The Artful Muffler

By CATHY CURTIS

Jan. 19, 2000 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Carson Muffler’s nondescript cinder-block building is just a blip on a bustling street in downtown Carson, a few doors down from Midas. A potential customer looking for the 41-year-old shop is likely to zoom right by. That’s because something is missing: the 9-foot-tall, silver-painted “robot” made of old muffler parts that has been a local landmark for decades.

Inside, the two bays are empty. No cars, nobody working. In a cramped office at the rear, owner Joe Loria and his young helper, Wayne Wright, are watching TV.

“That guy, he brings in customers,” said Wright, fondly referring to the Cold War-era sculpture made before he was born by Loria and an earlier generation of mechanics. “If he’s not there, I get a call once, twice a week: ‘I was looking for your robot and he’s not out there.’ People stop by and say, ‘Are you guys closing down? Where’s he at?’ ”

Not to worry. The tall guy is on loan, busy greeting visitors to “Muffler Men, Munecos and Other Welded Wonders” at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, the first exhibition to celebrate the ingenuity of the skilled mechanics in independent shops who assemble comical figures and animals--from cowboys and musicians to the Pink Panther and Santa Claus--out of auto exhaust parts.

Patrick Arthur Polk, a folklorist who is co-curator of the 32-piece show (with fellow UCLA graduate student Timothy Corrigan Correll), said he began noticing the metal figures while driving around Los Angeles to document storefront signs.

“We started talking to folks who make the sculptures, and we found how it really involved a kind of ‘playification’ of work space,” Polk said. “Guys will start to look at the process of labor differently, so when they take something off a car, instead of throwing it in the junk pile, they might stop and look at it and say, ‘What can I make out of this?’ It really transforms the work environment, which becomes a place of fun. It also lets guys express their creativity.”

Just ask Frank Afra, the effusive Lebanese-born proprietor of Affordable Muffler, which moved to Santa Ana a couple of years ago from Los Angeles, where its sidewalk display of intricately detailed muffler men included a USC Trojan--complete with helmet (the front hub of a Honda Prelude), shield (sheet metal from a Chevy Caprice) and sword (a Cadillac Seville exhaust system hanger).

In the shop’s new location, a goofy life-size muffler man holding a dog made from an exploded muffler stands several yards from the curb, demonstrating Afra’s grudging compliance with a local ordinance outlawing advertisements on public property.

Showing a visitor a pile of discarded mufflers and exhaust pipes heaped behind a fenced enclosure, he described the creative process:

“I say, ‘OK, I’m going to create something.’ I make a blueprint for it”--Afra’s term for a detailed sketch--”and then I check which junk I have, which car it came from. I have lots of new parts [in the shop], but it has to be junk. Even the bolts. I never use new parts. Never.”

Why not?

“Because . . . ,” Afra looked momentarily baffled. “It’s more creative,” he said finally. “You can shape it. You can do many things. Plus, you know, it didn’t come in from a supplier. It came from something.”

He painstakingly enumerated the automotive source of each of his muffler man’s body parts: the orange-painted resonator “head” that once lived in a Volkswagen Jetta, the arms bent from Jeep Cherokee exhaust pipes, the feet fashioned from Honda and Toyota front brake rotors.

Afra and his crew are still working on a new pair of pieces: a pitcher with spark-plug fingers and a slugger hitting a ball welded to his bat. One happy discovery in this line of work is that catalytic converter shields make excellent baseball caps.

“We do it on our leisure time,” Afra said. “I have the idea in my head, so when the [right] parts come in, the mechanics start cutting. They say, ‘Why are we cutting this muffler?’ I say, ‘Don’t worry about it. I know what I’m doing.’ And then I put it together. I say, ‘OK, let’s start welding. This has gotta go here, this has gotta go there.’ I make the decision because I want it to be shaped my way. I don’t take anyone’s suggestions.”

Muffler men, also called munecos (Spanish for doll or puppet), are made by muffler repairmen all over the world. As Polk points out, auto shop owners have the perfect setup for this type of folk art, with “all the requisite tools, all the metallic materials they could ever want and the skill to manipulate the materials.”

No one seems to know just when somebody got the idea of crafting a figure from used muffler parts--though in Southern California, it’s believed to date at least to the late 1950s, Polk says. But the birth of an individual muffler man is clearly a rite of passage for a guy opening a shop of his own.

Gary Koppenhaver is owner of G&R; Mufflers in Lake Elsinore, where the colony of aluminum-painted sculptures includes a golfer, a musician and two women with big hair and earrings. He reminisced about the bad old days when he worked for somebody else:

“I made a muffler man to stick out front; they told me to throw it in the trash can. They didn’t want that.”

Koppenhaver laughed.

“When I opened up my shop 13, 14 years ago, I said, ‘Well, I can make a muffler man now and nobody’s gonna throw it away.’ ”

Working with his longtime buddy Duncan Turrentine, a firefighter he taught to weld, Koppenhaver has a handy model for body positions (“Turp will stand there and I’ll come up with my wire and bend it around his arm”) as well as an idea man and artistic goad (“Turp was sayin’ we need to try something different”).

“When you get started, you don’t want to quit,” Koppenhaver says. “You’ve gotta kind of be left alone. You can’t do it when there are customers around. So we do it after work, or on the days when we’re closed. Crack open a beer. It’s neat, making something out of nothing.

“And exhaust work is kind of like that too. Sometimes I have a custom part come in and someone wants something totally different. So you gotta build it kinda how he wants it and kinda how it should be. I custom-bend everything here. So it’s something new every time a car comes in.”

Unlike Afra--who boasts happily about selling some of his pieces to collectors, including a Beverly Hills couple, for as much as $350--Koppenhaver prefers to think of his sculptures simply as fun to make and advertisements for the shop. A hand-drawn muffler-man logo appears on his business card, and he’s planning to market his automotive skills on a Web site illustrated with photos of some of his creations.

Exposed to the elements, stolen, vandalized or simply cast aside when shops close after their owners’ death or retirement, munecos lead precarious lives. The oldest one Polk has found so far in his survey of more than 150 shops in the Los Angeles area is the much-restored robot giant at Carson Muffler, which has suffered earthquakes and floods.

“He’s had [water] up to his knees,” the shop’s Wright said sadly, as if speaking of the travails of a fellow mechanic. “But he’s been through it; he’s survived. Some homeless people took his boots, so we gave him jack stands. He stands up more sturdy now anyhow.”

* “Muffler Men, Munecos and Other Welded Wonders” continues through May 28 at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays through Sundays; noon to 8 p.m. Thursdays. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission: free, but campus parking (in Structure 4 or 5, off Sunset Boulevard) costs $5. (310) 825-4361.

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Shake Hands With a Muffler Man

Shops with muffler men--usually no more than one sculpture per location--can be found throughout Southern California. Bear in mind that these shops are small, sometimes go out of business on short notice and may be lending their sculptures to the UCLA Fowler Museum exhibition.

AAA Muffler Shop

2600 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles

AAA Mufflers and Radiators

8821 S. Alameda St., Los Angeles

Affordable Muffler

125 S. Harbor Ave., Santa Ana

Arco Iris Muffler Shop

1930 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock

Auggie’s Muffler Shop

12300 Lakewood Blvd., Downey

Azteca Tire and Muffler

4822 S. Compton Ave., Los Angeles