Hot Rods DO YOU REMEMBER A TIME WHEN A HOT ROD WAS A RARE SIGHT IN YOUR TOWN?

I got hooked on old cars & hot rods at a early age, building models and buying my first car at 12 years old and had a bunch by the time I was in my early 20's but Hot Rods & Customs were rare and seldom seen, at that time the late 60's & early 70's factory muscle cars were about all you saw.

I was building a Model A and ran into a guy at the parts store and he was building a T bucket, H had just joined a car club and shortly after that he invited me to a meeting, I had no idea there were others building hot rods, some were older than me and a couple were younger.

There were a dozen members and 3 guys had running cars, a year later and we all had a hot rod or custom on the road, the year was 1973 and when we wre out in force we drew a crowd.

Those were some great times, for me my 1930 Pickup became my daily driver and the 1940 Ford sedan became Brenda's daily, it was like that for years.

Since my daily driver pickup got totaled earlier this month I have been driving my old beater and really enjoying the thumbs up and all the questions, it's kinda likegoing back in time.

Do yourself a favor and leave the daily at home and drive your Hot Rod or Custom to work, to the grocery store or out to dinner during the week, not just on the weekend. HRP

 

It still is, a fair number of old cars and hot rods here but most resting in the garage unless there's a car show or cruise in. Very few are anywhere close to daily drivers, don't want to get them out just to drive.

 

Until I was 12 I didn't know much about hot rods, then a local man came home from the Navy driving a slick white 46 Ford coupe tail dragger custom he's bought in CA. Then another local show up driving a 27 highboy roadster with a Flathead. Finally my dad brought me the Nov 57 issue of R&C featuring 32 Fords while I was in the hospital. I was hooked. I'm guilty of not driving my cars enough like many others.

 

I Recall It Very Well And Then A Few Folks Started Building Machines.....

 

As far as driving, even my daily driver isn't a daily driver. I ride my bicycle everywhere.

 

No….I grew up in Southern California in the fifties and hot rods and customs were a dime a dozen. Not unusual to see a T bucket in the high school parking lot along side an A coupe with an Olds engine. One guy had a ‘48 Ford ragtop done by Barris as a daily driver.

 

I was 13 in 1967, was obsessed with cars, and never saw a hot rod. We lived in a small town 30 miles from the Chrysler plant that produced Roadrunners, GTX, 'Cudas, etc., so there were plenty of muscle around, but NO hot rods that I can remember. Really didn't know about them until the late '70's when I made friends with a body shop owner (in the same little town) who had a T-bucket and was building a "deuce" roadster.

 

As a very young lad in Ontario, Canada they were few and far between. I knew of only two and they were both '49 Merc converts. More mildly custom than Hot Rod.
Then my family moved to SoCal in'61......WOW! Hot Rod heaven!

 

We had a couple nice ones seen almost nightly on main street in the 50s-60s - now I cruise main street and hardly see anything from the 20th Century, much less something cool...lots of them sitting in garages around here...

 

I Grew up in a racing family, Milwaukee/ West Allis Wisconsin, at 16, 1964 I got involved in the local car scene, cruising/street racing. I saw very few Hot Rods/Kustoms anywhere I went, a few here and there, mostly modified 50's cars, my avatar was my first car. The muscle car numbers exploded till early 70's, then car insurance got very pricey, law enforcement really clamped down on the street racing, So........... in my part of the world, various car magazines and the yearly local car show was my exposure to Hot Rods/ Kustoms. In 1967 I did trade for kustom Ford ragtop, Pics in my albums of some of my cars when a kid. I went open wheel racing from 1970-1991 then came back to Hot Rods/car hobby. AS a side note the few Hot Rods that I saw back then were pretty crude, the few nice ones I never saw on the street. In later years 80's/90's/2000/2010 Hot Rods grew in big numbers in Milwaukee /suburb areas with the quality comparable to anywhere.

by wicarnut posted Jan 20, 2014 at 5:46 PM

 

Around my area there is alot of old cars and some hot rods. They can be seen out on the street in the summer months, and my coupe as well. Come Hershey show, all are out running around. Cars like my drag coupe? Well I am the bad boy, kind of like Milner.

 

I was lucky when I was a kid. My Mom had a rooming house that had hotrodders/machinists as renters. Didn't have to go looking, they came to me. Two 40 Fords with Olds engines. Chopped and chanelled candy apple red 32 pickup with a nailhead. Custom 40 coupe with '40 coats of 'hand rubbed black lacquer' with upolstered firewall and running boards. Couple of 50 Olds coups and the usual 55-57 Chevs. Next door neighbor had a 60 Vette and down at the corner were some SS Impalas. My mentor raced Supermodifieds then Sprints. Hell, my Mom drove a 4 speed Mercury Marauder. Took me quite a few years to figure out that there were people who drove 'stock' cars...

 

Deep in what's left of NASCAR country, you'll see trailered cars, hardly ANY rods, street rods, and newer mini cars.....street machines are even rare.

 

Still pretty rare to see a HAMB era vehicle around here. Several mid 60’s and later factory hot rods, but not many pre 65 anything. I do know a guy with a nice 40 Ford that drives it about once a month, another with a 40 Chevy and a 50 Chevy that he drives pretty regularly, and a couple of guys with fiberglass cars that only get driven to shows. I’m liable to jump in my 47 Lincoln any day of the week and just drive to town and back.

 

The Philly area had a few that were visible. Always parked.
I am sure that there were more tucked away in garages.
It seems that the concept of rod runs was not in play.
Riding in the back seat I always knew where to check for the Deuce roadster, the 34 Sedan, the Forty coupe, the A Tudor, A pair of 37 coupes, a 32 Chev cp full fenders, and one without fenders.

 

I was born in '57 and started watching for them at a very early age. Hardly ever saw any. Still hardly ever see any.

On the other hand, my dad was born in '38 and said he remembered them being "all over the place".

Concerning driving them frequently, I drove my cars a lot. All the time. In fact one of the local farmers was going on one day about me and my '47 business coupe...
"He drives it ALL THE TIME!"
As if I was doing something wrong. LOL

 

For me growing up in the 70's in Sydney Australia, "hot rods were the sport of kings". It was a very expensive hobby to get into unless you knew someone to help you get through all the rig morale with rules or you bought a finished car for big dollar. They were there and I only got to see them at indoor shows etc or on a Friday night at the local drive in burger place called Beefies. Cheers

 

I actually saw a lot more hot rods in my home town back in the 50s and 60s than I have since I moved to the town I live in now in 1978. My old stompin' grounds was always full of car guys. They were not rare. I guess thats why I grew up with the hots for them.
Now days they are what I would consider rare to see on the streets.

 

Well being that was a kid/teenager from the mid 90s though the 2000's. Anything older than the 80s was pretty rare outside of my family's cars during the day. The guy who did the upholstery in Taboo for us daily drove a 34 Ford 5 window hot rod year round. There were a couple of 55 Chevy's guys drove around town. There was always a nice yellow 210 2 door sedan parked in front of a shop we always passed by. There was also an old logger in town that owned nothing but 60 Chevy's. Had a 60 Impala, station wagon, pickup, and a el camino that he would drive around town.

 

Saw them all. From Larry Ferris 31 model a coupe to muscle cars. Whiting Indiana was a car crazy town. Larry won the 63-64 ISCA show circuit with the model a he bought from my great grandfather in 1957. I even got a ride in it once!

 

My dad used to tell me about the cars he saw in high school, I never experienced it. The only Hotrods I could spot were T buckets. When I got old enough to get into cars, the muscle car era was what was going on. I was in HS till ‘79. The parking lot had a fe of us in old trucks from the mid 60’s back to the 40’s, but the power cars around were Camaros, Chevelles, etc.

The only time I’d ever seen customs was as a kid my dad would take me to the autorama in Sacramento. Wild paint jobs, stuff that was so “different “ hard for a kid to take in. I remember a sedan delivery with cut away doors, wild paint, wild interior, and a freaking leopard, or mountain lion, cougar, I dunno, chained up inside of it just chilling , laying down and looking up every once in a while. Could you imagine that today?

 

After about 50+car people have the money to get cars they wanted in high school give things 20 years there will be less.

 

Hot rods have always been a rare sight around here. They were even a rare sight in Canada, where we lived for a few years in the '70s, though at least my circle of adolescent friends were aware of them. Model kits and HRM were currency there.

I'm told that my uncle had had a Ford 103E Popular which had been modified in ways which suggested an American influence, c. 1958, so there appears to have been something which predated the appearance of the Fad T on the local scene in the early '70s. I saw them at very infrequent shows then; I don't recall ever seeing one on the road.

In the absence of a continuous prior hot-rodding tradition the local interpretation of the Fad T was different: there was something jocular about it but also something countercultural. It turned on an "outrageous" satirical juxtapositioning of old and new, antique-car prudishness with up-to-the-minute racing kit, which called for flamboyant '60s colours of which the quintessence was a heavy flake purple. To this day, painting a car purple is deemed in some circles to impart a certain defiant cockiness. The Fad T became the image of "what hippies drive", alongside the classic '60s/'70s longbike.

Political isolation in those years, and an authoritarian culture which discouraged critical observation, led to a subsequent process of cumulatively Getting It Wrong, the results of which have not yet been unlearned. Polished, detailed, uncaged Jaguar IRS was a Fad T thing almost from the start; and sometimes it was reckoned that if Jag IRS was good, Jag suspension all round might be better — I think of Buttera's tall T of 1974, though the IFS on that wasn't Jaguar. Only here did Jaguar IFS come to be regarded as one of the defining features of a hot rod, even when used in conjunction with a live axle.

Out of a probable road-racing aesthetic out of which the "zef" look arose — after the Ford Zephyr 6 MkIII, at first the most common recipient of a treatment which included a slightly nose-up stance, chrome-plated mag-look steelies spaced to stick out of the fender openings, fuzzy bathroom mats glued to the top of the dashboard, a lemon-shaped plastic lemon juice bottle on top of the radio antenna, and during the later, Cortina Mk3/4/5-dominated era, all kinds of plastic rear-window louvres and side-window wind deflectors — came the misconception that "bigs and littles" meant the widest tyres in stock at the tyre shop on the rear and the second-widest on the front. A modified car couldn't be a modified car unless it had "vet tekkies" (fat sneakers), and guys would look at pictures in American magazines and not see how skinny the front tyres were. Short, wide, roughly sausage-shaped tyres remain the definitive look for tow trucks here.

But I'm digressing: sorry Danny. Things have improved after the internet, which has made a better awareness easier. There is even a bit of a "traditional" sensibility, e.g. https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/cape-town-2019.1153257/; https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/what-you-see-today.1059262/page-38#post-12859092

But if I go outside right now and stand in the busy street for an hour, I'd be lucky to see anything out of the previous century. Even my sometimes infuriatingly modern DD is becoming a visibly "old car".

 

I see a few of em running around our little town. If yall remember "Live Wire" build here a decade or more ago by @Evel, Ive seen it a few times recently. One of our neighbors has a blown 32 coupe that you can hear a block away & just last week I spotted this dude driving down the hwy and snapped a quick rolling shot. There have always been old cars & hot rods around this area as long as I can remember.

 

Ohio….Growing up in the 60’s and early 70’s I don’t recall ever seeing an early 30-40’s Hotrod. It was all about putting powerful SB’s in the early to mid 50’s cars and of course muscle cars later in that period.
Danny is your cap button broken.

 

At least in the areas I lived in they were pretty rare in the 50's and 60's. One of the first street driven real hot rods I ever saw was at a highschool football game on Bainbridge Island when I was about 14. They would let some cars go in and park around the football field and one night a chopped and channeled coupe with an overhead V8 showed up. I never did find out who owned it or where it came from but figured that it belonged to someone connected to the other school.
Here the only early hot rod you saw in town was the Chopped and channeled 36 Ford bobber truck that belonged to Gary Fisher who ran the Shell station in the middle of town. Mostly he just drove it in and out of the stall in at the garage and you seldom ever saw him going down the street in it. I might have the radiator shell off that truck in my shed as I bought a sectioned 36 radiator shell at a swap meet in the 80's .
You actually see a lot more hot rods driving around on a regular basis now than you did.

 

Just guessing here, but the Post war activity of stripped down jalops ruined the views of the oldheads. They wanted them all junked to destroy depression era memories.
Meantime they were being raced at every stretch of open road.
Growing up (50s-60s ) I tried to save a few hulks, for when I could afford to make them nice.
I still have some poor attitude toward some ( now deceased ) cops, neighbors, and relatives.
Not that I can't live with the losses of the cars.
It's, as always, the money.

 

I can never recall a time when a hotrod was a rare sight in my home town. In fact that's what likely had a huge part of my attraction to cars from a very young age!
When I was a very young kid my 2nd floor bedroom window overlooked a busy street and intersection. On summer nights when I was supposed to be sleeping, I was actually sitting at my bedroom window watching the guys in their cars cruising, and street racing from the traffic light I could see. I often woke up during the night when I dozed off sitting in the chair with my head on the window sill, and I heard a couple hotrods revving their engines at the light.

 

Are you kidding? It's more rare now than ever! You don't even see any old cars driving around anymore. Unless, it's on the weekend. I drive my Coupe almost every day, and never see another old car....meaning pre 1970. I work in Orange, Ca, so you might see one going to Jimmy White's shop or Cambra's shop, but not anywhere else.

 

When I was younger, you saw old cars all the time. Mostly Muscle Cars and Hotrods. rarely ever saw a Custom.