Our brother-in-law, Sam, was visiting from Florida in late July. It had been only a year since his wife, Annie, died. To cheer him up, we took him on a tour of Traverse City and the Sleeping Bear Dunes so he could enjoy an experience he had never shared with Annie. 

He was in awe of what he saw in Northern Michigan. Then, for another change of pace, we invited a few neighbors over one evening, telling them ahead about Sam’s loss, because he had warned that he might not be able to join us for long.

Any concern that Sam might go to bed early evaporated when my husband, Russ, introduced him to our neighbor, Ray. A born car guy—his dad owned Serbay Motors, once famed for its powerful Plymouth drag racers—Russ told Sam and Ray that they shared something rare: both owned a vintage Toyota FJ Cruiser. Furthermore, Russ had just opened his July–August Car and Driver and found the full-page “What to Buy” column at the end, extolling the 2007–2014 FJ Cruiser.

“That’s my FJ!!” Ray exclaimed. “The photo in the mag is of my car.”

A magazine page with the title What to Buy and an SUV

Courtesy of Car and Driver

“What do you mean?” we asked. “How could that photo be your actual car?”

Ray explained that one day, while he was getting his mail from the box on the street—which required him to park against traffic—a man waved him over. That was Greg Fink, a senior editor for Car and Driver, which is based in Ann Arbor.

“I live up the road at Newport West, and regularly drive past Ray’s house on my way home,” Fink explains by email. “As a gearhead, the fact Ray’s house had not just one, but two FJ Cruisers always stood out to me.” (The second belongs to Ray’s wife, Bev.)

“Sourcing an example of a given vehicle is often a ‘hit or miss’ thing,” Fink writes. “Oftentimes a staffer personally knows someone with the specific vehicle we’re looking to cover and reaches out to see if we can shoot it. Sometimes the vehicle we photograph is even owned by a staff member. Other times we find ourselves knocking on doors, as was the case with Ray’s FJ Cruiser. These Toyota SUVs aren’t that old, but they already have a strong following, and we figured if Ray was game to let us shoot one of his FJs, then it’d be worth doing a ‘What to Buy’ feature on the FJ Cruiser.”

The magazine hired Ferndale freelance photographer John Roe to do the shoot with help from C/D photo assistant Charley Ladd. They also had the car cleaned thoroughly inside and out, including an exterior glaze that had it looking like new. All at no cost to Ray.

The cover story in the July–August Car and Driver is “Who Wants to Play Dirty? The Toyota Land Cruiser returns to conquer the Utah desert.”  On the last page, “What to Buy” might lead a few readers to decide that they’d just as soon have an FJ Cruiser instead.

Related: Tony Quiroga