Professor loves extremely fast cars
Simply put: Ron Shook is an enthusiast for life and cars.
This English professor loves everything from snow-shoeing and camping to reading and even some bird watching. And he’s passionate about race cars – not just the usual Nascar or Lamborghini-type cars, but land-speed record-breaking cars that reach more than 600 miles per hour. Shook is infatuated with the car racing at the Bonneville Salt Flats.
“I’m a car nut,” Shook said, who has owned 120 automobiles including motorcycles throughout his life.
The Bonneville Salt Flats, west of Salt Lake City and near the Nevada border, is famous for being where many land-speed records have taken place. About 11 years ago, Shook began attending and even working at the race meets. He helped with timing and even did a bit of announcing.
In the past few years, he has been researching the history of racing at the salt flats. He has been back and forth to England, where much of the history begins, and to California where some of the racing organizations are located, digging up facts and stories.
He is now in the finishing stages of completing a history book full of pictures and stories about the Bonneville Salt Flats. He is co-writing the book with Jessie Embry, a historian at BYU, and he said they could be finished this spring.
Shook, who is a professor of professional writing, said he has written many books, but they were professional documents for clients and manuals for industrial companies and such.
“This is going to be the first book that’s going to have my name as an author,” he said.
On top of being a racing enthusiast and writer, students know him for his unique style of teaching.
“He’s good at capturing people’s attention,” said Melinda White, a technical writing major, who had his reading theory class last semester.
She said he uses surprising ways to teach his class.
White said one time Shook threw his textbook across the classroom after he became a bit agitated when he found that no one in his class marked or highlighted their books.
“It’s just a book,” he said, and it should be used, not resold.
Shook is part of the professional and technical writing major of the English department and is proud of how things are going.
“Our professional writing major is acknowledged as one of the best in the country,” he said.
He has taught at schools including BYU-Hawaii, the University of Southern California and the University of Idaho and is happiest at Utah State University.
“This is the best English department I’ve ever been in,” he said.
For students interested in seeing Shook in action, come to his “Racing on the Bonneville Salt Flats” presentation and slide show at the Merrill Library Friday night.
Shook said it will be about the history from the earliest days of the salt flats racing and more to current ecology of the area.
-joelfeathers@cc.usu.edu