Fueling a Dream

L.A. Times Archives

July 30, 1998 12 AM PT

Coco Shinomiya is an art director at a major record company in Studio City. She’s also a hot rodder, owner of a 1932 Ford nostalgia rod that looks stock but hides a Corvette engine under the hood.

Peter Gallup, a school psychologist from the Inland Empire, is a drag racer, a muscle car owner who bought his 1965 Chevy Chevelle 30 years ago. He rips down the drag strip at 115 mph on Friday nights, then tows the car home, strips off the racing equipment and turns it back into a street machine.

Tony Montecalvo, a package delivery service driver from Montebello, has a tricked-out 1998 Volkswagen Passat: a four-door sedan that looks pretty normal, except for its lowered stance, fancy tires and wheels, and the big chrome exhaust peeking out from under the bumper. Beneath the hood is a turbocharger and other goodies that help squeeze 220 horsepower from the little engine. He represents the newest element in car customizing: the import performance enthusiast.

Jesse Saldana works for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office and studies criminal justice at Cal State L.A. But on his own time he’s a lowrider. His elaborately customized 1965 Chevrolet Impala stays in the garage behind his Echo Park home, and he usually drives around in a nondescript Chevy station wagon. But at show time, the lowrider comes out and Saldana is in his element.

Bruce Lewellyn owns an auto repair business in Huntington Beach and most days drives a 1995 Chevy Impala SuperSport or a Ford van. But in his garage, and in his heart and soul, lives a fire-engine-red 1930 Ford street rod, all shaved and filled and bobbed and raked and stuffed with a 425-horsepower engine. Inside: an automatic transmission, comfortable leather seats and even an air-conditioning system.

Betty Turner’s vice is a custom 1998 Chevy Suburban she uses when she’s ferrying her daughter and her friends to soccer matches and birthday parties. She drives a stock Jaguar sedan when she calls on clients of her insurance business and calls the Suburban her “fun car.” Inside is a kid-control system that includes a television and VCR with monitors built into the headrests. Outside it’s cool but subdued: lowered, with blacked-out window pillars, monochrome paint, color-matched bumpers, custom grille and fancy wheels.

These six Southern Californians represent the faces of today’s custom car culture. They are the people whose classy, sometimes outrageous cars we stare at and wonder about when we see them on the road. They recently discussed their passion for cars with Highway 1’s John O’Dell.

Highway 1: Why’d you pick a car to be the thing that says to the world, “Here I am and here’s what I’m all about”?

Montecalvo: I guess I represent the Generation X team, although I’m really not that young. I’m 32. I started in on cars right after high school in 1984. That was about when they started doing things to imports. We started with maybe a little Toyota Celica or Nissan pickup trucks and stuff like that. Now it seems like every other car is fixed up, whether it’s a Volkswagen or a BMW, but back then not many were doing it to imports. I do things to my cars because I want to make them my own. And fixing them up special says to people that maybe I’m not ready to give in; it’s saying that I like cars, and I’ll always like cars.

Saldana: What got me involved was my brother. Seeing him grow up having his own lowrider inspired me to have one. As a minority, coming from a community which doesn’t have much, I’ve seen how kids look up to someone with a nice lowrider. I think they are a positive thing in a neighborhood where you could have a lot of negative aspects.

Highway 1: You’re saying it gives others something to look up to?

Saldana: Definitely. To look forward to in life. Because maybe in the community they come from there aren’t such a lot of positive assets to be inspired by. We got together a while ago to do a photo shoot [for a magazine], and as we were driving down by Roosevelt High School, the kids would just turn and stare. They’d see this flock of 12 lowriders going down the street, and you could see the gleam in their eyes that was saying, “Maybe I’ll have one someday.”

Lewellyn: For me it fulfills a dream I had from the ‘50s. We lived and breathed hot rods back then on the streets of Long Beach. Then in 1958 I got drafted and was taken away from my home and wife--all the things I took for granted. When I got back, I really wanted to knuckle down and get my life together and get a family and a home and a job. But I always wanted to have a hot rod again. Then a few years ago, Carol and I discovered a cruise night at a local drive-in and saw a lot of nice cars. We started being more conscious of what was happening in the street rod industry and what was available, and one night we just decided we had to have one more street rod. It makes me feel like a kid.

Gallup: I’m a very active person, and the car represents that aspect of it. It goes fast, and I go fast in many ways. I’m an athlete, so I’m competitive. I like to tinker, I like mechanical things, and I like the car because I like to work on it. It’s fun.

Shinomiya: I think it’s because I grew up with it. My father had always taken me to the rod shows. And I’m an art director, and part of what I do for a living is I create images for bands. I kinda create coolness. And for me the car is the ultimate statement because it’s so individual.

Saldana: It represents you as an individual. It’s your lifestyle.

Highway 1: We have a couple of age groups and a couple of ethnic groups represented here. I wonder, as you listen to each other, whether you see similarities or glaring differences?

Lewellyn: I see a lot of similarities, a common bond. We all appreciate each other for our interest in cars. Everybody has respect for what the other person’s interest might be as long as you know they do it right and they set a good example for their interest group. And maybe some people think that fixing up cars is a waste of money, but to us, it’s our life.

Saldana: I think that there’s still a line that divides the groups. But true automotive enthusiasts like us really admire cars, so I’ll admire a hot rod. And lowriding is not exclusively for Hispanics, you know. People of all sorts are taking interest. A lot of them are bought by people in Japan. You go to a car show now that has lowriders and you don’t just find Hispanics. You find whites, you find Asians, all kinds of people who like that style. Lowriding is broadening its appeal. And it’s no longer a guy thing. There’s wives and daughters teaming up to help put things together.

Highway 1: This is for Coco and Betty. As women in the car culture, do you feel welcome?

Shinomiya: Well, hot rods are kind of a secret brotherhood in a lot of ways. I only know of maybe one or two other hot rod owners that are women. It’s good that I didn’t know this when I bought the car, or I would have thought twice. I thought I would immediately be in the brotherhood, but I’m not.

Highway 1: They look at you like you’re a girl?

Shinomiya: Yeah, they’ll see my car and then usually ask the guy standing next to me if it’s for sale. They never know it’s my car.

Turner: I don’t see much of that with the Suburban, but it’s not something you take to shows where there are a lot of car people. But my husband and I each have a Harley-Davidson, and with the Harleys there still is a gender gap. And when I go to car shows with my husband and his Cobra, nobody ever asks me about the car.

Highway 1: Are there more women sitting in the driver’s seats in the import car scene?

Montecalvo: I think that’s true. Maybe they have brothers that were doing import cars, and it’s just influenced them to where they are saying, “Hey, I wanna do it, ‘cause it’s not a just a boys’ world now.”

Highway 1: How do you feel when you drive your customs--your personality cars?

Turner: Well, I enjoy quality, so I feel good when I drive it.

Montecalvo: This is my daily driver; it’s what I use to haul the kids all over the place. But it doesn’t matter, because when I’m behind the wheel I feel good. That’s why I picked it. I love the car. It runs smooth, it has air conditioning, it has a good stereo, it’s low, it’s nice, and it makes a statement.

Lewellyn: I drive the hot rod for one reason: It makes me feel like a kid again. That’s the whole thing for me and my age group. And as I sit here and listen to this conversation, I start thinking that the street rod group is mainly a lot of people like myself. Our kids are out on their own, and we can finally do what we wanted to do for the last 40 years. And the street rods that we have are not the hot rods we had as kids. Those were junkyard specials. On Saturdays we’d go down and spend our week’s paycheck at the junkyard getting parts to keep ‘em running. But now we don’t have to do that. These cars are as nice as a new car. We try to make ‘em that way.

Saldana: I drive an ’89 Chevy Celebrity station wagon every day. I’m not happy with it, but I drive it. But when I’m behind the wheel of the vehicle that’s really me, I just feel proud of being who I am. It’s something special you feel and something you have that nobody else does. When you take out your car, it’s you as an individual representing your own street.

Gallup: My car either goes really fast or really slow. So where it is most fun to drive is on the quarter-mile. It’s an absolute thrill that is just beyond belief to pull up to the line, to floor the throttle and make three shifts of the gears, keeping the right foot floored the whole way, and running a quarter-mile at 115 miles an hour. It’s a thrill that’s just hard to describe.

Highway 1: When you have it out in public, do you always get a thumbs-up, or do you get negative vibes from people who see you as a speed demon or troublemaker?

Gallup: Sometimes when cars pass me I see the thumbs-up signs, but otherwise I’m not noticed unless they hear me coming and turn and look. But I think the public generally approves. Just like we are all admiring each other’s cars tonight, I think the public approves of what we’re doing.

Saldana: Oh, yeah. Definitely. You get people that turn thumbs-up or pull up and start staring at the cars. Us lowriders usually don’t drive our cars if we show them, so they’re usually on trailers, and when people on the freeway see us coming and they roll up to stare, it’s usually a positive attitude.

Montecalvo: I think that those of us who are into fixing up cars kinda look for people to stare. It makes us feel good because we’ve put so much into the car. So whether they love it or don’t like it at all, at least they’ve looked, they’ve noticed.

Turner: I feel a sense of camaraderie with people who look at my car. And that’s fun. I find that when car people get together, it doesn’t matter if you are the president of a company or work in the mail room. You shed all that and just interact as car people.

Highway 1: How much time do you spend working on your cars?

Turner: None. I pay somebody to do all that.

Gallup: I’ve made a lot of changes in my car, and that requires a lot of time and effort. I’ve been racing it on Friday nights, so I’ve got to get it ready by Thursday afternoon. And then when I get home, I’ve got to take off all the race equipment and put all the street equipment back on it so I can drive it Saturday and Sunday. So it’s taken a lot of time recently.

Saldana: To get my vehicle to where it is right now has taken me at least eight years doing a piece at a time. And like most lowriders who show their cars, when you go to a show on a Sunday it takes a whole week before that to clean it to the standard of the people who are showing their cars. It’s a never-ending process.

Lewellyn: It took thousands of hours to build, and now that it’s built I probably spend four to eight hours a week with it, and it’s mental therapy to me. I’ve fixed my garage with benches and a black-and-white checkerboard floor, and I bring my car in there and dust it or just look at it. And I’d much rather do that than sit in front of the TV. But I have another hobby, bicycling. I do that for exercise, and I think that’ll keep me going a lot longer than sitting around looking at cars. I put in as much time with my car group as I can, but it’s not the central focus of everything. It’s just one part.

Montecalvo: My car is only about 2 months old, but in those two months I’ve spent every weekend trying to do something to it. And I spend maybe an hour a week just washing it, waxing it and looking at it from this angle or that. Just mental therapy, like he [Lewellyn] said. But this is just my car. And I’ve got so many other things. I’ve got four kids, I’ve got a wife, I like fast motorcycles, and I like water-skiing. And I try to incorporate that with my family.

Shinomiya: It’s mental therapy for me too. I really don’t work on my car, but I hang around in the shop when it’s there being worked on, and mostly I just drive it.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Panel

Name: Coco Shinomiya

Real job: Art director at a major record company

Passion: Hot rods. Owns 1932 Ford nostalgia rod.

Name: Peter Gallup

Real job: School psychologist

Passion: Drag racing. Owns muscle cars.

Name: Tony Montecalvo

Real job: Driver for a package delivery service

Passion: Import performance cars. Owns tricked-out 1998 VW Passat.

Name: Jesse Saldana