10/08/2025
Long post warning! Often in life, you meet someone who is your "friend," but you never really know them. They become your friend because you have mutual friends. You know all about them, but you never really get the chance to "know" them. My life in the car world is very much like that. I have a good amount of really close friends in my circle, but I have a ton of friends in the stratosphere around that circle, and much like a ripple in a pond, that circle keeps opening, but the further out you go, the less you know about those people. The funny part is that everyone's ripples overlap. Some of the people in your friend's inner circle aren't in your circles, and vice versa, but you are still friends with them because your circles overlap. In other words, you know that person is a good person because he made it into your inner-circle friend's inner circle. Jeff Mccormick was one of those guys for me. For one reason or another, we never made it into each other's inner circle, but we had plenty of friends in common due to our shared love of cars.
When my friend Rod Bollini asked me to take a picture of his very close friend Jeff's beloved Sinister C4 Corvette at Du Quoin because he had just been diagnosed with ALS and was having to sell it, I didn't hesitate. After I had just shot Aaron and Shannon Ralph standing in front of her Firebird (the first people I had ever photographed like this), she insisted that I had to do the same with Jeff and Barbara.
I think it was the most nerve-racking shoot I've ever done. Jeff really didn't have the strength to move the car to the location where I shot every other car that night, so Rod asked if I could shoot it in the parking lot. I said, probably if we could get the lights at the Fairgrounds Inn turned off, but that'd never happen. Within five minutes, the lights were turned off, and I had about a two-minute window to shoot this photo. What you can't see is that about 100 people are sitting in lawn chairs behind that car, wondering what's going on. I told the Mccormick's to stand as still as possible for as long as they could, which was hard for him, so he asked if he could grab onto the car. You could tell he didn't like the attention, but he knew what it meant. I was a nervous wreck when the lights came back on prematurely. Did I get it?
Thankfully, I did. When I got back home and edited the photo, I asked Rod if we could take up a collection to get them a big metal/acrylic print made. Within hours, he had over $700. That alone made me realize that Jeff was a friend, given the ripples of our shared circles. Jeff meant a lot to so many of my friends, so he meant a lot to me, even though I barely knew him. He passed from ALS, a ridiculously horrible disease that no one would wish on their worst enemy.
As Rod has asked, please say a prayer for his wife, Barbara, and their daughters, who were his strength to the end. It is far worse for them than it is for him, because we all know he's in a better place and feeling no pain.
Godspeed Jeff. I wish I had gotten to know you a little better; I'm sure we would've been in each other's inner circle.
