Fast forward several decades and I have encountered John Phillips yet again, and again have benefited from his writing, which this time has very little to do with vehicles — and when it does, those vehicles tend to be 4-wheel-drive trucks.
You see, Phillips and his wife, Julie, decided to retire from a life orbiting largely within the Detroit automotive corridor to retire to a barely reachable residence clinging to a mountainside in the remote Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, or as Phillips puts in the title of his book about the move, Four Miles West of Nowhere: A City