Hot Rods and Culture

Hi folks -- tonight I'll be going again to the local Cruise -In and photograph some local hot rods. Seen often as curiosities by those outside the car hobby, hot rods have had a powerful influence on modern culture, particularly during the Golden Age of the automobile during the 1950s. What follows is an analysis of hot rods, their history and culture, taken from my book, The Automobile and American Life:

Hot Rod

The car hobby grew to be quite complex by the mid-1950s, and it involved both engine and body modifications along with creative painting techniques. Pre-WWII antecedents included the organization of dry lakes racing at Muroc, California in 1931 under the leadership of speed equipment manufacturer George Riley and sponsorship of the Gilmore Oil Company.^[1] Racing at the lakes continued to 1941. Hot rodding took off after WWII, however, and it is clear from reading early issues of Hot Rod Magazine that the phenomenon, while focused in Southern California and dry lakes racing, was really nationwide in scope. By 1948 numerous dirt track activities in the Midwest featured designs similar to Southern California cars at venues at Columbus, Indiana and Dayton, Ohio.

One example of the diffusion of hot rod culture from west to east involved the Granatelli brothers of Chicago. During the late 1940s, Joe Granatelli, who had constructed a hot rod in Chicago, drove it to the West Coast, where he picked up parts to stock the family speed shop Grancor.^[2] The rise of this post-war phenomenon on a national scale led to the remarkable success of publisher Robert Petersen. Hot Rod Magazine was first published in January 1948 and distributed at the Los Angeles National Guard Armory Automobile Equipment Display and Hot Rod Exposition. After an initial experiment with the inclusion of fiction in the first issue, readership demands focused the periodical on two major topics: technology and pretty girls. In fact, the remaining eleven issues of Hot Rod Magazine in 1948 featured the photo of a very pretty Hollywood model holding a car part! Pretty girls attract young men, and at its core hot rodding was all about autonomous technology; young people tinkering on limited budgets and working in their garages. These hot rodders and custom car builders, using rule-of-thumb methods, made significant improvements in engine horsepower and chassis design. It was all about going fast and looking good, first on the streets and the lakes and then later more on drag strips and custom car shows.^[3]

The tensions of this era relating to rodding were encapsulated in Henry Gregor Felsen’s Hot Rod, a novel directed to early 1950s youth but that became so popular that it remained in print to the mid-1960s. The central figure of the story is Bud Crayne, with an accompanying cast of half a dozen high school students from the small town of Avondale. As mentioned above, Bud is a car builder and street racer, and while a social outsider, also has as his girlfriend the pretty but mercurial cheerleader LaVerne. Overconfident of his driving skills and easily manipulated by his girlfriend and rivals, Bud sets a record driving from his town to another. In the process, he leads the police on an exciting chase. Bud escapes the consequences of his actions, however, as he strikes a bargain with the local police and a school teacher, agreeing to participate in a test in driving skills, a so-called roadeo. The concern of authorities is street racing and “teenacide,” and their hope is to use Bud to convince others that driver’s education is of value. Since he did not take lessons, however, and despite his prowess behind the wheel, Bud does not place first in this event. Nevertheless, due to a tragic accident in which half the teens in his town, including estranged girl friend LaVerne, are killed while imitating Bud’s driving, Bud gets to the state competition. The carnage aside, the story has a happy ending, as Americans of the 1950s would like, for Bud, now much wiser, goes to engineering school to improve the modern motor car. His past somehow now forgotten and forgiven, he nonetheless left a wreckage not only of cars, but of lives. The assumption – which was that of educational leaders of that day – was that education can cure teenage driving impulses, and that properly directed, rodding can be a healthy way to let off steam. However, the author does acknowledge toward the end of this book that risky behavior was “a question of glands.”^[4]

Felsen’s writing about hot rodders and the police took a very different turn four years later in his Cup of Fury. In this story, the reader is introduced to a young hot rod enthusiast, Link Aller, not terribly different in character than Bud Crayne. Unlike the understanding policeman in Hot Rod, however, in Cup of Fury there is a new sheriff in town, and he taught young Link a brutal lesson in obedience and respect at their first meeting. After Link was caught spinning tires in the school parking lot, policeman Kern, introduced himself this way:

The cop didn’t say anything. There was a click and before Link could set himself, the door of the police car was hurled open, and smashed against him. It seemed to hit him all at once, from his head to his knees. He was stunned where it hit against the side of his face, and bruised where it hit his chest and legs . . . Holding his light inches away from Link’s eyes, Kern used his wrist to push Link’s chin up, and his head back. Link’s eyes were glassy. Except for the hold Kern had on him, he would have fallen. His mouth was open and he was fighting for breath. Kern pressed against him, choking him a little. Link’s left eye was beginning to swell and change color. Kern maintained his pressure as Link sucked air into his throat in long, noisy, tortured gasps. His eyes cleared and his limp body became rigid. He stared into the light that was being directed into his eyes, trying to remember what had happened.^[5]

Most likely, the police of the 1950s in reality treated young men more like Link Aller than Bud Crayne. It was an era before such issues as police brutality and human rights were public concerns.

In addition to Felsen’s fiction, the hot rod was also the subject of songs – actually many of them by the early 1950s. The seminal lyrics of many versions that followed was that written by George Wilson and performed by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys in 1950. “Hot Rod Race” proved to be the precursor of many future songs, including “Hot Rod Lincoln,” the best-known version of which was performed by Johnny Bond in 1960 and Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen in 1972. Initially, the song told the story of a family trip from San Pedro in a Ford that turned into a race with a Mercury. Surprisingly, at the end both the Ford and the Mercury are blown off the road by “a kid, in a hopped up Model A.” Later, the Ford and Mercury were replaced by a Cadillac and a Lincoln, but the continuity in common among the long chain of version is obvious.^[6]

As one might expect, numerous B-grade films featured teens and hot rods during the 1950s – Hot Rod (1950), Hot Rod Rumble (1957), Drag Strip Girl (1957), Hot Rod Gang (1958), The Ghost of Drag Strip Hollow (1959), and finally, perhaps the best known of the group, Hot Rod Girl (1956). Following Felsen’s story line, Hot Rod Girl was about an attempt on the part of authorities to co-opt teen hot rodders by getting them off the street and onto the drag strip. Its actors and actresses are teens who look more like they are in their mid-to-late 20s and early 30s. Starring Lori Nelson as the “hot rod girl,” the budget for the film was so tight that Nelson drove her own 1955 Thunderbird to save money. With Chuck Conners playing the role of a sympathetic policeman and Frank Gorshin as the character “flat-top,” the highly unlikely and often silly plot involves a confrontation of “chicken,” several fatal accidents, and a happy ending. The message of the film seemed clear: in the war between good and evil that takes place in the minds and lives of teens, understanding elders know best and incorrigible rebels meet with an untimely demise.^[7]

Shifting from cultural manifestations to the technology that made the hot rod possible, perhaps the best example of this tinkering that led to cutting-edge technologies was the efforts in Southern California of Stuart Hilborn, who worked as a chemist in a paint laboratory during the day and raced in his spare time. Using scientific logic on one hand, and primitive machine tooling methods on the other, Hilborn moved from using an arrangement of Stromberg carburetors injecting fuel into each cylinder to true mechanical fuel injection. Hilborn’s system was relatively simple, so much so that the shade-tree rodder could employ a state-of-the-art technological system that rivaled that of Mercedes Benz 300 SLs. He was a true pioneer in developing a technology that is now universally used as a fuel delivery system in automobiles, although this technology now employs computer controls and a vast number of sensors.^[8]

The hobby demanded not only new technology and expertise, but also equipment suppliers, and Hilborn marketed his fuel injection apparatus by the 1950s. Other prominent equipment manufacturers included Vic Edelbrock, Ed Iskenderian, and Phil Weiand, who ported, polished and in other ways modified Ford flathead V-8s in Los Angeles area speed shops. Body shop men like George Barris and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth chopped and channeled old 1932 Model B and 1928 to 1931 Model A and 1908 to 1927 Model T bodies and began lowering and cleaning up the chrome from late ‘30s and early ‘40s convertibles. Trial and error methods were even extended to the formulation of car paints, as colors like candy color red came out of southern California body shops during the late 1950s. Using these new paint formulations, Von Dutch (Kenneth Howard) earned a reputation for the finest in pinstriping and flames.^[9]

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[1] “Hot Rod History,” Hot Rod Magazine 1 (March 1948): 7. In Hot Rod Magazine: The First Twelve Issues (Osceola, WI: MBI, 1998). Especially important on this topic and more is Robert C. Post, High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001). For a British sociologist’s history of the hot rod, see H. F. Moorehouse, Driving Ambitions: An Analysis of the American Hot Rod Enthusiasm (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). See also Dean Batchelor, Dry Lakes and Drag Strips: The American Hot Rod (St. Paul, MN: MBI, 2002); Tom Medley, Tex Smith’s Hot Rod History (Osceloa, WI: Motorbooks International, 1990).

[2] Anthony (Andy) Granatelli, They Call Me Mister 500 (Chicago: Henry Regency, 1969), 46-63.

[3] The definitive work on the history of drag racing and its technologies is Robert C. Post, High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing, 1950-1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994). See also Stephan Wilkinson, “Tanks, Hot Rods, and Salt,” Air & Space Smithsonian 12 (1997): 60-63.

[4] Felsen, Hot Rod, 183.

[5] Henry Gregor Felsen, “First Skirmish,” in Evan Jones, ed., High Gear (NewYork, Bantam, 1963), 10-11.

[6] Joe Wajgel, “A Short History & Evolution of ‘Hot Rod Lincoln,’” http://www.rockabillyhall.com/Hot RodLncln.html (February 26, 2004).

[7] Hot Rod Girl, Alpha Video (1956), 203.

[8] For an interesting interview with Hilborn that discusses the various steps that led to his development of fuel injection, see http://www.cruzinmag.com/feature3.html (July 2, 2007).

[9] See ad for Ditzler custom colors for custom cars, Hot Rod Magazine 1 (October 1948): 28. See Andy Southard, Jr. and Tony Thacker, Custom Cars of the 1950s, (Osceola, WI: MBI, 1993); Nora Donnelly, ed., Customized: Art Inspired by Hot Rods, Low Riders and American Car Culture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000).