Hot Rods and Customs: The Men and Machines of California's Car Culture, at the Oakland Museum of California, 21 September 1996 to 5 January 1997. Curators: Philip E. Linhares (Oakland Museum Chief Curator of Art) and Michael Dobrin (hot rod chronicler and writer). Catalogue: Hot Rods and Customs: The Men and Machines of California's Car Culture. By Michael Dobrin, Philip E. Linhares, and Pat Ganahl. Oakland: The Oakland Museum of California, 1996. 96 pp., illustrated in color and black and white. ISBN 1-882140-14-1. Reviewed by Christine M. Rodrigue, California State University, Chico Chrys Rodrigue is Associate Professor of Geography and Planning at California State University, Chico. She is also Co-Director of the Center for Hazards Research at CSUC and Research Associate at ALS Technologies, Inc., of Los Angeles. Her research concerns media representation of hazard and the social construction of vulnerability in disaster. At ALS, she focuses on geographical information systems applications in business. This review of the Hot Rods and Customs: The Men and Machines of California Car Culture exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California is written from the perspective of a nostalgic geographer, who participated in the hot rod and custom scene of the late 1960s, mainly as a low rider "wannabe." I maintained my interest in cars into the 1970s, as an automotive tinkerer of student economic necessity. I wrote my senior thesis on the subject of low riding back in 1973 and did a couple of conference papers on the general area of car cults until 1978. This paper reviews the primary entries and associated material in the Hot Rods and Customs exhibition and then relates them to my own, perhaps idiosyncratic, experience of this car culture in the San Fernando Valley of the late 1960s and early '70s. The purpose of the Hot Rods and Customs exhibition was to showcase the creative accomplishments of two generations of hot-rod and custom car builders. One lineage of these automotive creations linked backyard engineering with the sport demands of racing, whether formally organized or opportunistic. Another line of development exaggerated or accentuated the basic lines of automobiles into individual design statements, even high art. These two themes were explored in an exhibition of 29 landmark hot rods and custom cars in the Great Hall of The Oakland Museum of California, from September 21, 1996, through January 5, 1997. Curated by Michael Dobrin, an automotive writer and chronicler of hot rods, and The Oakland Museum's Chief Curator of Art, Philip E. Linhares, the exhibit was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue put together by the curators, with essays by Pat Ganahl, also a hot rod historian and writer. The exhibition was sponsored by Plymouth Prowler, the first production hot rod. Other sponsors were the Oakland Museum Women's Board, CivicBank of Commerce; Reliable Transport, Inc.; California Tamarack Foundation; Creative Spaces; Kaiser Permanente; Brookhouse Productions; and Budweiser. KFRC, KRON TV 4, Bay TV, the Contra Costa Newspapers Incorporated, and National Dragster Magazine provided media sponsorship. Accompanying the exhibition itself were many related events and activities. The first of these was the gala California Cruisin' fundraiser, held on September 21 for the benefit of The Oakland Museum. On October 6, a major "rodding run" of hot rods and customs was made to the museum by members of such car clubs as the Bay Area Roadsters, the Danville Dukes, and the Abingdon Rough Riders, and many independent hot rod and custom car owners. The resulting spectacle of revving engines and parked art cars made for a bonus exhibit outside the museum. The "Rodding Arts Day" also included demonstrations of custom painting techniques by some of the greats in the genre, such as Rod Powell (flame paint jobs), Art Himsl (fadeaway or shadow graphic techniques), and Tommy "the Greek" Hrones (striping). The metal-working techniques needed to reshape custom cars were demonstrated by Steve Moal and Ron Covell. Roy Brizio, a master builder of street rods, actually brought in an unassembled street rod chassis and demonstrated the steps involved in assembling a hot rod. There were many personal appearances by designers and builders of some of the most audacious custom cars in the world, such as Frank DeRosa, John D'Agostino, Bill Reasoner, and Joe Bailon. Other associated special events included a series of informal talks held in the Great Hall, right there among the cars themselves. On October 13, John D'Agostino returned, this time with Gene Winfield. "Windy" created the "Jade Idol" show car, the first car (a '56 Mercury) to feature his distinctive blended paints. D'Agostino designed the "Stardust" custom coupe, built for him by Bill Reasoner in shades of black cherry. October 20 brought Bob and Dick Pierson, whose famous race coupe was so extremely chopped beyond the standards of A, B, and C racing classes that it founded another category, D. November 3 was "Author's Day," bringing together many hot rod and custom car historians, editors, and writers in a slide- illustrated panel presentation and discussion. Panelists included David Fetherston (co-author with George Barris of Barris Kustoms of the 1950s and Barris TV and Movie Cars), Pan Ganahl (exhibit catalogue co-author), and Sara Parker (professor at UC Santa Cruz, whose research deals with the hot rod and custom culture). On November 10, racing was the theme, with Dennis Varni, Steve Moal, and Roy Brizio at the exhibition. Varni is a builder, racer, and collector of American and European sports, vintage, and racing cars. Moal is an owner-builder, drawing on a family history three generations deep in metalsmithing. Roy Brizio is a noted street rod builder and the son of Andy "The Rodfather" Brizio. On December 8, Philip E. Linhares, Michael Dobrin, and Pat Ganahl, the authors of the exhibit catalogue, presented a wrap-up and overview. The exhibition itself showcased 29 automobiles customized at some time ranging from the 1930s to the present. A number of them were, however, customized from vehicles dating back to the 1920s, as the art of hot- rodding and customizing entailed builders of modest means working on the older cars they could afford. Each of the cars comprised its own mini- exhibition, with dioramas of materials related to that vehicle or its time and context. There was also a life-sized tableau, a garage scene suggesting the early 1960s and evoking the Great Central Valley, entitled "Emerald Avenue (Modesto)." The name is that of a residential street in Modesto, a town in the Central Valley south of the State Capital of Sacramento. The town was selected as a conceptual middle space between the car-building traditions of Los Angeles and of the San Francisco Bay Area. Sitting in the middle of the garage scene, amid a flathead engine, a period radio, and all kinds of memorabilia, was arguably the most famous hot rod in the country: the brilliant yellow Milner's Coupe from the film, "American Graffiti," complete with director George Lucas' own license plates from his college days (THX 138). Built around 1958 from a 1932 (the "deuce" year) Ford Coupe by some unknown customizer, the Milner's Coupe is now owned by Rick Figari of San Francisco. Nineteen of the cars could, perhaps with some debate, be classified as hot rods, or cars rebuilt for racing purposes. This was the earliest form of car modification, going back in this exhibition to the 1939 Ed Iskenderian Roadster. Rodding began in Southern California as early as the mid-1920s, originating from racing on such conveniently close dry lake beds as Rosamond, Mojave, and Muroc. The Great Depression gave hot rodding a tremendous impetus, however, having wiped out the chance that young people could just buy fast new cars. They were forced to start making race cars from scratch out of junkyard Model Ts and Model As and anything else they could lay hands on. Lakebed racers at first were multi-purpose vehicles, since few could afford both a commuting car and a race car. This multifunctionality inevitably led to speed contests on streets, which posed a law-enforcement problem. Police began to press for formal, controlled drag racing on tracks. The different demands of lake racing, street racing, and drag racing gradually resulted in functionally and aesthetically distinct subgenres of hot rods. The vehicles displayed in the Hot Rods and Customs exhibition were presented as individuals in a rather confusing sequence. Examining the displays led me to the following breakdown of the hot rod category into six subtypes, which shade into one another functionally and formally, but not too tidily in time. First is the vehicle redesigned exclusively to race on dry lake beds, the lakester. Because of this degree of specialization, then, the true lakester comes from an era when the process of hot rod differentiation was already well under way. The two lakesters in the show date from the post-WWII era. They show their era in that they consist basically of bullet-shaped bodies, scavenged from fighter plane belly tanks. These were mounted on custom-designed suspension and steering systems and featured massively reworked automobile engines. Such tank cars were always under construction, undergoing lots of modifications often under several owners in sequence (figure 1). This class of hot rod was represented by the So-Cal Speed Shop Lakester initially constructed in 1951 and once raced at Bonneville in three different classes (A, B, and C) with three different Ford and Mercury engines installed between classes in a motel parking lot nearby. Another representative lakester was the Markley Brothers and Nieri Lakester, which began its career in 1955 and hit 280.15 mph in Class D at Bonneville in 1963. In 1995, after another rash of modifications (some for safety purposes), it became airborne after hitting 200 mph and crashed spectacularly. Its driver, Bud Barnett, was unharmed, but the lakester was demolished. Not to worry -- these things speedily reincarnate and this lakester was rebuilt again. None of the show material explained the "Nieri" in the title, by the way. A second type of hot rod is the sprint car, another always "under construction" sort of vehicle. These race on formal round tracks, such as the Fremont-Baylands Raceway, and seem an outgrowth of attempts by police departments and civic associations to get hot rod racing off the streets, beginning about 1950. The legal strips deflected some hot rodding into drag racing, and the drag racing tradition eventually yielded the highly specialized sprint cars. These are little more than bare engines in front of open cockpits, with enormous racing slick tires behind and small ones up front, proportions somehow reminiscent of Tyrannosaurus rex. They run on exotic fuels, such as nitromethane, and nowadays come equipped with parachutes to brake them post-race and driver firesuits in the event of unscheduled stops. The exhibition illustrated this category of rod with the Champion Speed Shop Special (figure 2), which was accompanied by its pushtruck, a 1934 Ford pickup, a racer in its own right. Moving into vehicles more recognizable as automobiles is the third category, the racing coupe. The Hot Rods and Customs exhibition featured five examples: the Pierson Brothers' 1934 Ford 3-Window Coupe of 1949, the Tabucci 1946 Ford of 1955, Milner's 1932 Ford Coupe of about 1958 (the street racer made famous in American Graffiti), the California Coupe of 1973 (another 1934 Ford 3-Window Coupe), and the Cop Shop Coupe (still another Ford Coupe, from 1934) of 1974-75. Some of these cars were raced on dry lakes (e.g., the Pierson Coupe, seen in figure 3), while others were primarily street racers (e.g., the Milner Coupe). In fact, lakebed purists actively resisted the advent of mere coupes onto the playas, and the coupes did not make their debut in official dry lake races until the late 1940s, when their enthusiasts organized car clubs of their own. While the frames and bodies were Ford Coupes, these vehicles were powered by a wider array of engines: Chrysler Hemi with a custom designed eight carburetor manifold (the Tabucci coupe), a Ford 302 (the California Kid), and a small-block Chevy (Cop Shop Coupe), whatever it took to move them at competitive speeds. With six examples, the fourth type of hot rod was the best represented at the exhibition: the roadster. This sort of vehicle could be raced on a variety of surfaces, including dry lakes, dirt tracks, and ... streets. As such, these cars had to be street-legal, and they often did double-duty as race car and somebody's commuting or roadtrip car. With this level of generalization, then, these are the parent type historically for all hot rods. They featured open tops, bodies of bathtub proportions (generally derived from Ford Model A's or Model T's), and souped-up Ford or Mercury V-8 engines (though a Ferrari engine did creep into one of the exhibits). The roadsters on display were the Iskendarian (the oldest vehicle of the show, a 1924 Model T rodded out in 1939), the Fuhrman 1929 Model A Ford V-8, the Niekamp, the Varni 1929 Model A Ford, and the Deucari (the one with the Ferrari V-12 engine in a 1932 Ford Coupe, or "deuce"). This category of hot rod has shown a distinctive evolutionary trend in purpose through time. The earliest roadsters were unmodified cosmetically, all the modification energy going into engine mechanics (e.g., the Iskendarian roadster of 1939, seen in figure 4). The later ones seem built less for actual competition than as cars built largely for show: a lot of attention has gone into restoration of the bodies around standard high-performance engines (such as the V-12 Ferrari around which the 1978 Deucari was fashioned). The trend toward cosmetics is exaggerated so much with some of the newer roadsters that they shade into a fifth class of hot rod: the show rod. The focus of their construction was clearly to create a good-looking car, the shape of which evokes the racing roadster of old and the engine compartment of which may well house a power plant guaranteed to collect speeding tickets on the Interstate. In fact, some of the show rods proved their durability in actual long-distance driving from one auto show to another across the country with the occasional foray well beyond the speed limit. Examples of show rods include the Emperor of 1960 (figure 5), the Brizio 1932 Model T Roadster of 1988, and the California V-8 Special of 1996 (which recalls the French, Italian, and British sports car tradition as much as it does the lake beds of roadster ancestry). A sixth class of hot rod sends the cosmetic trend right up into self- caricature. These odd yet slyly humorous creations remind one of the stylized automotive cartoons done by kid brothers everywhere (many of which, in fact, were showcased in a display of car-builders' drawings clear back to childhood efforts on lined school paper). Examples of these cartoonish vehicles in the exhibition include Ed Roth's Beatnik Bandit of 1961 (Oldsmobile chassis shrunken to Volkswagen proportions, its UFO cockpit barely visible behind the 303 cubic inch V-8 popping out of the long-gone hood, shown in figure 6). Another is Kookie Kar I, complete with enough baroque pipes poking up from the engine to play a Bach fugue and a bloody skull gearshift knob. This rod was built by Norm Grabowski and familiar to viewers of "77 Sunset Strip" as the roadster Ed "Kookie" Burns used for crook-chasing. While these nineteen hot rods numerically dominated the exhibition, a sizable representation of custom cars was also present. These are the cars modified for stylistic effect more than performance: "Hot rods were built for go; customs were built for show" 1. The goal here was to take some modest car and rework it cosmetically, sometimes focusing mainly on the paint job and other times entailing a resculpturing of the sheet metal beyond all recognizable proportions. Historically, this is a newer development. As Linhares put it: "The hot rod's message is, 'I'm fast and I'm mean.' In contrast, the custom car's message is, 'I'm low and I'm cool.' Customs rank style over performance. The custom car looks best cruising a brightly lit boulevard at night, a sophisticated, slightly sinister apparition that makes stock cars in its midst seem clumsy" 2. The cars are each so idiosyncratic, however, that they do not readily suggest a tidy classification. The vehicles in this exhibition, however, do show a trend in extremity of modification through time. The first three customs in this exhibition were Mercury cars: the Ohanesian 1940 Mercury customized right after WWII, the D'Agostino Stardust (a recreation in 1988 of the Matranga 1940 Mercury Custom Coupe), and the Hirohata 1951 Mercury customized almost immediately in 1952 by Sam and George Barris (figure 7). These three cars represent the classic early era of custom cars (circa 1945-1955). The three cars had their chassis lowered, their tops "chopped," and their sheetmetal reshaped, rather subtly, to produce a long, low, somewhat bulbous, and streamlined look. The effect in some ways presages the "jelly bean" aerodynamic production cars of today. Another four vehicles represent the late 'fifties and early 'sixties, an era characterized by custom work on a wider variety of automobiles. The look was even longer and lower yet and, though metalwork remained critical, paint also became a major focus of the customization. The result was a shift in effect from subtle to flamboyant. Mystery Ford was the first of these in the exhibition, a 1951 Victoria Custom customized by Joe Bailon in 1956. Its shape was exaggerated with a number of scoops and flanges, the exhaust pipe was run along the outside bottom of the car as a design element, and the car featured his brilliant, almost translucent candy apple red lacquer in a very 1950s two-tone paint job. This car is in the Oakland Museum of California permanent collection. A second vehicle was the Rod & Custom Dream Truck, which had an extremely complicated development, entailing separate evolution of its 1955 Chevrolet V-8 engine, a 1954 Chevy pickup cab, and a 1950 Chevy pickup chassis by Spence Murray and many others. These all came together in one vehicle by 1957. Custom as process. The 1957 Inman Chrysler Custom was customized in 1962 by Joe Wilhelm, incorporating a chopped top, chassis lowering, a new grille made of horizontal tubes, quad headlights "frenched" (or seamlessly and aerodynamically fit) into the fenders, and a black lacquer paint job. In some ways, this car is more understated than some of the others of its time period, in many ways updating the early era of Mercury customization. The last car shown from this era, however, could not be deemed understated: the Jade Idol. This 1956 Mercury Custom was redone by Gene Winfield in 1960. The body was sectioned down a full four inches to accentuate its long, low profile. It received a stainless steel bar grille, 1957 Dodge fender flares, and its headlamps are buried in gold lined nacelles somehow evocative of the Starship Enterprise's. This is the first car to feature Winfield's signature blended paint job, in this case many shades of lime green, pearl, and gold, feathered together and arranged to exaggerate the shape of the car (figure 8). The last group of customs share the reworking of substantially older cars, as self-conscious, almost reverent "retro" projects. In the case of the Cool 50, a 1950 Mercury Custom Coupe redone in 1975 by Bill and Cal Reasoner, the result is a car that deliberately recalled the classic initial era of custom-building. The candy apple red and silver two-tone enamel paint job seems a fond nod to Joe Bailon, and the overall look is faithful to Sam and George Barris' Hirohata Mercury, George Barris' Stardust, and the Ed Ohanesian Mercury. The Shark, ne' the X-79 Vendetta, is a 1960 Cadillac customized by Frank DeRosa in 1978. This is easily the wildest of the customs, DeRosa's "answer to George Barris' Batmobile" 3. It features absolutely monstrous fins; a number of torpedo-like extensions to the grill, front bumper, and front fenders; exterior "exhaust" piping; a padded brougham roof; and a flame and scalloped paint job in various shades of coarse metal flake blue. This car is ineffably "over-the-top," a motorized fantasy, succinctly expressed by one of the other exhibition patrons the day I visited as "gotta have a hat with a feather in it for this!" The last in this category is CadZZilla c, yes, copyrighted (figure 9). Commissioned in 1988 by Billy Gibbons of the band, ZZ Top, designed by Gibbons and Larry Erickson, and built by Boyd Coddington, this car started out as a 1948 Cadillac Series 62 Sedanette. This vehicle is perhaps the most extensively re-engineered in the show, both mechanically and cosmetically. The car is spectacularly long and low, superbly fit and finished in eggplant purple, and incorporates a 500 cubic inch Cadillac presidential limousine engine rebuilt to very high performance, nay, hot rod standards. CadZZilla c now has an entourage of matching Harley- Davidsons, HogZZillas c, of course, the presidential metaphor carried to extremes, perhaps? This car represents the apotheosis of the custom- building tradition and, in some ways, the hot rod tradition as well. So much for the cars. What of the men? Well, this has certainly been a very specifically male preserve -- "big toys for big boys." The Great Depression seems instrumental in comprehending the origins of hot rodding, especially. As Philip Linhares, co-curator of the exhibition, put it, "Young men without much money made hybrids from cast-off cars" 4. There was a sort of class pride to be taken when these poor young men's "...ingenious creations outstripped the fastest and most expensive production cars of their era" 5. From the beginning, these men exerted influence on automotive design far beyond their own tight-knit circles. Detroit, finding its own best production cars bested by these backyard achievements, incorporated their creative engineering and, later, their cosmetic designs as well 6. Think of muscle cars, high torque V-8 engines, pinstriping, metallic and pearlescent paint jobs, fins, aerodynamic styling, and the reduction in chrome accents, and the influence of hot rodders and customizers becomes apparent. World War II sent many of these California boys overseas, where they picked up technical skills they could apply to their favorite hobby, if and when they returned home. While in the service, many of them made converts of their peers from other parts of the country with their pictures of their cars and descriptions of their automotive adventures. Those who survived the War came back to California with military-honed technical skills. There they found the sustained post-War economic boom, the California suburban population explosion, and the heightened interest in car modification they had themselves created overseas. Prosperity and social pressure against the outlaw aspects of the hot rod scene led to regularization and organization of racing venues, popularization in media, and all sorts of specialized publications with "how to" features. The hot rod market became segmented into a number of niches: lakesters, sprint cars, street racers, and show cars. Part of this segmentation was the advent of customization, of auto modification for essentially cosmetic effects. With development and specialization, hot rodding and customizing began to shift away from the humble garage and back yard represented in the "Emerald Avenue (Modesto)" tableau to the professional shop. Hot rods and customs are big business now, commissioned for breathtaking sums of money by the likes of corporations, entertainers, and well-to-do and nostalgic car collectors. CadZZilla c cost $400,000 to build. One aspect of these men's identities not pointed out in the exhibit materials was their ethnicity. I was surprised by the prominence of German, Italian, Armenian, and Greek names, as well as Anglo names, among the actual builders of these vehicles. I think, based on my own high- school impressions, that I expected Anglo names to dominate the hot rod scene and Latino names the custom activity. I wonder whether the ethnicity of the names reflects something of the marginalization of these "old" ethnic groups during the interwar and post WWII years: it was poorer young men who first took up hot rodding and customizing after all, and the old ethnics continued to experience lingering discrimination into the post-WWII years. The absence of Hispanic names remained puzzling to me long after this tentative hypothesis formed to rationalize the old ethnic flavor of the builders' names. It seemed the odder, since I vividly remember the low rider cars of my adolescence and the special fondness for this form of customization among my Latino peers. The socio-economic hypothesis proposed above would cover the Latino low riders, too, so I was startled at their absence among the custom car builders in the exhibition. This sense of disconnection was only exacerbated by a statement at the end of the exhibition path, which surveyed the future evolution of the hot rodding and custom car traditions. The text commented that "another area of creative automotive activity is seen in the inner city: the familiar 'Low Riders' and the lowered Honda Civics, Acuras and small pickup trucks with big wheels and wide tires, a Euro-look advocated by Asian and Latino enthu- siasts" 7. The future? "Euro-look"? At least in the case of the Latino youth, the low rider customization goes back to the 1950s in the San Fernando Valley of my recollection and perhaps before, and "Euro" had nothing to do with it. Linhares basically claims that the custom car was an outgrowth of the hot rod, experiencing its glory days once Detroit introduced integrated fenders in 1949 until 1955 with the introduction of the 1955 Chevrolet V-8 power plant. The new engine, according to him, put the emphasis on car modification back into rodding, leaving the customs to rust away as forlorn back lot "lead sleds." A return to interest in the custom awaited the nostalgic mid 1980s. Well, maybe with the Anglo, German, Italian, Armenian, and Greek builders the exhibition showcased, this is true, but I am just amazed that the explosion of Latino (and some white and African-American) low rider customs in the 1960s and 1970s is just completely overlooked, this development being characterized as some sort of hope for the future of customizing. "Back to the Future"? Ganahl did try to include the Latino low rider in a paragraph (though not with an exemplar in the exhibition):.ls1 ...Influenced by traditional custom cars of the '50s, and almost exclusively rooted in Chicano culture, low riders had been around for years. It was in the early '70s, due partly to Low Rider magazine as well as exposure on TV shows such as "Chico and the Man," that low riding defined itself as a very separate entity from traditional customizing, again with surprisingly rigid self- imposed parameters. At the time, the cars of choice were '63-64 Chevy Impalas with intricate candy paint jobs, airbrushed murals, crushed velvet upholstery, tiny 5.20 x 15 thin-whitewall tires on deep dish chrome wheels, and the new rage: hydraulically lowered and lifted suspension 8. Even this concession fits not quite with my own memories of the time (in the San Fernando Valley, at least): low riding was quite well and self-consciously defined by the mid-late '60s and hydraulic suspension was already in vogue. The hydraulics were shown off in "low rider weddings," with phalanxes of "chorts" (low rider cars) being sprung up and dropped down in the front ends, almost waving as they paraded down the streets. Another cherished display of hydraulics were the "scrape races" (pairs of cars were raced on certain streets, their undersides lined with titanium plates, each car matching the other's speed until, at a signal, the hydraulic systems dropped the cars onto the street to see who would scrape the farthest and throw off the most dramatic spray of sparks). I remember Chevy Impalas from 1959-1962 and 1965 as very popular, too. By the time cited, the early '70s, Chevy Monte Carlos were becoming a hit. Young whites into low riding tended to favor Ford Fairlanes and Galaxies, while young African-Americans leaned to Buicks and Volkswagens ("squashed bugs"). Most young middle-class white boys, however, favored hopped-up hot rods, high riders (back ends raised), and muscle cars (production cars with high horsepower engines), while their peers from wealthy families conducted chase races, termed "runs," along the twisty stretches of Mulholland Drive in unmodified Porsches and Corvettes. Whatever its shortcomings, I have to admit I was just tickled to tour the exhibition, I and the other middle-aged visitors (mostly male, some with bored but indulgent mates in tow). The exhibition brought me right back to the Van Nuys Boulevard and San Fernando Mall of my youth, the "brightly lit boulevard(s) at night" of the time. Beyond nostalgia, this exhibition reminded me of the sheer fun of getting away with doing my senior thesis (and some academic conference papers subsequently) on low riders in the San Fernando Valley, with plenty of "participant observation" field work, cruising the hot spots with my late brother, John, in his 1958 red and white Chevy Nomad station wagon 9. It is to John I owe my interest in these cars and my ability to work on them. I still have that old lead sled, by the way, moldering in my back lot, and, one of these days, I'll get around to restoring it to its deserved splendor yet! Maybe when I retire.... NOTES 1. Pat Ganahl, "The California Hot Rod," in Michael Dobrin, Philip E. Linhares, and Pat Ganahl, eds., Hot Rods and Customs: The Men and Machines of California's Car Culture (Oakland, CA, 1996), 24. 2. Philip E. Linhares, "Hot Rods and Customs: From the Garage to the Museum," in Michael Dobrin, Philip E. Linhares, and Pat Ganahl, eds., Hot Rods and Customs: The Men and Machines of California's Car Culture (Oakland, CA, 1996), 15. 3. Frank DeRosa, quoted in Michael Dobrin, "The Shark," in Michael Dobrin, Philip E. Linhares, and Pat Ganahl, eds., Hot Rods and Customs: The Men and Machines of California's Car Culture (Oakland, CA, 1996), 87. 4. Philip E. Linhares, quoted in Oakland Museum of California, "California's love affair with cars is theme of Oakland Museum of Califor- nia Exhibition" (Press release OMC-A-7/29/96), 1. 5. Ibid., loc. cit. 6. Michael Dobrin, "Fifty Years of Hot Rods and Customs," The Museum of California 30 (Summer, 1996), 21. 7. Linhares, op. cit., 15. 8. Ganahl, op. cit., 24-25. 9. Christine M. Rodrigue, "Low Riders in the San Fernando Valley," unpublished senior thesis, Department of Geography, California State Uni- versity, Northridge, 1973; "Low Riders and Van Nuys Boulevard," Outstand- ing Student Presentation to the Southern California Academy of Sciences, Fullerton, CA, 1974; and "The Formation of Consumption Subcultures: The Car Cults of Los Angeles," presentation to the Popular Culture Associa- tion, Cincinnati, OH, 1978. LIST OF FIGURES, CAPTIONS, AND SOURCES Figure 1. The So-Cal Speed Shop Lakester, lakester hot rod type. (Photo: John Lamm. Catalogue, p. 50.) Figure 2. The Champion Speed Shop Special, sprint car hot rod type. (Photo: McLennan Archives. Catalogue, p. 73.) Figure 3. Milner's Coupe, racing coupe hot rod type. (Photo: Pat Ganahl Collection. Catalogue, p. 65.) Figure 4. The Iskendarian Roadster, roadster hot rod type. (Photo: Hot Rod Magazine. Catalogue, p. 39.) Figure 5. The Emperor, show rod hot rod type. (Photo: Andy Southard, Jr. Catalogue, p. 68.) Figure 6. Beatnik Bandit, caricature hot rod type. (Photo: not attributed in catalogue. Car is in collection of The National Automobile Museum, Reno, Nevada. Catalogue, p. 70.) Figure 7. The Hirohata Mercury, classic Mercury era, custom type. (Photo: Ralph Poole, Rod and Custom Magazine. Catalogue, p. 53.) Figure 8. Jade Idol, diversification era, custom type. (Photo: Andy Southard, Jr. Catalogue, p. 66.) Figure 9. CadZZilla c, "retro" era, custom type. (Photo: c Gizmachine, Inc., 1989, all rights reserved. Catalogue, p. 90.)