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My Buddy is Gone - Tom Medley Remembered

My Buddy is Gone - Tom Medley Remembered
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Stroker is gone. What an empty hole that leaves in my life, a hole that was filled by one of the best friends I have every been honored with.

Tom Medley, aka Stroker McGurk, passed away appropriately the day the Oscars were awarded. For me, he had won such an accolade decades before. For you, street rod enthusiasts everywhere in the world, he would simply have said “Hey, it was my job.”

But the Tom Medley who, literally, gave you the first street rod oriented magazine, the first street rod nationals, the best hot rod cartoons, the very fabric of the street rod movement,  one of the most deserving and least honored hot rodders in our history, that Tom Medley is likely never to be replaced. Ever.

I met Tom Medley the very first day I went to work at Hot Rod Magazine, and we celebrated that friendship often, sometimes daily, for the next six decades. We became good friends through cars, but much better companions through our common love of trout fishing. TMed was like a wonderful uncle to my four children, a brother to me and Pegge. For you, hot rod enthusiast, he was your conduit to the world.

I called him TMed, or TM, or sometimes Stroker. I always called him when I had something exciting coming up. And he was always up for an adventure on a trout stream or out bashing in the boondocks for vintage tin. Tom’s enthusiasm was infectious, certainlyl when he cranked the car radio way up, playing l940’s swing music. He was an especially good jitterbug dancer, you know.

Now I have to close yet another chapter in the autobiography I am now finishing (doing the pix), and TMed plays a prominent role therein. But, Medley is irreplaceable in my history, and I loved that dude very, very much.

It is more and more lonely.