BROCK YATES—longtime C/D contributor, short-time editor-in-chief— died on October 5, 2016. He was 82. Yates had been dodging the slings and arrows of Alzheimer’s disease for more than a decade. Official cause of death was complications from Alzheimer’s—“ He stopped breathing,” says son Brock Jr.
Yates leaves behind his wife, Pamela, and children Brock Jr., Daniel, Claire Lilly, and Stacy Bradley.
Yates was born in Lockport, New York, in 1933, and his father, Raymond F. Yates, was both a writer and a car enthusiast. Raymond helped Brock, at age 16, compose a freelance article that was published in Science and Mechanics magazine.
Yates’s early rides were his father’s, including an MG TD and a Jaguar XK120. He deployed the latter, as he put it, for “cruising through Hobart College with…
