Some Like It Hot : Still Kandy-Colored and Tangerine-Flaked, the King of the Street Is Back--With a New Fleet of Fans

We still love Lucy, pedal pushers and Harley-Davidsons. Johnny Rocket’s red glare glows brighter by the franchise while Mel’s Diner flourishes as American graffiti writ huge.

Now thundering, clattering, kandy-colored and tangerine-flake hot rods are joining our endless fascination with the ‘50s.

At this year’s National Street Rod Assn. show, more than 13,000 hot rods arrived to flatten Louisville’s bluegrass beneath fat slicks. Once the sport of street kings of Bakersfield, hot-rod passes are rattling the mock Tudors and antebellum replicas of Beverly Hills.

And ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons owns one.

“Older people are getting into it now, people with more disposable income,” explains Jeff Smith, editor of Hot Rod magazine. “They’re saying: ‘Now the kids are out of school I’d like to build the car I had in school.’ ”

Or the one they couldn’t afford in school.

In an age of catalytic converters and computerized engine management, say others, there’s a renewed lust for the honesty and simplicity of hot-rod mechanicals. They also are a touchstone to thoughts of drive-ins, poodle skirts, doo-wop music and less worrisome times.

“People who don’t even know what hot rods are love them,” says Boyd Coddington. He heads Hot Rods by Boyd, a multimillion-dollar engineering complex in Stanton that builds custom hot rods with antique shapes covering modern mechanicals. “The shocking purple. The shine of the chrome. The way of life they represent. And hot rods are fun.”

Truth is, hot rods never really went away.

For more than 40 years they have remained the right, and the rite, of die-hards who may have grayed and outgrown nicknames such as Buzz and Gordo, but never their passion for chopping, channeling and flame painting old coupes and roadsters.

Friday nights through the ‘50s to the ‘90s, these originals have gathered wherever there is still carhop service and enough asphalt for a brace of Deuces, a Merc lead sled and a ’27 T or three. Tuesdays at Hamburger Hill in Oceanside. Thursdays at Bert’s Diner in Sheldon. Fridays at Bob’s Big Boy in Canoga Park.

And very occasionally--usually to make sure the juices haven’t completely dried--drivers find an empty stretch of dark road and smoke tires for the oldest, highest prize of all: bragging rights.

Now there is a newer, bigger breed. It is just as ardent.

At 28, Glen Kashin is more than three decades younger than the first hot rods. He is no child of the ‘50s. As an office furniture installer, his salary should be stretching for a new Firebird or an old Porsche.

But month by month, $200 at a time, an Orange County swap meet here and a San Fernando boneyard there, Kashin is rebuilding a hybrid Ford hot rod.

It’s a ’31 steel body on ’32 rails and the hole where the hood used to be is filled by a small block Chevy. That’s good for 10 m.p.g., a top speed on the dark side of 100 m.p.h. and an open-throated roar that sets off car alarms.

“I’m not a nostalgia buff, just a car buff,” says Kashin, of Santa Monica. Then why not buy a Miata? “Because I’m not interested in high tech. A hot rod is a simple, ordinary car stripped to make it light and given a big horsepower motor to make it fast.

“It’s also grass-roots America. A hot rod was a workingman’s hobby in the ‘30s and ‘40s. It is this workingman’s hobby in the ‘90s.”

John Kaufman is reaching back. He couldn’t afford a hot rod as a teen-ager. Mom and Dad were more interested in Studebakers, not some shade-tree jalopy with drum brakes, loose steering and a marginal suspension.

But Kaufman is now 58 and much flusher, thank you, as a sound editor with Universal. He has reclaimed a portion of the ‘50s by building a ’33 Ford coupe heavily overpowered by a supercharged Chevrolet V-8 squeezing out 450 horsepower.

The sea-foam-green rod is stuck to Kaufman’s ego: “It’s hard to be humble driving this thing. The looks you get are from 18- to 80-year-olds and all giving thumbs up.”

It is an older gentleman’s personal statement: “Kids today don’t know the satisfaction of creating something like this. Everything they want they buy, they don’t build.”

The car also is Kaufman’s money pit: “There’s so much more you can put on a rod today to make it more comfortable, safer and faster. Mine has disc brakes, BMW seats, tilt steering and an Alpine sound system. Air conditioning. Electric windows. Alarm. And a six-pack CD. The only limitation is imagination and money.”

Exactly how much money is unclear.

“About three checkbooks,” Kaufman estimates.

High rollers are also into hot rods.

Bruce Meyer, 50, is owner-president of Geary’s. Noel Blanc, 47, is a television producer. They are friends, Beverly Hills neighbors and companion collectors of classic Ferraris, racing Jaguars and, more recently, a handful of hot rods.

Although mint originals start at $40,000--and, like taxes and movie tickets, are unlikely to depreciate--Meyer and Blanc say they are not buying hot rods as investments. Just as extensions of chronic car fervor.

Blanc--son of the late Mel Blanc, man of a thousand tonsils and Bugs Bunny--owns four hot rods. He sees himself as a curator of art created by any builder who might have spent $4,000 on a hand-rubbed, 12-coat enamel paint job with a gloss two feet deep.

Explains Blanc: “It was these builders who said there would be a ’37 dash on the car, not a ‘39, who wanted the running board extended to here, not there . . . until the car became one man’s creation, his art.”

Meyer’s pride is a pristine Deuce, a ’32 Ford roadster considered the quintessential hot rod. This burgundy beaut outclassed the model and her bikini when their curves clashed as joint centerfolds in a recent and traditionally sexist issue of American Rodder magazine.

And Meyer would rather ride Rodeo Drive in his Deuce than a Ferrari.

“I once owned a (Ferrari) Testarossa that reeked of wealth and made me feel very uncomfortable, very self-conscious,” he recalls. He also remembers more raised middle fingers than extended thumbs. “But in the hot rod I feel very comfortable, more me . . . also very American.”

Being American. It’s a powerful tug. Hot rods being bought and shipped to Japan and Europe are considered American icons alongside McDonald’s in Moscow and Levis wherever pants are worn.

“One of our newest exports, right here,” says Carl Stromberg, owner of a Chatsworth industrial tool and supply company. Stromberg, 55, and his lowered Chevrolet, 52, are at Mel’s Diner in Woodland Hills for a Friday night cruise and schmooze. “This car will never be made in Japan. They’re one of a kind and you can only get ‘em in the United States.”

Patriotism and artistry, however, aren’t motives for Don Prieto of Torrance. He’s a blast from the past, a man who ran rods in their heyday, from New Orleans to Sepulveda.

Head of the Prietive Group, a company preparing test cars for the media, Prieto, 55, still prowls in a ’34 Ford three-window coupe and a ’27 Model T track roadster. He likes to indulge a sense of old mischief.

“It’s a see-and-be-seen thing, being a one percenter like people who ride Harley-Davidsons,” he explains. “In a hot rod, you’re still a borderline outlaw . . . although at my age, maybe a rebel with a bankroll and no cause.”

J. P. Vettraino, writing in a recent issue of AutoWeek, says the resurgence could be a backlash against a plethora of European and Japanese performance marques. They are known as “belly button cars”--everybody has one.

Be it building the car in a garage at home or subcontracting the work, whether the builder is an up-market urbanite or a mini-truck racer in the San Joaquin Valley, Vettraino says hot rods allow “more freedom, individualism or creativity.”

And today’s rules are no different.

“Make it unique and better than it was before,” says Vettraino. “Yet today, parameters are wider and the raw material more diverse.”

The expanse of the return to hot rodding isn’t difficult to measure. What was born a Southern California monopoly has spread worldwide.

Pat Ganahl, editor of Los Angeles-based Rod and Custom magazine, went to London in July. The august Victoria and Albert museum, all cobwebs and antimacassars, had invited him to speak on American hot rods at a design study course.

Ganahl is seeing rods among the big-buck Bentleys, Bugattis and Packards at prestigious car shows and concours d’elegance from Santa Barbara to the Edsel Ford Estate at St. Clair Shores, Mich.

“There’s nostalgia drag racing at Palmdale and Sears Point, Sonoma . . . people not only restoring famous old hot rods but cloning (custom designer George) Barris cars and Ed Roth cars,” he says. “Drag racers. Street rods. Hot rods. Custom cars. There are several camps, even some owners who won’t paint their cars because they think a true hot rod should be in primer.”

Other evidence abounds:

* Hot rods are showing up at car auctions where $10,000 still buys a starter car and an owner’s proud entre to this month’s Sun, Sin & Tin hot-rod show in Las Vegas, or the Orange County Cruisin’ Assn.’s Great Labor Day Cruise at the fairgrounds in Costa Mesa.

* Beverly Hills Motoring Accessories, an automotive boutique associated more with Ferraris in crystal and Mercedes floor mats, reports that 20% of its mail-order business is now for hot-rod items, mainly custom covers and steering wheels.

Owner Andy Cohen has been quite moved by the surge; he recently began building his own Deuce roadster.

* Dean Bachelor, Los Angeles author, historian and hot-rod builder whose So-Cal Speed Shop Special set a drag-racing record 210 m.p.h. in 1950, is seeing another measure of the growth. “More and more writers are calling to pick my brain,” he told a writer who recently called to pick his brain.

* In a warming fillip for Buy Americans, Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America has built a car to showcase its modern technology. True, the car uses a four-cylinder engine from the Mitsubishi Eclipse. But the buttercup-yellow Aluma Coupe is designed as a fast, fenderless, fat-tired, turbocharged, mostly aluminum hot rod that would look content with the Bonneville Salt Flats as its backdrop.

The Aluma was born in the U.S.A., whelped by bearded good ol’ boy and custom-car designer Coddington. It cost about $300,000--without air or driver’s-side air bag. Even in Coddington’s business, that’s a chunk of change.

With original bodies and parts running out--and with barns in Idaho yielding few ’36 Ford coupes these days--many newcomers are building hot rods from $20,000 fiberglass kits. Or buying Coddington’s turnkey creations in modern metal for from $75,000 to $250,000.

Few of Coddington’s cars--built for rock stars, a banker and a gasket manufacturer--carry much more than shreds of their former selves. Maybe the headlight rims. Possibly a body panel.

Some--such as a Deuce two-door phaeton--never existed because all ’32 Ford phaetons had four doors. Others roll from his plant on modern Mustang chassis or with new Chevrolet Corvette engines.

To a few purists, that makes Coddington a profiteer at best, a philistine at worst.

Prieto sees such modern builders as suppliers to “twits who wear Rolex watches and a Ralph Lauren logo on their underwear . . . wanna-be car people.”

He also questions the wisdom of anyone spending $100,000 on a custom replica when originals can be purchased for less than half that. “Let’s face it,” says Prieto. “You’d have to keep (a replica) 400 years to get your money back.”

Coddington disagrees. He sees ancient hardware as the ingredients of death traps. Coddington does confess a little guilt at building an American hot rod around a Mitsubishi engine, but not at bringing the safety of disc brakes and independent suspension systems to his products.

“On original hot rods, the brakes were crappy, you couldn’t steer it, wheels shimmied at 30 (m.p.h.) . . . . They were absolutely horrible,” he says.

Then there are those who believe that a hot rod is a hot rod is a hot rod. Old cars were the apogee of style and ingenuity, and exercises in the best that could be done with what was available. Coddington and other builders, they say, are simply doing much better with more superior raw materials.

“The neat thing about the hot-rod crowd,” says Editor Ganahl, “is that most of the ego is in the car.” So whether an owner’s rod is new and store bought, old and rebuilt, steel or fiberglass, there is “immediate acceptance of one rodder to another.”

Carl Stromberg is concerned about dirtying his Chevy coupe. There are “No Step” signs on its running boards and a “Don’t Touch” warning on the windshield. But then the car is at Bob’s Big Boy in Canoga Park most Friday nights to see and be preened, maybe even respected as the investment of $30,000 in parts alone.

Stromberg grins. He says his kids are upset that dad spends so much on a 52-year-old car: “They figure it’s money I should be leaving to them.”

There’s a rookie rodder at the meet. Bill Schultz of Chatsworth arrives in a carrot-orange, Chevy-powered, ’38 Ford panel delivery truck. It has been his for one day.

“I traded it for $7,000 and my ’88 soft-tailed Harley-Davidson,” he says. “This is more fun and much safer than the bike.”

It’s an eclectic night. A fashion-plate ’67 Dodge Charger muscle car, the real thing, is parked down from a Cobra 427 sports car, a replica. The legacy of Henry Ford is a dozen cars, from a ’27 Model T hot rod to a ’71 Thunderbird low rider.

Prieto is a die-hard regular at such nights. Last year, he drove his ’34 Ford three-window coupe to New Orleans for a high school reunion.

There was a reception at the home of his first sweetheart.

Prieto was a little late, arriving behind a second former suitor for the lady’s love. His rival’s rather impressive car--a $95,000 Mercedes 500SEL--was already parked in the driveway.

“When I pulled up, she made him move so I could put the hot rod in the driveway,” says Prieto. “It made my day.”