All of us have our own story on where we got our start in hot rodding. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise how similar many of our stories are, but even so all the stories are a bit different.
For starters, I had the usual background in street racing followed closely by drag racing, but that was from the time I was about 16. And I’m going to guess this may be a similar path many of today’s hot rodders have taken. But what about the early years? For me that would be starting around 8 years old. Yes, 8!
This was the time I began building model cars and subscribed to my first car magazine … Rod & Custom. I liked the hot rods but at that stage of my game I was really into customs. Somethin’ about all that fancy paint- and bodywork just fascinated me. I had an affinity for lights, so the more headlights, spotlights, taillights, and whatever I was onboard.
It didn’t take long before my collection of model cars outgrew my room. For some reason my mom, although supportive of my hobby, wasn’t keen on seeing my Competition Orange 1957 Chevy on the fireplace mantle or the chopped 1949 Merc with the white body carefully covered in blue scallop paintjob resting on top of the television cabinet. Do you remember TV cabinets? In those days these cabinets were a piece of furniture that was normally topped with pictures of the kids and the family dog but most assuredly not a model car no matter how cool I thought it was. We had a 21-inch Packard Bell with remote control, one of the first, which was a big deal for me as I was the designated channel changer. The luxury to just lie there on the floor and not bounce up and down 14 times every 30 minutes to change the channels (of which there were seven!) was a big deal.
There were lots of models to choose from with the Big T, the Black Widow, and the Big Deuce among my favorites. But I did have a Candy Green 1940 Ford sedan that was one of my all-time favorites. Of course, I was always a Corvette fan so there were lots of them. Some were customs, drag racers, and road course wonders painted in many colors.
Somewhere in between building model cars and my summer of cutting grass and watering lawns came my stint as a paperboy. Around the STREET RODDER offices a lot of the guys put in their time as paperboys. When it comes time to talk about double folds, rubber bands, and the subsequent fights, porchin’ it, no roof shots, and the dreaded Sunday edition, each of us is on the same page. I handled such papers as the Garden Grove Daily News and the Sunday edition of the L.A. Times. For those of you who have no idea what a Sunday edition of a newspaper looked like back in the late ’50s let me just say they were humungous. No double folds here … just fold that behemoth in half and use one heavy-duty rubberband. There was also no throwing these papers it was strictly walk it up to the porch and put it down. In those days the Sunday paper was delivered to my house in sections; sports, news, entertainment, sales specials, and then I would assemble them, load my bags, and jump on my bike and off.
Now, that’s pretty typical of many hot rodders who grew up in the suburbs, especially in the ’50s and maybe early ’60s. But it’s what I did on those early Sunday mornings that would shape my interests in iron to come. I would start wrapping the Sunday edition of the L.A. Times around 6 (that’s a.m.!) and be on the road by 6:30. Back in the day it was pretty peaceful at that time of the morning and it was then that the fun would start. Parked in all my neighbors’ driveways were their cars. Since my paper route took me several miles in a straight line from my house in just about every direction there were lots of cars to be seen. Pretty much the usual stuff, but this was the late ’50s and Detroit Iron had reached their Zenith in “far out,” if not over-the-top design. Every family had something from one of the Big Three … it would be years before foreign cars would begin to take foothold. It was during this timeframe that I saw my first 1958 Chevy Impala complete with 348 and Tri-power, 1959 Chevy El Camino with black interior and a four-speed—now that was a car I wish I had today! And, the car of cars, the 1959 Cadillac with those amazingly tall fins and twin bullet taillights and enough sheetmetal to build a complete Model A highboy roadster.
It would go on from there. I will never forget the neighbor at the end of the street who purchased a brand-new 1960 Corvette followed by another in 1961. I was in heaven and absolutely thought I was the coolest kid on the block because I knew all about these cars. I even worked up the nerve to ask if he would show me the engine compartment. I damn near passed out … fuel injection. I was looking at my first factory Rochester mechanical fuel injection. Life just kept on getting better with each passing September.
And here I am today still fascinated by new cars, especially Corvettes but still with a love for vintage tin and all those fins from the mid to late ’50s. Ah, life was good … and still is!
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