The Greatest Gifts Left Behind
Hi Friends!
Here we are, through the first weekend of Arizona Car Week and as much as I would like to report on how great the shows have been so far, how awesome the Arizona Concours was and the feeling of unity that’s currently running through this community, which in turn we are sharing with everyone who’s visiting (all of these things are true by the way), something occurred earlier this week, that I think deserves to be discussed more urgently.
Unfortunately, this past Monday, Mecum Auctions announced the sudden passing of John Kraman.
For those not familiar, John was the color commentator and professor extraordinaire for Mecum’s television and web broadcasts going back many, many years. He was the guy that provided the expert analysis on every lot as it crossed the block and essentially, whether it be cars or motorcycles (or guitars), John was the guy that knew everything about everything. He was also a guy that I really, really personally liked a lot.
I’ll be the first to admit, I haven’t always had the greatest relationship with Mecum. As head of marketing and lead auction guerrilla warfare expert for Russo and Steele for many years, we had competing events and differing objectives, but that was never really all that relevant for either of us. Anytime I saw John, it was always a great conversation that I was always sad to see come to an end. He was somebody that liked to share his knowledge and his passion and he was deeply dedicated to bringing people together in order to facilitate that. He was always quick to extend a hand, provide a kind word and he remembered absolutely everything about everyone.
My last conversation with him, just a few short weeks ago, was surrounding decoding vehicle identification numbers on 1950s Italian motorcycles for their upcoming Las Vegas Motorcycle Event and as quick and seemingly irrelevant as that conversation was, now in hindsight, I’m really wishing we could have talked more. I know he was a frequent reader of this newsletter (his name was one of the first to pop up every week on the read list, including this past Sunday) and I always felt honored that he thought highly enough of what I was doing to continuously dedicate the time required to reading it. Especially with how crazy his schedule always was.
Despite all of this and what an awesome guy he was, I don’t even think this is the greatest gift that he has given to our world.
The fact is, whether it be on the streaming networks, cable television, the internet, the various editorial that he contributed throughout the years, etc, the most significant thing that John has left behind for all of us was the unbelievable amount of recorded and documented knowledge that he shared over the years. There is literally thousands upon thousands of hours of deep know-how that is now accessible not only to people today, but people of the next generation and potentially the generation after that because of John. This will serve to inspire and educate people and in turn keep his passion and the passion that we all share for collector cars and motorcycles alive and well for what could be decades and decades to come.
These gifts are critically important to the future of this hobby and of this industry and I think in John’s memory, we should all be trying harder to make our own experience and know how more accessible to more people too.
For the past 2 years or so, I’ve been running ads on social media specifically trying to get people who have expertise in various niche corners of this hobby to start to document the knowledge they have and share their life’s work electronically and in a capacity that makes it easier to share and easier to acquire. This means start blogs, put up websites, start YouTube channels, create podcasts, do anything you can in order to share the things that have defined you with others so that they too can benefit from them when there’s nobody around to show them the way.
Whether John acutely knew he was doing this or not, I don’t know, but again this is something of really major importance that he contributed to the world and even if each of us does a fraction of what he did, we can carry on his legacy this way, as well as the legacies of ourselves and the things that we love collectively.
My deepest condolences go out to John’s family, his friends and all the people at Mecum Auctions who went through the trenches with him every day.
He was a truly great guy and he will most assuredly be missed.
John Kraman
1956-2025
RIP
That’s it for this week…
Darin Roberge