About Me

Location: Southern California, USA

Member, AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, SAE, the Society of Automotive Engineers, SAH, the Society of Automotive Historians, CCCA, the Classic Car Club of America, AACA, the Antique Automobile Club of America, and SEMA, the Specialty Equipment Market Association, plus various auto racing organizations. Steve has been honored with two Los Angeles-area Emmy Awards (automotive reporting at KTLA/TV5, KCBS/TV2).

Steve was born in Brooklyn, NY (and who wasn't?). Steve was raised in Brooklyn, NY and Rockville Centre, a wonderful, small village on NY's Long Island, and in Santa Ana, CA. He currently resides with his wife and cat in La Quinta, CA. He graduated Santa Ana High School after serving as Student Body President his senior year (1972), and attended California State University at Fullerton, majoring in computer technology (then brand new!) and journalism. In those days, every journalist wanted to be the next "Woodward and Bernstein", but there was more money to be made writing about cars, trucks and motorcycles ... And a better chance of getting a byline and a paycheck, too, then there was in bringing down another government!

So Steve made the decision to go for the gold. He has continued his education through the years by taking various Society of Automotive Engineers' (SAE) courses and others offered through various online and local college and auto industry/auto racing sites.

Thanks to 35+ years in the auto journalism business, he is one of the best-known and most widely-recognized automotive journalists in the world. He has written literally hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and columns on a wide variety of subjects, most of them having to do with cars, trucks and motorcycles and all the many forms of motor racing worldwide.

Steve has in recent years served as a consultant, analyst and advisor to some of the top auto industry consultancies in the world (including the two pre-eminent in the field, AMCI and Sandy Corporation). He has also ghost-written magazine articles and best-selling books along with and for some of the auto industry's and auto racing's best-known personalities.

His advisory, consultant and ghost-writing projects are constantly growing, and Parker today concentrates much of his time towards these efforts, along with his company's “CAR NUT TV" show, numerous Internet projects and a soon-to-be-announced worldwide, interactive project taking auto journalism kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Steve constantly tries to offer another avenue of information for the world's Car Nuts, apart from the constant corporate PR barrage which is often carried as "news" in both the well-known enthusiast print publications, and now also on the Web, where many automotive sites, whether connected to one of the enthusiast magazines or not, continue to confuse PR for real news, much to the glee of the auto-makers, and often to the detriment of consumers. This has gone on at least since General Motors was "credited" with creating "modern" automotive public relations in the 1950s.

Steve Parker has been a working journalist since 1973, based in southern California, focusing on cars, trucks and motorcycles, the worldwide industry which makes them and the people who buy, collect, race and lavish over them. If it has anything at all to do with cars, Steve Parker has been “the go-to guy" for scores of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV shows in need of an on-air “expert”.

Steven Parker Productions, Incorporated (SPPI, a California corporation) is currently in the process of creating and producing a brand-new, live and worldwide automotive experience, the likes of which has not yet been done. It will be launched the second-quarter of 2008. Visit this website often to get the latest information!

CAR NUT TV, a 1/2-hour TV program, just started its fifth season and runs on Time Warner cable systems in California's San Diego County and the Coachella Valley (Palm Springs and surrounding areas), reaching a potential audience of near 3 million viewers. It is the #1-rated program on Time Warner's OnDemand services in both San Diego and the Palm Springs area. CAR NUT TV’s wide-ranging event coverage, from the TOKYO MOTOR SHOW to events around the southern California and the Coachella Valley, to the SEMA Show in Las Vegas and all points in-between, has won the program much acclaim and popularity. CAR NUT TV is produced completely in-house by Steve Parker Productions (SPPI).

"American Racing Today" is a daily two-minute NASCAR news update heard on some 50 radio outlets across the country. Written, produced, voiced and syndicated by Steve Parker Productions for over a decade, "ART" is often adding new affiliates.

THE CAR NUT radio program was heard live every Sunday for almost five years from 8am to 10am on NewsTalk 920 KPSI in Los Angeles, #1-rated AM station in the Coachella Valley, the third-fastest growing area in the USA, runner-up only to Las Vegas and Phoenix. On-the-air almost five years, it was produced and hosted by Steve Parker, and it was the #1-rated AM radio program in its time slot.

Steve contributed columns to Gannett’s Desert Sun newspaper, the largest paper in southern California’s booming Coachella Valley, and Gannett's Desert Magazine, and did so for several years. He wrote a feature piece each month for the Alaska Airlines in-flight magazine for four years. Parker has also written for PALM SPRINGS LIFE magazine, but, then again, who hasn't?

Steve's CAR NUT radio show ran since 1992 in various forms on KABC, KMPC, KTZN and KXTA (XTRA Sports), all in Los Angeles, and KNWZ in Palm Springs before finding its KPSI home. PAST Steve's working travels have taken him many times throughout Europe and the Far East and across the nation.

From hosting TV shows in the UK to his visage featured in television loops explaining advanced technologies at the Honda Motor Corporation exhibit at major auto shows in Frankfurt, Germany and Tokyo, Japan, Parker has “been there, done that” when it comes to the world of cars.

Three times he criss-crossed America’s back roads in a vintage car as a journalist/participant in The Great American Race (now known as “The Great Race”, seen annually on The History Channel), an over-4,000-mile long TSD (time/speed/distance) rally for classic and antique vehicles of all sorts. Once, as the west coast editor of Popular Mechanics Magazine, Steve covered the event for a major cover story for that magazine (in a car sponsored for the event by PM), and twice served as a PR representative for the over-1-million-member strong GOOD SAM RV club, world’s largest such club, accompanying Good Sam's entry in the nationwide race, a 1925 Model A Ford towing a 1929 Zagelmeyer camping trailer. At each of the near-100 heavily-promoted stops along the over-two-week-long route, Parker coordinated and oversaw local, national and international press coverage of the Good Sam “race car”. So Steve has indeed worked on "the dark side", too ...

Parker created, for the first-time at any US TV station, the position of “automotive feature reporter”. He did this at two TV stations in Los Angeles. The 53-year old Parker was the automotive reporter for 10 years at KTLA/TV5 Los Angeles (Tribune Corp.) and for a single year at KCBS/TV2, LA (CBS-TV). His TV work was honored with two Emmy Awards. His KTLA reports were also regularly syndicated to many of the 26 Tribune TV stations nationally, including stations in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC and other major markets.

Steve created the first nationally-syndicated automotive talk show on a commercial radio network. The syndicated radio program for Westwood One/Mutual Broadcasting/NBC Radio, called “America on the Road”, started in 1987 and was heard on more than 300 radio outlets across the nation. It is still on-the-air.

He was West Coast Editor of Popular Mechanics Magazine (1986), and served on the staffs of Petersen’s Four Wheel Off-Road and several other major auto and motorcycle publications. He also was editor of "Race Boat and Industry News", and editor of the auto industry monthly trade journal, "Automotive Fleet". That magazine serves the vital fleet, leasing and daily rental business, which accounted for over 20% of the new car and truck marketplace in the USA when Steve worked there.

Parker has often served as an auto expert on local and national TV and radio. Guest spots have included those with "Mike and Maty"on ABC-TV, "Scoop with Sam and Dorothy" on Tribune Television, CNN's "Best Buys" and many more. He appeared many times on the "CBS Late, Late Radio Show" with Tom Snyder and Steve Mason. He's also guested with Larry King. Other TV credits include numerous ESPN shows and he hosted "Speedvision" coverage of the Los Angeles Auto Show. Steve served as the American “presenter” of "The Motor Show", the top-rated auto show in England, produced by Granada Television, the largest commercial network in the UK.

Through the 1970s and '80s, as a freelance journalist, he wrote articles and shot photos for scores of well-known magazines worldwide, including all the major car and motorcycle magazines and top airline in-flight publications including the biggest in their field, "TWA Ambassador", "American Way" and "Delta Sky". His contributions to magazines during that time ranged from Larry Flynt's "Rage", to"Motor Trend", the authoritative "Automobile Quarterly"and even "Rotarian", official publication of the Rotary Club International, where he reported on the 1985 Tsukuba (Japan) Science World's Fair, where he has traveled over 20 times on assignment.

Parker and his wife, Carey, married 9 years, are partners in SPPI. Carey produces and hosts radio’s "Desert Homes Today" each week and "Desert Real Estate Today" daily, and runs the busy SPPI office. They also own "Desert Homes Today Realty". They live with their cat, Tippi, outside Palm Springs, CA, near many off-road driving areas and plenty of long, straight roads. These include the fabulous "Palms to Pines Highway", California State Highway Route 74, where much "unofficial" road testing takes place for magazines around the world…by members of SPPI.

Interests, aside from the auto industry in all its interesting iterations? What the classic American male finds interesting: Women and food, and not necessarily in that order, depending on the time --- and the situation. Sports of all kinds; I'll watch chain saw speed-sculpture on ESPN sponsored by Husqvarna, or any sport, if it is that sport's championship, and there's a ton of money on the line, and you know you're seeing the best in their profession, whatever that might be.

Anything with motors, engines and wheels, for me, qualifies as an active interest. Yes, spacecraft, too. Which are my favorite cars or trucks or bikes? The last one I drove or rode, usually. And no matter what era they are from, either, sometimes the older the better.

My father was one of the best piano players in New York City, and if you got married or bar or bas mitzvah'd in the NYC area from the early 1950s until the mid-'70s, or enjoyed a great piano bar in Orange County, CA into the early '80s, you might have heard my dad "tickle the ivories". My older brother was lucky enough to have been born with what some call a "perfect ear", meaning, apart from making me eternally jealous of him, he could hear a musical piece, one time, and immediately be able to play it perfectly, on the nearest keyboard. He went on to some fair amount of fame as a songwriter and led a traveling rock band in the 1970s and into the '80s, a band whose frontman was "Papa John Creach", the best rock fiddler ever; if there are any "Jefferson Airplane" or "Hot Tuna" fans reading this, you know all about "Pops". Out of that band also came the Grammy-winning blues artist, "Keb' Mo'", but I know him better as Kevin Moore, one of the best guitarists and singers any of us ever heard; 20 years from now, Kevin will have his own theater in Las Vegas and play to sold-out crowds for months on end. So music, of all kinds, has always been close to my heart.

Naturally, I have an ongoing and always growing interest in my own craft, writing, of all kinds and types, usually in the pursuit of a payday of some sort, one way or another. And photography, both digital and analog (if that term is correct when discussing cameras), moving and still. The new Leica digital camera is very interesting to me. And of course computers and all the latest electronic doo-dads, gadgets and gimcracks available. Just got a couple of iPhones, and were both startled by its features and intuitive usefulness.

We like to travel but hate to fly, and do it only when necessary. If you're like me, and can remember when every man in an airplane, not just the pilot, wore a jacket and tie, and all the women wore dresses and "sensible" shoes, then you know why I hate flying now.

Religion and philosophy have both been of great interest to me (at age 12 I read "Siddartha" and years later became a Buddhist). Also very interested in every facet of newspapers and magazines, radio and television and now, naturally, the Web.

I've been a CompuServe member since 1984 (still have and use my original 7-digit ID!) and still use their "Executive News Service" which, when all is said and done, remains one of the best news-clipping services available.

What about you? Drop us a note and let us know your story --- And be sure to e-mail us photos of your favorite sled for our all-new "Reader's Rides" section, too! And, thanks!