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In 1955, Doc Scadron ’57 first glimpsed the love of his life.
“I was on the Lafayette campus,” he says, “when my classmate, Jimmy Tsi, drove up in a cream-colored XK140 Jaguar Roadster. I saw it and fell in love.”
Doc jokes that he did find the more typical love of his life and married her 14 years later. But he is serious when he talks about cars.
“The passion and longing for beautifully-designed cars that has infused my life started at that moment,” he says.
Upon arriving at Lafayette, Scadron was a hopeful auto designer. The required advanced calculus challenged him and he eventually switched majors, graduating with a business degree and earning a Wall Street Journal award.
“Professor [J.H.] Tarbell, my economics professor, was responsible for that award,” says Scadron. “He was a great influence on me. During my senior year, I was a board-marker at Merrill Lynch in Allentown. Tarbell helped me get that job also and it in turn gave me the exposure and will to begin my Wall Street career.”
Scadron eventually started his own firm on Wall Street, and later held a seat on the Chicago Board and started a firm there also. Shortly after he retired, his second wife encouraged him to turn his lifelong hobby into a business. He founded Doc’s Jags (dba World of Jaguars) and began selling and restoring classic cars, dedicating himself to the Jaguar mark.
“That was 24 years ago and I’ve never let up one bit. I am an adrenaline junkie and this work feeds that need for me. When I come home at 2 a.m., I remind my wife that this was her idea,” he quips.
Doc’s Jags is the largest restorer and purveyor of classic Jaguars. The business has won some of the most highly coveted awards for restoration and contributed to many of the most prestigious car collections in the world.
“In some ways I have fulfilled what I wanted to do when I came to Lafayette to be an auto designer,” says Scadron. “We do design modification to cars and so in the end I find those design dreams fulfilled.”
The company has continued to grow, expanding this year from four lifts to 14 to make headway into a four-and-a-half-year backlog.
The National Republican Congressional Committee’s Business Advisory Council has awarded Scadron the Businessman of the Year award several times as well as giving him the Ronald Regan Medal of Honor in 2004.
He likes to tell the story of how his first glimpse of that car on the Lafayette campus came full circle at his 40th class reunion.
“At the reunion we had a parade,” he says. “I took a 1957 XK140 that was a twin to the car that Jimmy had and one of my other classmates drove a 1957 Corvette. That day our slogan, which still holds true today, was ‘We’re Still Rocking.’ On the whole I think that Jaguar has had the best-designed cars of all time.”
Scadron is looking forward to his upcoming 50th class reunion. He intends to bring a 1954 XK 120 Roadster, a former factory racecar, again in the cream color that he prefers.