OZZIE LYONS, MY PHOTOGRAPHER FATHER  

Not only a photographer but also an engineer, writer, editor, movie director, travel enthusiast, mechanic, car restorer and aficionado of auto racing, Ozzie Lyons was also a great dad. With Geraldine, his wife of over 50 years, he gave their four children the widest possible exposure to the world's myriad opportunities and delights. 

Born in 1910 at Cohoes in NY State's Hudson Valley, he studied engineering at the renowned Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), then began his lifelong creer at the General Electric Co., as a draftsman at first.

Ozzie’s fascination with cars began in childhood, and never ebbed. His earliest racing photos date from 1938, when he shot dirt trackers in lurid action at the Altamont county fairground near Albany. Post-war he went to some of the earliest Bridgehampton and Watkins Glen sports car races, and even all the way to the Indy 500.

In 1953 Ozzie drove to far-off Florida for the second-ever Sebring 12-hour race, and so enjoyed it that next time he brought the whole family along. This growing classic event became the core of the Lyons annual vacation. 

It was there at Sebring that he became friends with Gregor Grant, the Scottish founder of Great Britain’s Autosport magazine, who soon appointed Ozzie Lyons his American photographer. What a crucial development point in my own career that would turn out to be!

Though his weekday career with General Electric was in engineering and later documentary film making, on weekends Dad energetically pursued his journalistic passion, reporting on races and rallies, covering car shows, and photographing custom and classic vehicles both for magazines and the car’s owners, including racing figures Briggs Cunningham, Max Hoffman and Tony Pompeo. 

Often, Ozzie would take his son and even the whole family along on adventures to every corner of North America. It was on such expeditions that he patiently taught me how to use a camera, and on returning home, how to "soup" the film and operate the enlarger to print photos in his darkroom. Yours truly spent many a back-aching, nose-wrinkling hour in wan yellowish light bending over pans of acrid chemicals, sloshing sheets of paper around as I watched images I'd shot a few days before magically emerge as finished photographs.

One thing led to another, and one day I found myself standing in Ozzie’s place at a race track, reporting the event for Autosport.