A son recalls the life & legacy of his father

I REMEMBER MY FATHER, Phil Hill, saying to me perhaps half tongue-in-cheek, “I wonder if having a two-syllable rhyming name has made it easier for me to be remembered.” And for that I will refer to him as Phil. As time without Phil has made way for plenty of contemplation and a broadening perspective of the man, it’s comments like these that take on a different meaning than what I once thought.

Growing up, I always had this feeling Phil was making a point to be humble in a somewhat contrived way, downplaying his successes to ward off any judgment that he took himself too seriously. But behind all that display of humility was a complex character, one who I feel was both tremendously proud of his achievements, and also fairly uncomfortable with the adulation he received from his fans and the extended car-loving community he was so often surrounded by. His achievements were indeed heroic, but he would be the first to downplay such compliments if he was ever mentioned in that regard.

The feeling that he was undeserving of these accolades and admiration permeated his psyche over the years as he became a world champion driver, which he so valiantly earned. (It was the car that was fast…). But as I experienced the man in his post-racing years, and saw the moments when he was being honored and surrounded by racing contemporaries, whether it was Carroll Shelby, Dan Gurney, or Stirling Moss, his whole composition would change — he’d stand taller for a day and his head would swell a bit with pride. He could allow himself, for a moment, to accept this feeling of self-importance, yet it would fade, and he’d melt right back into his restoration business and family routine.

The pre-fax-machine era in our household seemed to be one long endless phone conversation as his phone number was publicly listed and available in the Hemmings publication. He would sometimes screen calls by putting on a heavy mid-west accent and giving a false name. I remember being surprised a few times by his antics, and he would dispel any awkwardness with a semi-serious wink. Though, what I heard and saw all those years was that he was endlessly available for people to problem-solve and converse in all the minutia of details that came with the classic car hobby and profession.

A man of extraordinary capacity

His joy came from engaging in people’s enthusiasm around his interests, which covered everything from motor racing and its history to pre-war automobiles and music from classical to opera. In the years since he passed, and after sorting through the endless files and documents he left behind (he was never one to throw anything away), I’ve come to see a man of extraordinary capacity — someone who managed to juggle his professional life as a co-owner of the classic car restoration shop, Hill & Vaughn, with the demands of being an esteemed former Grand Prix World Champion and multi–Le Mans winner, all the while providing for and being a devoted husband to my mother, Alma, and a father to me and my sisters.

Just his hobby alone of collecting and restoring vintage music box players and self-playing pianos, as a decades long member of the Music Box Society (who knew?), took up rows and rows of deeply filled filing cabinets, let alone occupying half the space in our house. Here was a man who couldn’t stand to be bored for a minute, only unless he got cornered by someone giving him an endless monologue. If he felt a spark of shared interest, he’d open up completely, and the conversation could tumble down a long, engaging rabbit hole of shared interests.

Our home was in fact his aunt’s house that he had acquired from the family after her passing and it was here that he took delivery of his first automobile, a Model T at 12 years old, a present from his late Aunt. Many years later, with career earnings, he managed to expand the garage into a 9-car space, leaving a postage stamp of a backyard.

The house hadn’t changed much since his bachelor days as a racing driver; our main gathering room was called the Music Room, with thick carpet and a state-of-the-art 1960s stereo equipment complete with surround sound and acoustic-tiled ceiling. Music was his escape. I’d mine through his LPs to pull out the odd Doors or Beatles album hidden amongst hundreds of classical and opera records. The house had been refurbished and freshly decorated in the early 60s while he was away in Europe. It was to stay this way until carpets were worn down to the mesh as he started his post racing years, starting a family and buying up cars and restoring them at home.

He would soon meet his future business partner, Ken Vaughn, who had a particular talent for the cosmetics of restoration, from paint color combinations to the textures that gave customers a satisfactory result. Paired with my father’s mechanical ingenuity and more gregarious nature, they managed a decades long run of award-winning restorations and maintained a mutual respect all along.

Piecing together his past

I’ll always admire and be inspired by Phil’s curiosity for the history of things and places we’d go to. A trip to one of my races at Watkins Glen would inevitably make time for a retracing of the original race track over country lanes that he raced in the early 1950s in a C-Type Jag only to retire in both races. We’d drive around and he’d retrace the old circuit with an original track map in hand, pointing out the downhill corner where some unlucky fellow lost their brakes, and the railroad tracks the speeding cars would get airborne over.

It was at the contemporary permanent road course that he would be welcomed as the newly crowned Champion in the Formula One season’s final race in 1961. He had clinched the Championship a month before at the Italian Grand Prix however, Enzo Ferrari decided against entering the cars for the final race. While I went about my pursuits in motor racing, little could I be aware of these poignant memories these places must have evoked for him.

From there we’d add an extra day visiting places where, going back ten generations, our 17th-century Scandinavian-Dutch ancestors settled. We’d drive around for hours trying to locate a burial plot at the site of the once family farm outside of Schenectady, N.Y. From there we’d go over to Glenville where his seventh Great-Grandfather, Captain Daniel Toll, was scalped by a raiding party of French-allied Native Americans in a lead up to a frontier skirmish called the Beukendaal Battle, still decades before the American Revolution.

Phil would bring this all to life as an enthusiastic historian would and lead us on this sort of treasure hunt. His nature was to be so immersed in the moment that it didn’t matter if your level of energy wasn’t quite keeping up, he was all in and it was infectious. From there we’d head down to Albany searching around for the house his father grew up in, only having one photograph of a young Philip Toll Hill, Sr., sitting on a stairwell of a front porch. With the help of a street address scribbled on the back, we were astonished to find it looking almost exactly as it did some 90 years before.

I felt these were cathartic moments for him, piecing together his past, and perhaps the experience of sharing it with his son.

A life of meaning

This was how he found meaning in all things. Every car in our garage had a story and a complete hands- on touch from him.

I remember he worked late into the evenings for weeks and weeks getting his 1915 Packard 5-48 ready for the Great American Race. It had to be totally gone through and upgraded with an overdrive. His other 1915 Packard, a 3-38 runabout, was bought in Ohio at the urging of my mother. He beat a keen buyer to it, and he decided to drive it all the way back home to Santa Monica on a cold and somewhat treacherous drive.

That was normal for him; he was all for the adventure on the road and not the least bit intimidated by potential mechanical woes, yet anxiety was an ever-present trait riding with him. He explained that from a very young age in his life mechanical things made sense to him; people did not. He made the most of it by turning his focus completely on cars and never looking back.

I thank my mother for being the one person in his life who could reel him into the life of a family man — he was a father who was truly our rock. And yes, dad’s life played a big part in bringing meaning to people with the way he lived his life, how he expressed himself, and could engage in deep conversation. “Feel-eel!” as the French and Italians would say. I think he was right, it’s an easy name to remember.