Veteran WardsAuto Correspondent Mack Chrysler Remembered

Colleagues, friends and industry insiders are mourning the loss of longtime WardsAuto correspondent Mack Chrysler who recently lost his battle with cancer.

Chrysler died June 17 at his home in Salt Lake, UT, after a brief illness.

Chrysler, 83, is survived by his wife, Sylvia Miller Chrysler, four grown children and their spouses, and five grandchildren.

Born in Ontario, Canada, in 1928, Chrysler graduated from the University of Western Ontario before beginning a 30-year career with U.S. News & World Report and a 50-year love affair with Asia.

He arrived in the region in 1965, just as the first U.S. combat forces were building up in Vietnam. Like many correspondents who covered the war, his base was Tokyo, which also gave him a front-row seat to the Japanese economic miracle and the emergence of the nation's auto industry.

Unlike many of his colleagues, he got around town on a small motorcycle, which, after his U.S. News days, he would leave behind in storage for his frequent return visits.

Chrysler served as president of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in 1972-1973.

After leaving Japan in 1977, he worked several more years for U.S. News. Then in 1986, he embarked on a second career as correspondent for Ward’s Automotive International, a twice-monthly newsletter dedicated to coverage of the global auto industry.

Chrysler’s beat was Japan, but he often made forays into other Asian markets, creating detailed, deep-dive packages that peeled back the curtain on the region’s emerging auto industries for Ward’s.

“He invented the ‘long-distance’ commute,” friend and fellow WardsAuto contributor Roger Schreffler says of Chrysler leaving his home in Salt Lake for weeks-long stints in Tokyo or elsewhere in Asia.

“Mack was the consummate professional,” Schreffler adds. “He always advised me not to argue with the editors. ‘It’s their publication,’” he advised. “Then of course, Mack argued.”

But the truth is, Chrysler needed little editing. His reports were thorough, insightful, lively reads.

“Given his truly excellent reporting on the automotive industries of Japan and Asia over the past quarter century, we are sure that his loss is a major one for both Ward’s and its readers – including Mitsubishi Motors Corp.,” Mitsubishi President Osamu Masuko wrote in a recent note to WardsAuto.

Chrysler worked right up to the end. He continued to file reports for WardsAuto into May. And that month, in an email to Schreffler, he admitted suffering fatigue from his chemotherapy but noted he was hoping to publish a book based on a 20,000-word diary he kept about the 1992 Paris-Moscow-Beijing rally.

His sense of humor was famous – and folksy.

In a recent email, he sent the following thought for the day. “A married man,” wrote Chrysler, a doting husband if there ever was one, “should forget his mistakes. There’s no use in two people remembering the same thing!”