Long LOST Customs/Hotrods.....let's start a list.

Tom davison,

You aren't by any chance the Tom Davison from K.C. who used to paint the shirts?

 

That's me. I just posted some shirt pics on the art show thread. Who are you?

No more pics of Anderson's shop, Dirk.

 

WANTED!

 

Hey Tom,

My name is George Barnes. I'll post this pic to see if it rings any bells with you.



Those pics were taken at Ray Farhner's first car show at the WW11 Memorial building in about 1960. The page is from R&C in Oct of '61.

We were hanging out at Ray's shop in the basement out on 40 highway as we had the front half of a T touring and the back section and Ray was supposed to be joining them. Typical Ray, it sat forever until a boat shop up the street started building T-Bucket bodies and we bought one. As far as my involvement, this car was Larry's but before it was all over, we had nearly equal amounts of time and money in it.

If I am not mistaken, I think that the first shirt that you ever sold was to Larry. You had done a sweat shirt with a drawing of a T-Bucket on it. I seems to me that you were going to give it to Larry and he insisted on paying for it or Ray told you to sell it to him. You might have even been in grade school then. I think that you went to Southeast and had a class with my brother later on and he is 9 years younger that me. I was 18 when this all occurred. 50 years does things to your memory...and it's not good things!

Just wondered if your memories were anything close to what I have on this subject.

Incidently, since this thread is about where have different cars gone, I found Larry's car about 5 or 6 years ago. It isn't for sale and the guy is planning to redo it. It has been kept mostly intact. What has been changed, the old stuff was kept.

 

Hi, George. Sure I remember you, Larry and the "T". It was one of the very best looking buckets anywhere at that time. Rod and Custom featured I think four cars from that show. It was '61 and the Beatnik bandit was the feature car...Roth's first time outside of Cali with the Bandit.

You might very well be right about Larry getting my first shirt. I don't have a specific memory of it, but if he got it at Ray's shop, it was probably before I had set up at any of the shows. That's wild.

I was doing them using markers for guys in school before that, but Ray had an old Binks Wren airbrush he gave me. You're right, I went to Southeast. What's your brother's name? I was 16 then because i was driving.

 

so Tom any of these your work?? when we started the Portland Chevelle club in the mid 70s we used the car from the chevelle freak tee......

 

George, you'll get a kick out of this. This was taken at Ray's Memphis show in '62 after he bought it. That's me with a load of shirts, all hunched down and shifting.

At Ray's funeral Doug Thompson was telling the story about how during that Memphis show, Elvis had called the show office to see if they could arrange a private tour through the show for him after hours. Ray got the phone and told Elvis that he could come and buy a ticket during show hours like everyone else! Ray was a little older than us and he didn't have any use for Elvis and rock n roll! Quintessential Farhner!

 

Meatball, no, the Chevelle freak design was done by Stan Peterson, one of the Roach owners.

Hey, I got your PM. I can Email that photo if you want, but did you know you can take it right off the forum here? Just right click onto the photo. A menu will pop out and you click "save as". A file directory will come up and then you choose the folder for it, name the file and click save....you got it!

 

yeah I did............thanks..hope to see ya soon..Kent

 

Tom,
My brothers name is John.

I can certainly imagine Ray telling Elvis that! Tough old Marine!

The other cars in the R&C were Charlie Aldrich & Jim Smith's '32 sedan, Lou Brown's "Clipped Coupe", which later was named "Rackety Boom" and a fellow from Texas.

I didn't realize that that was the first time out of Cal for Roth. Kind of a funny story about that show, Ray had been on Larry pretty hard to bring the T to the show and Larry didn't want to as he didn't like all of the angel hair crap that was popular then. Ray finally got him to agree. He had the car up on the stage with Aldrich & Smith's sedan and the Bandit. The T drew good crowds all weekend. Came trophy time and every car in the place got one...except one. Care to guess which one that was. Larry's car show career was short...very, very short.

Do you know a fellow named Red Hersey? He was one of Ray's gang somewhere in those early days. I posted the R&C stuff on a T-Bucket website a few years ago, and he said that he had owned the car for awhile. Said that he was living in a Merc custom and had the T and sold it to have enough money to get to the west coast to get his singing career going. Later on, he was the lead singer in the Broadway musical "Hair"

We traded the car to a fellow named Tom Sebbun. He had it for a while and then sold it to Ray. He was giving it away at his shows as a door prize. Give it away and buy it back and give it away again. I don't know how many times he did that. That part of the history is pretty much second hand as we weren't around Ray's much then.

Somewhere in there, it appears that Bill Smith of Speedway had possession of it. He has had photos of himself seated in it in several of his catalogs and is selling posters with it in the picture. Trying to make it look like one of his kits, I guess. There wasn't any thing Speedway on it...Arrow Speed Shop for sure, but no Speedy Bill stuff.

The shirt thing makes me think of another deal involving T-shirts. I'd often wondered when the first outfit started putting their logos on them. It seemed that the earliest that I could remember seeing were Iskenderian Cams shirts. One year at the PRI show, Ed came up to my booth and I got to talk to him and ask if he was, in fact, the first. He said that he wasn't sure. How his involvement got going, was he had some low buck Bonneville racers that he helped with some parts on occasion. In those days, the hotshot mechanics all wore white shirts and pants or white coveralls. These guys were bemoaning the fact that they couldn't afford to dress like that. Ed gave them the artwork for his logo and the name of a screen printer and said go have him fix you up some nice white T-shirts. The rest is history as they say. Listening to him relate that story is one of those treasured moments in my life.

I really need to get down to Butler and see Doug and see if he can supply some more of the in-between history.

This is enough of this for now, but it is kind of an interesting story about locating Larry's car again. Another day.

George

 

That's wild stuff, George.

I remember Red Hershey. He did own it as he was the winner of the raffle and Ray did buy it back. There was a lot of rumor and innuendo that it was a setup because of the fact that he bought it back, but I never saw evidence of that and I was privy to a lot that was going on around that shop because I hung out there all the time.Red was actually homeless even then was and living in Ray's shop for a while. A real character. And I remember that he was trying to get to California. Neal Faler owned the bucket for a while too.

That sounds plausible that Iskenderian would have been the first guy to seriously put car logos on shirts. He had several firsts going on. Roth was really the first person to mass-market t-shirts with designs that we now refer to as "novelty-type t-shirts".

My coolest car moment came when Honest Charley (Hisself) came up to me after looking at my lowered Riviera and asked me how I lowered it (cut the coils of course).

 

This thread just keeps gettin' better. Please carry on with the stories, guys... LOVE IT!

 

he's right,this is great.did any of you guys know anything about Ray Farhner of the boothill express fame,I know he built other stuff too!

 

hi tom do you remember what color they painted it, was that when they painted blue for aqua velva? when you delivered illusion, did you have the custom trailer dave made for it?

 

it is in the alburn museum as carl casper redid it, i haven't found pics, yet enyone have some would love to see it. caspers' futurian tom

 

Here is a Farhner built car that propelled Ray onto the national scene. It was named the Eclipse and was the winner of the (I think) first NHRA car show that they had in Indy in conjunction with the U.S. Nationals Drag race.



This photo was taken in Starbirds museum down in Oklahoma a couple of years ago. It had been restored and owned by Jack Walker at one time and I'm not sure if he still owns it or not. I remember selling him a round tube x-member for the restoration. It always seemed to me that an awful lot of the work on that car was done by Doug Thompson. The top of that nose was not metal shaped from one piece of metal but rather a whole bunch of small pieces (a couple of inches square maybe) that were gas welded together and then leaded. Think that Doug did most of that.

Tom, I'd forgotten that Neal Faler had the T at one time. I don't think that it was for very long though.

At one point some guy had it and had changed the color to green, which incidently is the color that it is now. He had it at a show in Municipal Auditorium and was taking claim for building the car. Larry and I stood there and asked him questions about it for a while and let him dig himself a real deep hole. Pretty soon, Larry asked him if he didn't have a real hard time getting to the wiring on the fuse box up under the dash. The guy got a real dumb look on his face and said "what fusebox?" "The one that I put there" says Larry. It is always fun to make an ass out of a liar, in front of a small crowd.

Here is what the car looks like today. Maybe I should clarify a bit on that. This was taken about 5 years ago and I am assuming that it is still in the same place and condition. From talking to the present owner, I would be inclined to think it is.

 

People now don't realize, George, that back in 1960 when you built that "T" there just weren't any t-buckets other than the Ivo and Grabowski cars. I appreciate the statement you guys made with that car even more now than I did then. The absense of a bed was unique, and the Outlaw-inspired windshield frame was clever.

I was at the Roadster Show in Pomona last year for the big Duece 75th and the Eclipse was there. Unfortunately, it wasn't one of the top picks for 25 Most Influential Dueces which occupied all of one hall. There were a couple of custom rods in the 25 that, in my opinion, should not have been chosen over the Eclipse. I thought Lil' Coffin was a glaring omission too. But everyone has their favorites. I wasn't there for the building of the Eclipse either, but I know Doug Thompson was instumental in the building. And I know that Doug designed it because I saw his original sketch. It was purchased not too long ago by someone who is putting together a Museum somewhere in the middle of Nevada..Ely, or someplace.

What I said earlier was that the '61 show was the first out-of-Cali showing for the Bandit, not Roth's first time back East. But, if you remember the show Daryl Starbird put on during the AHRA championships in 1960, he used Roth and the Outlaw as the feature in a show he held in the Municipal Auditorium parking garage. I'm pretty sure that was Ed's first time East. I was hanging around during setup and helped him unload the Outlaw. We became friends then and I was able to hang out with him many times throughout the years

 

Here.s a way back picture of Roth arriving in the big city with the Excalibur (Outlaw).
Not absolutely sure where this was taken.... Anybody?

 

That's a cool photo for sure, but not Roth's car towing. He had a dusty rose-colored '59 Coupe de Ville (with camping and cooking equipment strewn about in a real messy trunk compartment. His own trailer was covered with canvas over a tubing framework, like a covered wagon in the old West, so all that makes me think it was someone else towing it. I asked him (naive 15 year old that I was), "Why do you drive a Cadillac?" and he replied, "When I was a kid I always wanted a Cadillac and now I can afford it". Cads weren't cool with hot rodders in the 50's, but just he didn't care!

 

Tom you need to write a book!..with a lotta photos

 

I remember a car from back in the 70's around Dallas show circuit. It was a custom 60 Edsel painted silver and silver flake. Silver flake vinyl interior. Had a Chrysler Hemi for power. Was owned by a lawyer in North Dallas. Don't know if he had it built or bought it. Was called "Silver Cloud" for obvious reasons.

 

The Hilborn car was in Tulsa, OK with Jimmy Scott many years ago (circa 1955). I've been told it is still there, in a garage, not for sale.

 

Ray Farner deserves his own thread. I plan to start one, but I have to gather more pictures first. Ray died about two years ago at age 75. This is the Ecipse, which was the national champion custom in 1960. The prize was a new Ford convertible and as far as I know, it was the biggest prize ever awarded to the winner of a single show.

 

Anybody have a picture of Kasper's Pearl from the mid 60's ???

 

from the net , sorry no info.

 

kinda dig the mercamino.or is that rancheury

 

X tee cee

 

how about the sectioned merc that belong to "the twins" in Barris's volume 1 book techniques of the 50's he said that they sectioned the merc and did some more kustom stuff to the body and "the twins" picked it up when it was primered and it was never seen again...

 

The Durant was built as a ladies restroom for a dress shop in Chicago called 'Le Garage'. It sat in the middle of the shop and had one way glass so the ladies could see out but noone could see in. The top was raised so they could step inside. It was plumbed had a camode and the works. Move the gear shift to flush the john. I'm not kidding. I did a lot of work on this car in 1969/70. We also built a cash register out of a 1936 Chevy one ton truck. The shop went under shortly after opening. We never got paid for the job.
It's a shame Dave has been bypassed and his legacy has not been fulfilled. Too many times recognition is tied to politics or money, not historical significence.