Travis Bell remembers car YouTube superstar “Rabbit” Pitts
Rob “Rabbit” Pitts was an instant favorite. He had a natural sense of storytelling and a voice soaked in Carolina honey. He turned his used car business into an adventure. His passing is hard for those of us who only knew him from YouTube and Netflix. For those who knew him personally, this loss is brutal. His friend and fellow VINwiki member Travis Bell is also a friend of mine. I asked Travis to share some of his memories of Rabbit with Road & Track.
“A lot of people liked Rabbit,” Travis confesses, “but my friend was Rob. Rabbit was Rob on a steroid. He was the real Rob, but he was louder and better in front of the camera. And I’ve never met anyone better on the mic than Rob. Rabbit was Rob Pitts on steroids.”
Travis Bell
Travis met Rob on the set of the car-loving YouTube channel VINwiki and they’ve remained friends for the past four years. “Since that day, we’ve done everything together,” Travis says. “He’s been my best friend my whole adult life.” And that means car shows and stops to eat at seedy little town restaurants. It means adventures in media and exploring junkyards. “He’s packed three lives into his short time here,” Travis sighs.
“Rob didn’t drink, he called his mom every day, and he’s always been a very grounded character,” Travis continues. “For his Netflix show, Tex-Mex Motors, we didn’t have to write anything for him. We just pointed to the cars and let them talk. It was amazing. I was just thinking, ‘How did they pick up all that Cherry trivia out of thin air?'”
One of the earliest to recognize the growth of classic truck collecting, Rob was collecting old Chevy pickups back when most of us were still figuring out how to drive our trucks off cliffs. “He was way ahead of us in OBS,” Travis asserts. “That’s Rob’s way of saying old body style trucks.”
Travis Bell
Although Rob built a successful family business, Pitts Truck Service, he didn’t start out wealthy: “He grew up in a trailer park and married a doctor,” Travis concludes, “and that wedding came just months after he was diagnosed with cancer.”
The story continues
Rabbit was Mayberry’s virtue and passion for machines. It was stomach cancer that took him. Rob Pitts grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and was just 45 when he died Sunday while in hospice care in his current hometown of Seneca, South Carolina.
He leaves behind his wife, Dr. Randy Foraker, a black cat named Webster, many close friends, and millions he never had the chance to meet.
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