent L. Stephens, of Boston, Massachusetts, is an American Studies scholar, educator, and academic administrator. A lifelong car enthusiast, he previously published an essay on U.S. automotive journalism, “Mediating the World Class Imperative: U.S. Automotive Journalism, the Big Three, and the Globalized Automotive Industry of the 1980s” in the summer 2023 issue of Automotive History Review. He has written books on 1950s popular music and contemporary television and is currently writing a book on small cars in the U.S.
Benjamin Hill – Rincon, Georgia