Custom auto

Hot Rod History

A lot has been written about the origins of the hot rod and the development of the culture that gave rise to them and then grew up around them. This is my own personal take on the subject, and I'm sure others with more detailed knowledge (including the many who were there) might well disagree with my thoughts. With that caveat, I place the defining origin point for hot rods and hot rod culture as the end of World War II. A number of factors came together at one time -- the period between the end of the war in 1945 and the begining of the 1950s -- and mainly in one place -- southern California -- to create a unique environment in which the hot rod and its culture were born.

At the end of the war, a legion of young men returned to America with a wad of demobilization cash in their pockets and a sense of freedom and excitement bred by their experiences in the war. With a period of peace and the steadily increasing prosperity of the country as a backdrop, these young men had a "can-do" attitude and a desire to express themselves in ways that their time in the military had stifled. And, all of a sudden, there were a lot of inexpensive used cars available. For five years Detroit had basically been in the business of supplying the military. Now all that production capacity was turned to creating a stream of new cars to satisfy the pent-up demand of a civilian population that had scrimped and saved throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s and the sacrifices of the war years. Men who'd stayed behind to work in America's offices and factories had a lot of savings and they were ready to ditch their aging cars from the 1920s and 1930s for gleaming new models offered by the Big Three (and the others who are now gone, like Wilys and Kaiser). Their trade-ins became the starting point of the hot rodders, and came to define the way they were built and how they looked.These factors dictated the core aesthetic of the classic American hot rod. It was the later Model Ts and the plentiful early-30s Fords and Chevys that became the raw material for the young men who created hot rodding and hot rod culture. Here's a picture of a '32 Ford Roadster, a contemporary car, but one built on the style of those first hot rods. The basic performance and engineering elements of the hotrod came together in these cars: More power, less weight and a look derived from these things leading to chopped tops, channeled bodies, pinched frames, dropped axles and, eventually wide tires. And why southern California? Again, a lot has been written about the question of why southern California became the seed-bed for so much cultural change in the second half of the twentieth century. Part of it was Hollywood, part simply that the western part of the country had reached a critical mass of prosperity and population sufficient to establish itself as a new center of culture distinct from the old center in the northeast. But a few factors made southern California the right place for the birth of hot rodding. One was the climate: with year-round perfect temperature and little rainfall, young men of little means could work outside on cars that had few creature comforts themselves. More important, Los Angeles was the first city truly shaped from its beginnings by the automobile: There were more roads, and new ones there. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, was "the lakes," the dry lake beds just east of L.A. that became a magnet for the chopped and stripped-down speed machines. Here the hot rodders found miles and miles of hard, glass-flat surface upon which to run their machines.

GOLDEN AGE

The 1950s were the Golden Age of hot rodding and, for a while, there was only hot rodding -- not the different strains of car-craziness that it gave birth to. In the beginning, there was no distinction among the cars that kids played with as a form of street-running self-expression, the drag racing car, the customized work of art; there was just the hot rod, the amateur automobile artform. But the seeds of hot-rodding's progeny were growing during that time.

The "lakes" were breeding a number of different kinds of cars aimed at faster and faster top speeds at the expense of driveability and, eventually even roadability. The famous "drop tank roadsters" exemplified these early forefathers of the machines that would some day exceed the speed of sound on the ground, built from war surplus military aircraft fuel tanks.

Meanwhile, the true "drag strip" was born. The National Hot Rod Association was formed in 1951 to impose some safety standards on "those speed-crazed kids" and the NHRA, now the governing body for drag racing in the the U.S., held its first sanctioned event in southern California in 1953.

Finally, the pure aesthetics of hot-rodding began to be expressed in the metalwork of exterior modifications to later, post-war cars. This gave rise to the "kustom" culture of cars that were increasingly works of pure visual art. Later, this gave rise to the show car world of the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s (detailed below.)

But for a time, it was all one thing -- just young people exploring a new form of American individuality through the ultimate American experience, the road.

HOT ROD CULTURE

During the 1950s and into the early 1960s, the southern California scene connected with hot rods gave birth to a whole host of related cultural phenomena. The stars of custom car building, like Ed Roth and George Barris, became celebrities in the hot rod scene and some, like Roth and Von Dutch became visual artists in a weird and adolescent genre that had a life of its own apart from the cars. More than half the middle-aged men (in 2003, when I'm writing this) in America probably had some kind of Rat Fink image in their room when they were a kid. Many may not have realized the connection to the greasy hot rodders of a decade before. For a look at where this visual art is today take a look at this gallery (warning, it's not for the faint of heart).Then there was the music. At first, hot-rodding was associated with rockabilly, the first form of true rock and roll. But, just as hot rod culture became a defninable space in the general lanscape of American life, a different connection developed. Here it's not possible to separate the connection with a broader southern California scene, known by the often-inapplicable term "surf music." Most folks probably think of the Beach Boys and titles like "Little Deuce Coupe" and "409," but there were many other musicians who were mining the hot rod experience for subject matter. Jan and Dean come to mind, and the Ventures (with their album covers adorned with "wild" T-buckets), and the incredible Dick Dale, whose music to me is the sound of hot rodding.

Hot rod culture sat at an intersection between the hipsters of the late 40s and 50s (think of Dean Moriarty's relationship with cars in Kerouac's On the Road, and "Big Daddy" Ed Roth's goatee), the lower-class aspirations of kids from the wrong side of the tracks in a country with rising economic expectations (think of the menace of Dennis Hopper's "Goon" in Rebel Without a Cause) and the general development of a "counterculture" of individuality and free expression. For a time, the hot rod became a central symbol of youth and creativity in America, and was as cool as anything around. But by the mid-1960s, the wave of the counterculture had moved on and, although many of the "show car" artists of the time incorporated things like peace symbols and images of long-haired guys in patched bell-bottoms in their work, the days when hot rod culture was part of the "crest of the wave" were over.