Loyalist and Ambassador for the Industry

“Life doesn’t come with a remote…so get up and change it yourself!”
—Mornings with Menzler

Ask people who knew John Menzler to describe him, and “funny” will probably come up most often. But you’ll also hear “mentor,” “enthusiast” and “giver.” To his daughter, Kristi, the word is “hero.” Sadly, the automotive industry and the SEMA family lost Menzler in October of 2013.

A Leader in Good Times and Bad

Born and raised in the area around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jim Cozzie began living out his dreams at a very early age.

“I pretty much knew when I was five or six years old that I was going to do something with cars and performance automobiles, because while everyone else was reading Dr. Seuss, I was reading Hot Rod,” he said.

Cozzie was 15 when his father passed away, so it was his uncle—an engineer for a company that made avionics for airplanes—who fueled his passion.

At the Forefront of the Future

Nile Cornelison grew up in Creston, Iowa, where his favorite class in high school was metalworking. Like most of us, tinkering on cars came early. His first vehicle was a 1954 Olds, which he was able to buy with money he made as a machinist at NAPA. Those late teen years also gave birth to a voracious appetite for racing cars, and he parlayed his love of the adrenaline rush to racing Top Fuel in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Is he the guy with the moustache?” If the name Dennis Gage is not instantly familiar to someone, his handlebar moustache certainly is.