Gordon Jennings, a former editor of Car and Driver and a longtime columnist for this magazine, died November 11 at his home in Paso Robles, California. He was 69.

Born in California, Jennings grew up in the desert at Brawley. He served time at Road & Track and was editor-in-chief at the now-defunct Cycle magazine before moving down the Ziff-Davis hall to run C/D for a time. He was editor from January 1970 to March 1971, and he wrote a column from September 1967 to July 1972.

Editor-at-large Patrick Bedard remembers: "He was an outsider -- he raced bikes, and they animated his conversations -- but quick with a quip, and his flair for vivid descriptions made him a player in those days of swaggering verbosity at C/D. About his first test ride on the wheelie-crazy Kawasaki 500 triple, he said, 'After three laps, you have to pull into the pits and beat the goosebumps down with a hammer.' He liked ornate expressions and quotes, and he laced his copy and conversations with them.

"He had a bad fall-off in a bike race when he was editor. He was trussed up for months like a roasting pig. He'd stop at my cubical entrance and start to say something, then grimace. Ever so gracefully, he'd shift the stack of broken pieces in his skeleton, then restart the conversation. No more racing after that.

"Often we'd lunch together at Cedars of Lebanon, a three-block stroll from the C/D offices at One Park Avenue in New York. Arak gone milky white over rocks was his aperitif -- liquid fire. He would talk about other bike racers, their predilections, and I'll always remember one of them -- a guy so devastated by VD that, standing at the urinal, 'he had to finger his member like a piccolo to hold all the leaks,' according to Gordon."

He is survived by his mother, Cornelia Jennings; sons Gordon III and David; and a grandson, Ian.