WOODIES : Homely Chariots of Yesteryear’s Surfers Ride Wave of Nostalgia

Nostalgia under a buttermilk sky. A kaleidoscope of wood and chrome and vanity license plates. Termite City. Woodie Wonderland.

That was the scene Saturday at the South Cardiff State Beach parking lot, where Southern California woodie buffs and a couple of tourists gathered to drink beer, swap stories and hark back to the golden days of the 1950s and ‘60s when those homely wood-sided station wagons were the cars of preference for the surfing crowd.

Now, 30 years older and 20 pounds heavier, the golden youths of the ‘50s are more prone to reach into their coolers and pop another beer than to hit the 65-degree surf and “hang 10.” So most of the long boards stayed stashed in the back of the vintage Fords, Chevys, Chryslers and Oldsmobiles while their owners browsed among about 70 woodies, seeking out fellow car buffs for shop talk and leads on missing parts.

Finding parts for the aging woodies was a common complaint among woodie owners. Several enterprising owners had set up stands advertising “woodie goodies” and “missing links” to cash in on the demand.

A few hardier souls, ignoring the flat surf and the autumn chill in the brisk onshore breeze, competed for the attention of the onlookers and a half-dozen driftwood trophies.

Stuart Resor, a 44-year-old Encinitas architect and owner of a ’46 Mercury woodie, started the annual reunions seven years ago. He’s seen the get-togethers grow to impressive numbers of the old cars and thousands of curious spectators, who create non-woodie traffic jams as they come to view the hand-fashioned wooden-paneled vehicles that went out of vogue in the early ‘50s and were picked up for a song as surf wagons. Resor didn’t own a woodie back then, but his dad did, and it was a black day when the senior Resor traded it in for a more sensible metal model. “I was definitely bummed,” Resor recalled.

The hurt was salved in 1979 when Resor bought his Mercury and restored it to a cream-colored, maple-and-mahogany cream puff with a FUNWUDI license plate.

Some woodie owners at Saturday’s get-together had similar vanity plate preferences: 51 WOODIE, WOODN 47, 37 WOOD, WUDN CAR and WUDN TOY. Others opted for the original yellow-on-black California plates of the vintage cars or special vintage tags.

Maroon was the favorite color, but fire engine reds and austere blacks were also popular. And almost every woodie sported whitewall tires and a pair of oversize dice dangling from the rear-view mirror.

Among the crowd favorites were a customized needle-nosed Ford with a jacked-up rear end, a 3-holer Buick Super 8 and a rare ’41 Ford woodie, one of the last built before the auto industry retooled for the war effort.

The first woodie was built by Henry Ford in 1928 and resembled a large wooden box on wheels. It inspired wits of the day to holler, “When ya gonna take your car outta the crate?” at early woodie owners.

According to Resor, the handcrafted wood bodies were created because sheet metal stamping machines of the day could not press a single sheet large enough for a car roof. Most automobiles of the 1920s and ‘30s had wooden framework beneath their treated canvas tops, he said, because the auto makers had been wagon makers.

When World War II came along, metals went to war and the woodies saved the small civilian steel allocations for more important car parts such as engines and frames. But it took only a few years to discover that wood did not weather well and required continuous upkeep. The auto industry halted production of woodies with 1953 models.

As woodies weathered, their prices fell, and for $75 or $100 many a teen-ager picked up a crate that would stow his 12-foot surfboard and serve as a camper during overnight outings. At Saturday’s woodie rally, a few of those same wagons were on sale at prices ranging from $20,000 up.

A Leucadian, who is still restoring the prize 1941 Ford woodie he bought from an unemployed man in Harbor City, complained that his teen-age children weren’t at all interested in helping him with the task.

“They like to cruise around in her, and they like to come to events like this,” he said, “but they aren’t around when it’s time to get your hands dirty.”

His wife, however, is not a woodie widow. He bragged that she “restored that dash all by herself. It will take years and years but we’ll get this back in shape some day.”