Observations: Bob Margolis
I first met Bob Margolis at a NASCAR race. This is to say I was at a NASCAR race that Bob Margolis was also at, because to be in his physical proximity was to meet him.
There was no avoiding him. There was no not-noticing him. He had this thick black hair and sometimes wore actually fashionable clothes. (To say this caused him to stand out at the track is an understatement.) He was unique. He was a musician. He had worked in the recording industry. He did some television production. He was a character. He was cool. He was a self-described hippie. He was fun.
He talked loud and fast and for a long time. He laughed. A lot. He laughed in a way that you looked across a room, saw these people crowded around him and wondered A) what is that guy laughing about? and B) how exactly can I get in on the group?
The latter was simple; you just went and spoke to Bob or, more likely, he came over and introduced himself first. He loved meeting people and being around people and having fun arguing about things … race cars and guitarists and politics and the best places for sunsets (the hills of Northeastern Pennsylvania, he said) and whatever the heck else popped up. He was a tour de force. I liked him immediately.
Bob passed away Wednesday, a fourth bout of cancer doing what the first three couldn’t. He was 65.
Man, this dude was tough, a decade of taking everything the disease could throw at him and still standing tall – rounds and rounds of chemo, surgery after surgery, setback after setback. Stage 4 cancer? He came back from that one time. Even as it weakened and changed him physically, at times threatening his ability to speak (of all things), even as it tired him with its relentlessness, it couldn’t douse his infectious personality.
“People need to know, you don’t have to be scared of cancer,” Bob would say. “It’s a scary diagnosis, but you don’t have to be scared of it. It can be beaten.”
He spent his last few days in hospice in his beloved Pennsylvania, surrounded by his family. I know that meant he was content and happy. Of all the subjects Bob loved to talk about, it was his family – particularly his four kids, Brian, Janelle, Natasha and Alana – that always elicited the most passion and pride.
Bob was a friend and for a stretch a co-worker at Yahoo. He wasn’t a traditional journalist, but that was his strength. He was popular with readers (his Observations column was a must-read for NASCAR fans every Monday morning) because he was full of information and opinion. Here’s the blog he was writing even while fighting for his life.
At the track everyone talked to Bob. He’d post up next to a crew member early in the morning, pull aside a driver after the race and then find a way to fly home with an owner at night. He was a gossip in all the best ways. Everyone liked the two-way flow of information he provided. Everyone was happy to see him, unless he’d just criticized them in print, but even that was eventually forgiven.
That was his way, though. He was an arguer. He was a convincer, a street lawyer. He was a guy who just needed a couple of minutes to win you over.
Back at some point in the 1970s or ’80s he worked for a record company. This was before big radio networks bought stations in each city, before MTV, before the Internet. The only way to sell albums was to get local stations to play an artist’s song on the radio. And that meant going station-to-station, city-to-city, convincing program directors why this song should get airtime. Bob’s stories were wild because “convincing” quickly descended into all-night entertainment, payoffs, even wild antics such as smashing up an office of someone who wouldn’t budge. It was completely nuts. His life was a movie.
People in the music industry – singer, songwriter, producer, record executive – just don’t become NASCAR media and marketers. But Bob did.
Racing’s incredible cocktail of danger and excitement and soap opera and endless mayhem hooked him. At his core he was an adrenaline junkie, a guy who lived life 200 miles per hour, so why not get in on the sport that can match it? It wasn’t even just NASCAR or the Indy 500. Bob was enthralled by it all, dirt tracks and Grand-Am Road Racing and Top Fuel dragsters.
“When I’m at the track,” he’d say, “I’m alive.”
I didn’t watch racing growing up. No one I knew watched racing growing up. I was late to the party when I started covering races, and while I immediately appreciated the storylines and personalities and massive grandeur of it all, I didn’t fully get an intensity for it until I started spending time with Bob, who simply wouldn’t stop selling every last bit of its glory.
I’m going to miss that about Bob. I’m going to miss the conversations, even the one-sided ones. I’m going to miss being at some track, early in the morning and watching this ball of energy come in, grabbing me by the shoulder and excitedly discussing what he just heard or what he thought might happen or what one of his kids just did or simply about how lucky we were to be here, on race day where anything could happen.
And I was – very lucky.
