Jim Stout’s Journey from Oklahoma to the Palisades – And the Cars that Drove His Life
By MATTHEW MEYER | Reporter
Life moves a little slower for Jim Stout these days, at least relatively speaking.
The former Palisadian lives on his family’s farm in Oklahoma, taking every opportunity to babysit for the grandkids and driving a shuttle for rail workers as a “semi-retirement” gig.
Forty-some years ago, he was driving for work, too, although it was the process of driving to work that was often half the fun.
As an automotive writer and advertising manager for the Palisadian-Post, Stout used to drop off his wife, Gloria, downtown and have 30 minutes to make it 22 miles to Pacific Palisades for work at 9 a.m.
He often made it with time to spare.
That may have had something to do with his beloved Datsun 2000, a little silver roadster that got Stout into his share of trouble and now graces the cover of his autobiography, “Drifting Sunset.”
The title is an allusion to another one of Stout’s downtown dashes—a return trip, in this case, to pick up Gloria after work so that she didn’t have to walk home alone through a seedy part of town.
“I got tied up with a client and was running late,” he explained in the book.
But that was no problem. “I let the little Datsun strut its stuff.”
Stout went flying down Sunset Boulevard toward his sweetheart, and when he came upon a sweeping left-hand turn with a constant radius (and, he adds thoughtfully, no oncoming traffic in sight), he threw the roadster into a “four-wheel drift in third gear, exhaust note singing a racing song.”
In that moment of suspended, sliding glory, a little boy from Oklahoma fulfilled a life-long dream.
Before he “ever set foot in California,” Stout recently told the Post, he had been “enthralled” by images and stories of Sunset in his favorite motor magazines.
That day, he drifted the iconic boulevard … and promptly killed his engine.
Stout used what momentum he had left to hobble toward a nearby hotel, where staff helped him get the car back to working order with “some duct tape and … a can of water.”
He was late to pick up Gloria. “I took her out to dinner,” he quipped.
“Drifting Sunset” is filled with such tales: horsepower-filled glories and failures, told in Stout’s wry, matter-of-fact manner. The book traces his life along the lines of the cars he’s loved and lost.
There was the 1950 Ford Stout rolled while purposefully fishtailing on gravel with some school chums. That was as an Oklahoman teenager, growing up in a town that he swears was so small his phone number was simply “4.”
“Out here back then it was wide open spaces and half the population [of] today,” he recalled.
Stout developed early fascinations with cars and photography on his family’s farm, winning an organized (legal) race or two and earning plaudits for his work snapping photos to promote the state’s Future Farmers of America program.
A trusty 1952 Ford got Stout to college, where he studied photojournalism at Oklahoma State.
He bounced between newspaper and magazine jobs, plus stints with the Army and Naval Reserves, eventually landing in Detroit for a managing editor gig that allowed him to work from the heart of the country’s automotive industry.
But the winters were too much for Stout and his chosen ride at the time, a Firebird 400.
He and Gloria moved to Hollywood on Valentine’s Day, 1970.
That’s when Stout landed a job at a prize-winning weekly called the Palisadian-Post. Owners Charlie and Bill Brown, whose photos still hang on the newsroom wall, brought Stout onboard as an advertiser, “because the one they had was caught inebriated on the job with whiskey in his desk drawer.”
It wasn’t long after landing his role with the Post that Stout became smitten with the Datsun 2000, purchasing one brand new and driving it proudly to his meetings with clients. As an ad manager, Stout vastly expanded the paper’s automotive advertising.
Eventually, he pitched the idea of a weekly, devoted auto section and won the Browns’ approval. They crowned him auto editor, and Stout was granted a gearhead’s dream: work-sanctioned road test duties.
In the years that followed, Stout’s road test reports included a BMW Bavaria, the luxurious Jensen Interceptor and a “sensational” Datsun 240Z28. For the latter experience, Stout enlisted the help of a professional Datsun racecar driver, who took him “not to the freeway as I expected” but to a high-end residential street in neighboring Santa Monica.
“With the exhausts bellowing and the race tires allowing roller-coaster turns, we blasted a zigzag path through the Spanish Missions of north Santa Monica,” Stout wrote.
When the drive was done, Stout “thanked the race driver and said I had learned what I wanted to know … It was a miracle it was in one piece. And a second miracle it wasn’t in some police impound lot. And we weren’t in handcuffs.”
“My antics were not reported,” Stout told the Post, laughing. “I had to wait for the statute of limitations to pass.”
In fact, the auto writer doubts his Palisadian neighbors ever quite understood what he’d seen and done behind the wheel.
He and Gloria moved into town while he still worked for the paper, and after Stout’s time at the Post was done, they opened a camera shop and studio together. He was a chief organizer of the annual Fourth of July parade and the couple actively volunteered for youth programs.
They were Co-Citizens of the Year in 1978, where Stout recalls good-natured ribbing from the acceptance ceremony that displayed the extent of his neighbors’ mild-mannered assumptions:
“The sexual revolution passed him by and he never got a shot off” and “Jim Stout od’ed on Twinkies.”
It doesn’t quite conjure the image of a man screaming down Sunset Boulevard in his silver roadster, a daring navigator with gasoline in his veins.
Stout and Gloria eventually split and his time in the Palisades came to an end, returning to Oklahoma where he re-married and raised two children of his own alongside his former wife Donna’s four daughters.
From his home state, Stout snapped award-winning photos for local publications, drove 18-wheel trucks from coast to coast and watched “more grandkids than I can count” grow up before his eyes.
At 74, his work as a shuttle driver today prioritizes safety over speed. And the appendix of his book, in which he outlines safe driving practices learned over years of admittedly ill-advised decisions, is the first portion he wants to expand in a second edition.
But Stout’s passion for cars—their machinery, their full capabilities, the way it feels to control one expertly—hasn’t wavered in the slightest.
“I’m still that way,” he assured the Post before adding, in perhaps a minor understatement: “I enjoy driving.”
That much is abundantly clear.
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