My Cherry Amour

From chopped-and-channeled ’32 Ford hot rods to fender-flared Honda Civics with $500-a-copy wheels and computer-generated graphics decorating their flanks, Southern California highways are becoming a showcase for the nation’s fast-growing car-customizing craze.

Turning cars and trucks into personalized vehicles that go beyond what the factory dreamed up has been a passion here since the first speed demons pulled the fenders off their 1920s flivvers and lowered them to achieve more aerodynamic shapes in their quest for a few more miles an hour.

The pursuit for personality in our vehicles has grown from a backyard hobby dependent on self-taught skills and homemade parts into a $19.3-billion-a-year industry. In just four years, between 1993 and 1997, spending on improving the appearance and performance of cars and trucks grew 34%.

And all along the way, Southern California has set the trends. The hot rod, the full-custom “lead sleds” of the 1940s and ‘50s, and the lowrider all came out of backyards and back-alley garages around Los Angeles.

Perhaps the biggest change in car customizing in the last decade has been its gradual switch from a largely do-it-yourself hobby into a major do-it-for-me business, says Jim Spoonhower, chief statistician for the Specialty Equipment Market Assn., the automotive aftermarket industry’s trade group. Only about 20% of the parts and services sold to owners after they buy their vehicles--the so-called after market--is sold to do-it-yourselfers, Spoonhower says.

The other big change is that while it is still a largely male hobby, customizing is seeing more and more women in the driver’s seats.

That’s largely because the two newest trends involve vehicles--import sedans and sport-utility vehicles--that appeal to women.

“It’s the late 20th century, and girls are going against male chauvinism,” says Edward Eng, an editor at Illustrated Graphic Communications Inc., a Huntington Beach publisher whose magazines chronicle both the import-auto and sport-utility scenes.

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The goal of the new era of customizer is to achieve a base vehicle that is superclean, “like a factory car, only a lot better,” Eng says. Outrageously altered metalwork is out, as are big chromed bumpers and huge hood scoops. Instead, the modern customizer smooths out the body and then embellishes it with a “wing,” or spoiler; a high-performance engine; improved suspension; fancy wheels and tires; and a paint-and-graphics scheme to make it unique.

Most customizers also pay tremendous attention to the interiors of their vehicles, often spending thousands of dollars on custom stereos and upholstery jobs. “Sport-ute” enthusiasts often take it to the extreme, installing satellite navigation systems and integrated electronic entertainment packages that include super stereos, computer game systems and television-VCR units with monitors installed in the headrests of each seat.

About 40% of all the money spent on customizing last year was spent on automotive sound and entertainment systems, Spoonhower says.

But customizing--”personalizing” is perhaps a better way to describe the phenomenon--isn’t just about Hondas and Expeditions.

Just look at any well-stocked magazine rack--there are scores of periodicals devoted to vehicles of all types and how to make them look better and run better.

Among other things, they show the tremendous breadth of the customizing culture, which these days cuts across age, gender and ethnic lines.

Enthusiasts are buying elaborately painted vintage Chevrolet lowrider cars, built by custom shops in Los Angeles and Orange County, and shipping them across the Pacific to their homes in Japan.

Latinos, though still deeply involved in the lowrider culture, are discovering imports. Elaborately lowered Hondas and Volkswagens, some equipped with the same hydraulic systems that make conventional lowriders hop and bop, are turning up with regularity at competitive lowrider car shows.

And women, while still most active in the import and SUV arenas, are building and driving hot rods and muscle cars.

“Everyone wants to feel distinctive, and the car is just a great tool to create an individual image,” says Howard Becker of Becker Automotive Design in Los Angeles.

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That search for individuality is the underpinning of the entire car-personalizing industry.

The eyes may be the windows to our souls, as the poets say, but it is that write-me-up red roadster in the garage--the one with fat rear tires and screaming yellow flames on the nose--that tells the world: “Hey! This is me. This is how I want to be seen.”

Sure, there are people who don’t consider their cars anything more than an appliance, a necessary evil in a sprawling land untamed by mass transit.

But considering the dollars spent here each year improving the stock cars and trucks that roll out of factories in Asia, Europe and North America, they are in a minority.

“It seems like every other car you see is fixed up,” says Tony Montecalvo, a 32-year-old package delivery service driver whose own cars--a 1989 Nissan Maxima and a 1998 Volkswagen Passat--carry a bunch of custom equipment.

Customizing can be as basic as adorning a vehicle with a message-bearing bumper sticker or sticking a clown head on the radio antenna. The car owner is making a statement and using the motorcar as the medium. It goes from there all the way to the old-fashioned definition: building a unique car, a one-of-a-kind body and interior constructed from scratch.

In most cases today, though, customizing connotes making a change that, by its nature, puts the owner’s personal stamp on the vehicle.

“I just think that what you drive says a lot about you, so you want it to look nice and to be something special,” says Tammy Agajanian. The Huntington Beach resident drives a mildly custom sport-utility vehicle that she bought and designed in 1994. Besides swapping the stock cloth interior for custom leather upholstery, she had all of the trim, body moldings and manufacturer’s name badges removed--a process called shaving the body--”so it would have a clean, sleek look.”

To Arnold Marks--who can often be seen driving a purple-and-silver 1947 Mercury with a number of more aggressive touches, including hidden door and trunk handles and locks, and a custom grille and front bumper treatment--customizing isn’t a big mystery.

“It means it’s not stock,” says Marks, owner of a classic Mustang restoration and repair shop in Van Nuys and a self-confessed car nut whose own garage holds eight classics, all customized. He says that removing the hood ornament and putting on chrome wheels are customizing.

“Or you can go really radical and change the whole look of the car. That’s the neat thing about it,” he says. “Everybody’s ideas are different”

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The reasons cars have become canvases are as simple--and as complex--as sex appeal, the drive for status and the search for meaning in our lives.

“The car is a good starting place for showing the world that you are on your way up,” says Will Miller, an Indiana psychologist who recently conducted a national survey of car owners for software giant Microsoft Corp.’s Internet auto shopping service.

“People who have made it might not feel compelled to customize their cars, because they can afford something, like a top-of-the-line Mercedes, that says they’ve arrived. But if you can only afford a Toyota, then by dressing it up you elevate yourself.”

Fowler also believes that we decorate our cars in Southern California as a means of marking our territory--that as people who may spend several hours a day on the road, we view the car as a key piece of turf. And all those pinstripes, wild paint jobs and fancy wheels are little more than rolling graffiti, if he is to be believed.

“The more you adapt to your environment, the more you mark your turf to carve out an identity for yourself,” he says. “Face it, a heck of a lot of what we do to our cars is stuff that’s designed to be seen, not to make the car work better or be more comfortable.”

The short version?

“It’s status. It’s, ‘Look at me!’ ” says John Butler, sales director at Steve Millen Sportparts Inc. in Costa Mesa, a major car and sport-utility vehicle customizer and performance tuner.

It’s also about sex appeal, attracting others by showing off one’s physical prowess or beauty, says Marshall Fishwick, an American studies professor at the University of Virginia whose courses include a section on car culture. He claims as a former student author Tom Wolfe, whose 1965 book, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” helped popularize the custom-car culture.

“Customizing used to be pretty gender-specific,” Fishwick says. “It was the male’s business. And some of the accouterments on custom cars are pretty macho.” As with the knights of old, who won the fair lady by jousting, the drag races that spawned car customizing were all about defeating your opponent in a one-on-one contest of raw power, he says.

But now, both men and women embellish their cars with custom paint, wheels and body modifications to strut their stuff, Fishwick says.

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And the custom movement is not fading away.

A stroll through a roadster or hot-rod show might argue otherwise because of the preponderance of aging baby boom males who participate in that particular arena.

But Dan Fink, whose DF Metalworks in Huntington Beach builds classic roadster hot rods for mostly well-heeled businessmen, says he also sees growing interest by younger car owners in the art of car customizing.

The reason is the fast-growing import performance segment of the market, fueled--as was the custom movement of the 1940s--by relatively low-cost cars that young drivers can work on themselves. Where many of the modifications they make are performance-oriented, appearance is equally important, and most owners are spending thousands of dollars on parts and equipment to improve the looks of their cars.

The cars are usually Asian imports, with the Honda Civic leading the pack.

“It’s been 43 years, since Chevrolet brought out the 1955 Bel Air, since we’ve had a platform like this,” says Pete Chapouris, whose So-Cal Speed Shop in Pomona is a mecca for hot rodders and custom car enthusiasts alike.

“We’re excited about it. It’s bringing out a whole new crop of enthusiasts.”

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Times staff writer John O’Dell can be reached via e-mail at john.odell@latimes.com.

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AUTO MART

Accessories for the would-be customizer. W13