John K. Teahen Jr., who was born a week before Automotive News' founding in 1925 and became a pillar of the publication through six decades of writing and editing, died Tuesday, Jan. 8, after a long illness. He was 87.
His first byline appeared in Automotive News on Nov. 14, 1955. His last was posted on autonews.com on Sept. 18 of last year, a month after he turned 87.
In between, he graced hundreds of columns, news stories and editorials with a peerless writing touch, mentored generations of reporters and editors and chronicled the industry's triumphs and failures.
The scorekeeper
Teahen created what have become staples of industry scorekeeping, including an annual dealer census and tallies of automakers' sales per dealership.
And he enlivened the Automotive News newsroom with barbed comments about such things as disobedient computers and automakers that failed to see the folly of abandoning cars in favor of SUVs.
To his colleagues he was the ever-gracious gentleman, always ready with kind words delivered with the elegant Teahen touch. To a favorite editor temporarily away from the office, he wrote: "I await the day that you are again the brow-beating dominatrix we all love."
For her help in his epic battles with "the abomination" -- the newspaper's computer system -- he annually awarded her a box of premium chocolates.
In 2006, Teahen's career won widespread accolades from his peers. In that year he was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame, received a Distinguished Service Citation from the Automotive Hall of Fame and accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Detroit Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
"He was the editor, more than any other, who made sure everything was right, from facts collected by our reporters to the way commas and apostrophes were used," wrote a former colleague, the late Richard A. Wright, in 2006.
Teahen's desk was a resource center for colleagues who mined his extensive storehouse of auto industry history and retreated to his hardcover dictionary and thesaurus when online searches failed them. To this day, a 1959 edition of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style sits in the shadow of the latest editions of his pricing bible, The Original New Car Cost Guide.
An auto family
Jack Teahen was born on Aug. 20, 1925, in Detroit. A week later, the first issue of Automotive Daily News was published in New York.
They would come together three decades later. In the interim, Teahen was no stranger to the auto industry. His father, J. King Teahen Sr., spent 46 years in the business, most of them at Fisher Body.
During World War II, "we didn't see much of my father for several months," his son wrote in a 2001 column comparing post-World War II America to the nation after 9/11.
"He was a Fisher Body executive and was much involved in the changeover of Fisher and General Motors plants to war production. He worked days, nights and weekends."
