Stopped by a local mostly petroliana swap meet on the way to work at Tardel's on Friday morning and scored on some pristine copies of HOP UP and R&C little pages, plus several copies of large HOP UP & MOTOR LIFE Magazine -- three bucks apiece, and did I mention that they are pristine? (I experienced just a touch of guilt when I bought all the seller's little pages without so much as a second thought; he had that unmistakable look of seller's remorse, as in "Damn, I think I priced those little magazines too low!") Anyway, it's taken me since Friday to get even partway through my new treasures, and this morning I discovered a wonderful display ad in the September 1953 issue of HU&ML that transported me back to my teens . . . A&E's lot was a regular weekly stop for a lot of SoCal gearheads -- myself included -- in the '50s, early '60s. It was a couple of doors east of Burbank Bob's Big Boy drive-in, at the beginning of Burbank's auto-row. The photo in the ad looks a little sp****; most days the rods and customs were parked a lot tighter because there were so many of them on the lot. On my many visits I saw countless customs from the good shops -- Valley Custom, Barris, Ayala Bros -- along with well-done amateur builds; A&E reserved their "back line" for sporty-car hybrids and "specials" rather than poorly done projects and ratty piles. Famous rods and customs were a staple of A&E sales, and I'm sure the "noise" they'd generate in the drive-ins and speed shops of SoCal would bring lookers -- and potential buyers for other less-expensive machinery -- from all around the vast SoCal basin on any given Saturday. If you'd heard Jack Calori's '36 was for sale on A&E's lot for nine-hundred bucks would you have made plans to be elsewhere on Saturday?! So, you weren't really a coupe guy, well check out Frank Rose's sweet '27 roadster parked in the premiere spot on the lot, right on the corner. Not cheap at twelve hundred, but certainly one of the finer streetable Ts ever. Those beauties are not in the 1953 ad, of course, when Calori and Rose were still driving and enjoying their creations, but they are two of the more memorable offerrings I saw later on at A&E, way back in The Day.
Neat ad, I started reading it and saw the roadster on the lot and thought "Hmmmm". I met a guy about a month ago that has three boxes full of HOP-UP the little books that I called and I still need to run out there and pick them up. But with the buying of a house and all, the time is a little sp****. Any pix from this weekend at the Tardel Ranch? Chris Nelson Kansas
I love old ads/photos like that. I found this one on the Library of Congress web site... I bet with a little haggling you could talk him down from $189.00 for that '36(?) 5-window...
<font color="brown"> Great score av8! You guys are the heartbeat! So envious of what lays in your backyard! We try our best over here.... But most of all, thanx for sharing that with us. Always ready to receive trips down memory lane... Cheers, C P.S. spent a few hours with fellow rodders yesterday watching the mad fabricators DVD I recently purchased from 55olds88. Saw HAMB cars and some great footage. If any of you haven't seen it or got it, do both or one at least! </font>
Yes, found 'em at Fred's. I'm not even a marginal petrolianer, but Fred's place in on the way to Vern's and there's often something intererting going on there along the side of Old Redwood Highway on weekends.
man that is so cool, hard to imagine how awesome that must have been to cruise by to check out what was for sale. bet it was cool just to frequent it just to check out the new inventory! thanks for that,very cool
Just goes to show how cosmopolitan L.A. was in 1953. We didn't get two letters and five numbers in our Cincinnati phone numbers until 1955! Thanks for the pic... Mutt
Happy to share the good times of those times. I look back on those times from the perspective of now and find it hard to believe that the real "then" existed when it did, even though I was a part of it. It seems nuts that things could have gotten so far out of kilter, out of shape in such a short period of time. It's no wonder that guys from my crowd look back with such fondness on our early years.
Mike, remember the compe***ion on the other side of the hill? Custom City, on Santa Monica in West Hollywood? I remember looking at a very nice '40 coupe on the Custom City lot, maybe around 1958, running an immaculate Ardun with a single two-barrel. It was really expensive, though, probably more than a grand.
The Jalopy Journal
