>Kickin' Ass >Makin' Titles
If the divorce granted anyone an advantage, it was Tom. In 1974 Steve Stillwell and Jim Clark finally lured Bob Clark (no relation) to work for them. "A friend of mine, Roger Cassano-better known as Raja; he was like the king of metalflake-and I owned a shop called Chopper Specialties on Beach Boulevard," he said.
"It became very apparent that my real area of expertise was designing new magazines," he said. In fact, during the 23 years he worked for the company, Bob helped start up about 20, "Many of which I started on my own," he maintained. Among them: Splash, one of the first personal watercraft publications and a bunch of self-explanatory titles like Car Audio and Electronics, Truckin', VW Trends, American Survival Guide, Handgun Illustrated, and Sport Compact Car.
To his defense, Tom did come up with some original ones, but Snowball, a magazine devoted to topless skiing, and Croquet-which still leaves us speechless-didn't survive. We do admit he redeemed himself with Beer, even though it went flat too.
Those weren't the only casualties, either. Without Tom to invent parts for it and the magazine to promote it, AEE Choppers withered. Sadly, the little company that started it all died.
Surely stories could be told of the next 30 or so years, we're going to leave those for another time. Instead, we'll give you the CliffsNotes version.
The publication company changed names twice, first to reflect the divorce (McMullen Publishing) and again when Vice President Ken Yee assumed a stake in the company (McMullen-Yee Publishing). Ken Yee, an avid golfer died, ironically enough, on the golf course in 1994. Even more ironically, Tom died a year later to the day. Given his numerous close calls in aircraft over the years, it's probably no surprise that it was at the helm of a plane. The report cited pilot error; he hadn't activated the de-icing equipment on his Rockwell Commander for the short trip from Wichita to Oklahoma City where he and his third wife, Deanna, were to reportedly going to drop off a dog to her brother. Rime ice formed on the wings, the plane lost lift, and an eyewitness account said the plane augered the ground at full power. Jim said it left a 30-foot trench and the largest remaining part fit in a 4x4x8 box. Needless to say, it was a closed-casket funeral and nobody mentioned the dog.
The McMullen publishing legacy still endures, though; his empire merged with Argus Communications and was later bought by a holding company that eventually became Primedia Publications. There's a bit of silver lining there: Tex Smith, 20 percent partner in Tom's publishing empire, proved his share in court using testimony from Jim Clark's internal tape recorder. In the end he walked away a millionaire many times over, reparations for all the times Tom snubbed him when he asked to cash out.
Primedia's acquisition of Peterson Publications in the early 2000s ironically made uncomfortable bedfellows of rival titles. Most recently Source Interlink bought Primedia's enthusiast titles (this one among them) for-sitting down?-$1.2 billion dollars.
>That's a lot of zeroes.
Strange, isn't it, that this mountain of money can trace its way back to a bunch of amateurs trying to make a buck? "It started out of just that," Dave Brackett pondered. "The magazine was to fix a financial problem at a parts shop and it was the smartest thing we ever did."