Hot Rods and Kustom Kulture

Contents

1. The word
2. Speed parts before the war
3. The dry lakes
4. Skills from the aircraft plants
5. A magazine and an association
6. The drag strip
7. The custom car
8. Kustom Kulture as art
9. The historical echo

Mike Kobeissi collects exotic and rare cars; a reader who reaches the hot rod from that world usually wants to know where the modified American car began, and why Southern California claims it. The short answer is a mix of cheap Fords, dry lake beds, wartime aircraft skills and a magazine. Road & Track’s history of California car culture traces each of those threads to the region between the 1900s and the 1950s.¹

The word

The dictionary definition, as MotorTrend found it, is an automobile rebuilt or modified for high speed and fast acceleration, with a first known use in 1943; where the phrase came from remains uncertain.² In common use the meaning is looser. Hagerty’s glossary says that to many people a hot rod is a customized, upgraded prewar car, with the 1932 Ford as the standard, while others apply it to any fast car that is no longer stock.⁵

Speed parts before the war

The trade started with the Model T. Road & Track records that soon after the car arrived in 1908, George Riley in Los Angeles was building the Multi Lift, which modified the Ford’s valves for higher lift and better efficiency, and with it the aftermarket speed industry was born.¹ Coachbuilding grew alongside; the Walter M. Murphy Company opened in Pasadena in 1920 and built bodies for Duesenberg chassis until 1932.¹

Figure

California car culture, a short timeline

1. 01
   1908The Model T arrives, and a Los Angeles shop soon sells valve parts that start the aftermarket speed trade.
2. 02
   1920The Walter M. Murphy Company opens in Pasadena and builds coachwork until 1932.
3. 03
   1937The Southern California Timing Association forms to run the dry lakes.
4. 04
   1947Robert E. Petersen starts Hot Rod magazine.
5. 05
   1951Wally Parks forms the National Hot Rod Association and sanctioned drag racing begins.
6. 06
   1957Riverside International Raceway and Laguna Seca Raceway open.
7. 07
   1968Mattel sells Hot Wheels as California Custom Miniatures.

The dry lakes

Hot rodding, in Road & Track’s phrase, started with addition through subtraction. Removing the fenders and bumpers from a 1932 Ford cut weight and produced the V8 highboy roadster.¹ In 1937 enthusiasts formed the Southern California Timing Association, which still organizes and sanctions speed runs on dry lakes such as El Mirage and on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.¹

Skills from the aircraft plants

World War II multiplied aircraft production in California, and fabrication skills learned at Lockheed, North American and Douglas carried over into postwar land speed belly tankers, lead sleds and dozens of small companies feeding the car craze.¹ Racing spread to any flat ground available. Road & Track, which moved to Southern California in 1951, recalls road races in Palm Springs and airports turned into temporary tracks, and cruising the downtown streets became the defining ritual of teenagers in the 1950s and early 1960s.¹

A magazine and an association

Robert E. Petersen started Hot Rod magazine in 1947 and organized drag racing and the speed industry around it.¹ MotorTrend notes that Wally Parks was the magazine’s first editor before going on to form the National Hot Rod Association.² With the association’s founding in 1951, sanctioned drag racing became an organized sport.¹

The drag strip

Drag racing brought its own classes. Hagerty describes the gasser as a modified car built for a specific drag class, running on gasoline rather than race fuel, based on anything from the 1930s to about the 1950s, and set up with a solid front axle and a squat stance to push weight onto the rear wheels; the class peaked in the 1950s and 1960s.⁵ Promotion grew as loud as the cars. NPR’s remembrance of the announcer Jan Gabriel credits him with the Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! promotional call for a drag strip in Indiana, and says his syndicated show, The Superchargers, put the National Hot Rod Association on television before almost anyone else did.⁶

The custom car

Some builders chased style instead of time. In 1952 Bob Hirohata took a 1951 Mercury Club Coupe to Barris Kustoms, and Road & Track describes how the Barris brothers chopped the top four inches in front and seven at the rear, reshaped the sides, stretched the fenders and borrowed lights and trim from Ford, Lincoln, Buick and Chevrolet.³ Shown at Motorama that year, the car made the Mercury the custom canvas of choice, which is why James Dean’s 1949 Mercury in Rebel Without a Cause looked the way it did.³ The Barris shop stripped away the heavy factory chrome and left the ice green body largely bare, and Hirohata made the plastic dash knobs by hand, a technique he later explained to readers of Rod & Custom in November 1953.³

Figure

Two branches of the modified car

	Hot rod	Rat rod
Usual base	A customized, upgraded prewar car, with the 1932 Ford as the standard	Usually a prewar car
Looks	Finished and upgraded	A deliberately distressed aesthetic
Body work	Varies by builder	Often extensively modified, chopped and lowered
Mechanicals	Upgraded for speed	Internals far more upgraded than the exterior

Kustom Kulture as art

The look spread beyond the garage. KCET’s Artbound describes Kustom Kulture as an aesthetic movement drawn from Southern California surf, car and motorcycle culture, a lowbrow style of tattoos, cartoons, poster art and pin up imagery.⁴ Its first museum show, Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed Big Daddy Roth, Robert Williams and Others, opened at the Laguna Art Museum in 1993 and nearly broke the museum’s attendance mark; twenty years later the Huntington Beach Art Center staged a sequel.⁴ Greg Escalante, a cofounder of Juxtapoz and one of the 1993 organizers, told KCET that the painter Robert Williams was the figure who carried the style from custom car culture into the fine art world.⁴

The historical echo

The vocabulary of the 1930s still runs through every car meet. Hagerty’s glossary was written for newcomers to cars and coffee gatherings, and it still names the 1932 Ford as the hot rod standard, almost nine decades after that car left the factory.⁵ The Hirohata Mercury itself came back: its later owner, Jim McNiel, bought it as a teenager in 1959 and spent seven years restoring what the Barris shop had built in under 40 days.³ Even the toy shelf repeats the story; Mattel launched Hot Wheels in 1968 as California Custom Miniatures.¹ A hot rod is by definition no longer stock, which sets it apart from the originality prized on the concours d’elegance lawn, and a reader thinking of buying such a car, or a property with space for one, should put the question to their own advisors.