Hot Rods For Debate: When Did Hotrodding Take Root?

What ever everybody wants to call it, it al started in California.

 

Oh, shit, 40WillysCrazy. Now you'll get the southern racer and 'shine crowd going'. We are in for some more DEBATE, folks!!! LOL

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^ Yeah, what Jimi said! ^^^^^^^^^^^

Total B.S.

 

We're a bit off topic, since this thread is not really about when the term hot rod came about, but to pin down the date just a bit, Life Magazine used the term in its November 5, 1945 edition. You'll see it on the sign at the top of this 1945 picture from Life (courtesy JimmyB). That sign is proof that Life did not coin the term. (double click on the picture to make it big) The sign obviously predates the text of the article. The title of the article was "Hot Rods". The term "hot rod" was also used in the first sentence of the accompanying article. As far as I can find, that sign in Dick Holland's garage is the earliest recorded use of the term "hot rod".

Perhaps Dick Holland (at right in photo) actually coined the term, and Life just picked it up from the sign???!!!

Who is Dick Holland? Anybody know?

 

I wouldn't know who or when the <layer id="google-toolbar-hilite-4" style="background-color: Yellow; color: black;">term</layer> was coined but Life must have ingrained the trm into peoples heads when the article was wirtten.

I would have thought that the <layer id="google-toolbar-hilite-5" style="background-color: Yellow; color: black;">term</layer> was coined in the 30's and remained obscure until weekly articles and newspaper headlines painted the picture of what the 'kids' were doing back than.


.

 

Maybe...but no evidence of its prior use has ever been turned-up, and some great minds (some of them were there in or near the beginning, including Tex Smith, Pat Ganahl, Albert Drake, Dean Batchelor, and Don Montgomery) have looked diligently. Most that researched it had only been able to take it back to 1946. Pat Ganahl is credited with finding the 1945 Life article.

 

and thus horse rodding was born....

 

I'm sorry, but I don't understand your response.

 

Once again, the proposition isn't when did the term HOTROD or HOTRODDING spring forth.

I think it has been repeatedly established that the term didn't click in the popular vernacular, in the media (and with cops! LOL) until after World War II when all the young men came back with some jingle in their pockets, more mechanical training, and a world-beating attitude. HOTRODDING JUST JELLED AFTER THE WAR.


Hopping up cars was going on before World War II. It just wasn't called HOTRODDING 'til '46 or so. I myself was born in 1950, and when I heard the term hotrod, I thought it was a loose, even humorous term indicating any old car that was hopped up . . .and they'd occasionally be seen beside the road spewing water, smoke or steam from being pushed to the limit. That's all.


The original post really addressed WHEN in the EARLY days of the U.S. auto scene the ROOTS of hotrodding were. It's okay to bicker about details or viewpoint, but let's all remember to stay on topic (Not singling ANYbody out, guys/gals! It's ALL good!)

 

The two questions/topics are somewhat integral. You really can't discuss one without discussing the other.

You can't determine where the roots are, if you don't first establish where the trunk is.

Like you say, hot rodding was going on long before WWII began, whether or not it was called that.

 

Not sure of the term hot rod but "go devil" was the name of my great uncles hot rod in 1920
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and this was my other great uncles car (pictures taken in Redstone and Whitetail Montana)
http://

 

Another view
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another view of the"go devil"
http://

 

T-Time said: The two questions/topics are somewhat integral. You really can't discuss one without discussing the other. Like you say, hot rodding was going on long before WWII began, whether or not it was called that.


Jimi: You hit the nail on the head, T-Time. Sometimes, it's good just to stop and summarizes where a discussion has gone, what can be agreed on -- and I think it's what I hilighted in red in your quote, above.


And, THANKS, 51Pontiac, for the pix of your great-uncle's "Go-Devil" !!! Not only does it show that hopping up cars was being done well before WWI, AND the hobby/practice went beyond any particular region -- AND went by many humorous names. Now, we can add Go-Devil to our pre-WWII list! LOL. Thanks, guys & gals. This has been a fun thread (for some reason, though, I think the DEBATE will flare up now and again!) As I said: IT'S ALL GOOD!



The Go-Devil, circa 1920, Montana/Alberta. A hotrod NOT yet
CALLED a hotrod!
:

 

Of course, all reference in pagaraph 3 meant World War TWO, not World War I, okay? Just my fat fingers!!! LOL

 

It was used in some SCTA publications in early 1945, mentioning about it being a headline in a newspaper I believe....

I did a good bit of research and this was the earliest I could find it in print. Before the Nov 1945 Life article.....

Word of mouth from some old lakes racers I know is that it was indeed used a bit before WWII... but you can't count that as fact...

Zach

 

Not to be too redundant, I've always felt the automotive pioneers were, in essence, racers at heart. Once the second auto was produced (from a competitor's shop) it's all been about "improving the performance" of their products. Certainly the first "races" with stock cars were more about endurance and reliability, but you have to start somewhere! And when one guy realized his stuff was slow and trouble prone, he went about improving it asap or nobody would be buying his stuff. I'm also pretty sure the first guy who showed up with a hotter cam and a bigger car pissed a few folks off - was he a hot rodder or a cheat?
In a parallel line of development, you have to remember that the fastest things in the world back then were aircraft, and closed-course racing and speed records were popular events and the competition was fierce. I read some place that if the race was 20 miles, they built the engines to run 21 miles and blow. And until retractable landing gear came along, the fastest planes were streamlined float planes - fighter style hot rods with pontoons. Think art deco with wings and engines that sounded like Ferraris. These guys were all about hp and aero. And large ones...
Likewise, a lot of land speed racing was going on, ie Campbell, etc. These guys were all hot rodders / speed freaks. As were the road racers and Grand Prix car mfgs. And let's not forget all the oval / board racing that went on (on the east coast first, eh?). You don't think they were hot rodders?
Long before hot rodding was a post-WWII Californian "cultural designation" men and women were souping up machines with wheels and racing them. I think it would be nice to know those key dates, like the first race with modified cars, the first land speed record, the fastest (mph) oval race, etc. The fastest cars over a long distance or timed events (12 or 24 hrs), the first round the world drive, etc.. Those folks are hot rodding. Later, Gary

 

The chariot was the first means of wheeled transportation in battle, and the earliest known chariots were Sumerian from 2500 bc. They were four-wheeled carts with solid wooden wheels drawn by four donkeys or wild asses. They were heavy and slow, and lacked a pivoting front axle, so they handled badly. The power plants were known to be tempermental.

Around 1600 bc the Iranians (at Tigris Speed Shop) came up with the war-horse (the hemi of horses) pulling a light two-wheeled open chariot (fenderless open roadster) that was way fast and highly manuverable. The fame of this rod spread quickly, and the race was on in every neighboring country to increase speeds with ever larger horses, better bearings, stronger high-speed wheels, etc.

A later development was the custom chariot, not necessarily built to go fast, but good for dragging main to catch the eye of the ladies, with lots body mods and bright gold and silver plating ("if it doesn't move, gold it").

Oh wait, you probably meant modified internal combustion cars, a johnny come lately concept, but one solidly based on man's age old desire to go faster than his neighbor.

 

Wow! I learn something new everyday! I never knew that the beginnings of hot rodding and the beginnings of the arms race were one and the same.

 

SlamIAm & T-Time, you guys have me fallin' off my chair. But the point is GOOD (though it's been nailed down earlier on this thread).

Transportation, technology and human nature are intertwined -- all the G-D way down through history.

So, when man caught and domesticated horses, they raced those for fun and status in their tribes (whether in China, Asia Minor, or in the Americas).

When the steam engine was adapted to river boats, they raced THOSE.

On and on. It just follows that, as automobile technology advanced, the intensity to race and find more horsepower and acceleration went hand-in-hand. This thread has been about examining that history and putting it in a useful -- and often humorous - perspective. Shit! We have certainly done that!

Oh! And about chariot racing: It reached its apex in the first century after Jesus was crucified (meaning when the Roman Colisseum was finished -- the Ben Hur thing). And chariot racing was a BIG draw. Chariot racing "teams" traveled from place to place to put on their shows, not only in the big Colisseum.

I did, however, find SUHRrc's personal memory of lakes racers using the term hotrod (probably along with a bunch of OTHER terms for hopped-up cars) a little before WWII pretty interesting. But, I think everybody is pretty satisfied, "hotrod" wasn't widely used until 1946 or so. (The thread wasn't about that anyhow, but its still fun to try & nail it down, eh?)

 

Yup, been fun! Thanks, EVERYBODY, for all the spirited input! God bless the HAMB!

 

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Long before he was U.S. president, Missourian
Harry Truman was a sort of proto-hotrodder!
When his mom offered to help him get a car
so he could visit his girlfriend, Bess, in Inde-
pendence 20 miles from the family farm, he
said he didn't want a Model-T, as that would
make him look just like the farmer he was.
Instead he borrowed $600 from his future mom-
in-law and bought a 30-horse 1911 Stafford four
made in Kansas City. The engine had an
overhead cam, roller lifters and, by one ac-
count, hemispherical combustion chambers.
Harry's tinkering soon had the Stafford capable
of 60 mph, and he ran the dog crap out of it!
Not only could it pull the steepest hill around
in high gear, Harry would have to shut the
motor down near the top for fear of going
airborne at the crest. He loved to see if he
could drive the 20 miles to Independence on
the roads of the day faster than he could get
to Bess via the train. He gradually stripped
away a good deal of sheet metal to lighten
what he called his "machine" -- what we'd
today call a hotrod! With a 4-5/8-inch stroke,
Truman eventually converted the torquey car
into a truck-like affair for use by his Missouri
National Guard unit.

 

Mean, yes, LOW??? NO! T-Head posted these keen vintage shots
recently on the cool thread, Vintage Shots From Days Gone By.
Thanks, Tee! More PROOF, there were proto-hotrodders BEFORE
the term came into our vernacular!

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<!-- / icon and title --><!-- message -->Harry Stevinson of Bashaw, Alberta took a junked model T Ford (top speed 45 MPH) after building the body it went 70 MPH. The fuel economy also went from 25 miles per gallon to 38 mpg.
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Our HAMB brother in Georgia, Toby Denman, posted the following UNIQUE early rodding photo over on the "Vintage Shots From Days Gone By" thread, and there was an enthusiastic discussion that followed (you can pick it up on about Page 1,617 of that thread). I wanted to include the pic HERE because it represents a true early TRAD 'rod, and the women's dedication to the infant hobby/sport of rodding is of particular significance. Toby's words:


"The caption that came with the photo stated that the photo was shot in the early 50s and the women's names were Jean Fowler and Betty Hayes, from Fort Worth, Texas. They had actually towed that roadster 1200 miles from Texas to Barris Kustoms to have the car made into a hot rod."




"The building in the background is Barris' old shop. Here is an early photo of the Barris shop for comparison: The Hirohito Merc @ the Barris shop."



HAMBer Bill "BamaJama" of Montgomery, AL, commented:

"Thanks Toby. Those two young ladies were true pioneers in the hot rod past towing that car across the desert to Barris's shop. I bet George remembers that to this day."

 

The first car was made to run, the next was made to run better or faster. Cars made by auto manufacturers or professional racers may be a kind of hot rod but not what we usually think of as hot rods.

The term hot rod usually means a standard make of car, modified for more speed by an amateur.

In this sense of the term I would suggest "hot rodding" as we know it today, began in the late teens and early twenties when go faster accessories were first offered for sale.

The ad for the Roof head from 1917 on this thread was an eye opener. I didn't think go faster goodies were made that early, I would have said early 20s.

Some time ago I read an article on the Roof speed equipment. Someone who was there at the time, described how the company got going.

Purpose built racing cars were available from Miller, Duesenberg and others but were very expensive. Miller charged $5000 for an engine, $10,000 for a rear wheel drive car, $15,000 for a front drive car in the twenties. A new Ford cost $275

Someone got the idea of converting Ford Model Ts to racing cars. Of course they would not be as fast as a Miller or Duesenberg, but would be a lot cheaper and as long as all the cars were more or less the same, you could put on an exciting racing series.

So Roof began making engine parts, soon to be joined by others like Waukesha (high compression Ricardo heads) Frontenac and others. You could buy engine parts, chassis lowering kits, wire wheels, racing bodies etc.

They were meant to be used to build race cars that could be used for outlaw competition on the 1/4 mile and 1/2 mile dirt horse tracks that were common all across the country.

Some of these parts started showing up on hot cars on the streets in the twenties. I believe this was the origin of hot rodding as we know it. Later came organized racing for amateurs at the dry lakes, and still later, drag racing.

 

Jimi, I seem to have lost track of this thread since my rather cursory contribution on one of the first pages. Allow me belatedly to throw in some ideas. I'm subscribing in the hope that some further debate ensues.

The first is merely by way of introduction. The non-American perception of the hot rod phenomenon, arising out of a lack of familiarity with a continuous prior tradition, is of something that developed in the mid to late '60s. To that perception the archetypal hot rod is a T-bucket and, ironically to some minds, it is associated very much with '60s psychedelia. A lot of non-Americans first became aware of hot-rodding through music at the time, for instance due to the motoring choices of certain musicians. The resulting vision had a large element of humorous irony arising from what seemed a perversely eccentric decision to base a performance-modified car on a historic vehicle. To this day there is the idea that a hot rod ought to be garish, outlandish, and whimsical.

Conversely, being aware of a continuous (if nebulous) tradition, the idea of a serious hot rod has never been problematic to American hot-rodders: which brings me to my second idea. This is a somewhat fine distinction to be drawn in how we propose to define hot-rodding. Do we consider the relationship of any given instance with a socially cohesive phenomenon, that is, do we define hot rodding in terms of continuity with a single historical growth? Or do we regard anything that possesses the essential properties of hot rodding, regardless of provenance, to be hot rodding? (assuming that we do not regard the aforementioned continuity to be an essential property of hot rodding). Both views have merit, and have been debated at greater length than one might imagine. It really comes down to how we understand the idea of linguistic meaning. Is it eidetic or discursive?

My third idea does seem to support the idea of a cohesive growth, without denying the possibility (indeed the probability) of external inspiration. I should propose understanding hot rodding as a socio-political act of subversion, albeit an unself-conscious act. I should argue that hot rodding is at its root rebellious, and that its specifically American character arises firstly from an ongoing Jeffersonian tradition of challenging established concentration of power, and secondly to the unique character of the American motor industry compared to the motor industry in other parts of the world.

World-wide, the early motor industry comprised primarily the large grey area between independent tinkerers at one end, and established manufacturers at the other. In this context the meaning of "hot rodding" is quite redundant. It is barely distinguishable from what the processes of manufacture are anyway (I would argue that this is how the motor industry ought to be today, but that is another discussion - see my blog).

Beginning with Ford, the nature of the American industry began to change very early. The concomitant phenomenon that the automobile was always promoted in the USA as the primary means of mobility for the entire population should not be understood as a separate development, nor should too much be made of the existence in other countries of established systems of mobility, for they existed and functioned in at least some parts of the USA, too. The American automobile was thus oriented not to a knowledgeable minority of "car people" but specifically to a majority who didn't really care one way or another. The upshot is that, by the era we consider the nascent phase of hot rodding, American motor manufacturers were becoming fewer in number and more powerful in market reach and technical ability.

The abovementioned "grey middle" survived much longer in Europe, which is why the term "factory" as an adjective describing specifications approaches meaninglessness in the case of many European manufacturers even after World War II. The "factory" was really not so far removed from someone's garage; it was not a different world like the American factory.

It was not, of course, thought through in quite these terms, but I believe that the origin of hot rodding as a cohesive historical phenomenon lies in an impulse to reclaim automotive technology from an increasingly aloof, impregnable, and essentially hostile motor industry. It must be added that this hostility was always largely subliminal, and industry has gone to great lengths to keep it from becoming patent and overt. Hence our typical mixed feelings about the factory.

Therefore, I should say that hot rodding is a specific, cohesive growth because it is a specific, cohesive response to a specific, cohesive political/economic/industrial situation. In this sense the mere act of modifying something to improve its performance does not suffice. Similar phenomena, like European sport specials, are separate but parallel developments: though I do not believe the separation is complete. There is enough evidence at least reasonably to conjecture that there was mutual inspiration - and more of it acting westwards than eastwards (though today the opposite might be true).

 

Dawie's detailed and thoughtful analysis and positions have, I think,
lent some worthwhile, perceptive and constructive substance to this
thread of discussion. Thanks, bro!

These two late-'30s Library of Congress shots were tracked down by RaceRon
and posted over on Dog's "Vintage Shots" thread. His comment, "In the 30s & 40s
they called 'em jalopies" is apropos to what, I think, we've agreed on in this thread.
Specifically, the posts as a whole have established that people were hopping up
old cars at least as early as the '20s. Yes, jalopies was a general catch-all term.
Some were, indeed, quicker than stock, and, truthfully, some of those rattletraps
weren't fast at all. They barely ran at all, were smokey, noisy, even borderline
unsafe, and were generally considered to be anything from amusing to a public
nuisance, depending on who was talking. Bottom line, though, they were FUN!


Before the term hotrod helped define such machines after WWII, I haven't heard
of any "jalopy clubs" or dedicated periodicals in the '20 and '30s. If homebuilding
and hop-ups could be considered a hobby or sport back then, well, I'd say it was
usually a fairly original and individual affair. When racing became popular at the
dry lakes, etc., one inventive guy with dreams of going faster than the competition
could go and try his hand, without a ton of financial backing. Racing probably
brought more focus to the budding sport/hobby than any other factor, IMO.


I guess what I'm getting at is that, IMO, the birth of what we HAMBers call hotrods
didn't spring full-fledged upon the scene. No jaw-dropping revelation there! It was
really the result of a generally informal process, spanning decades and -- in the
early years -- lacking any commonly accepted guidelines or standards. So, while
I love the era of trad hotrodding celebrated in the HAMB creed, I find the pre-WWII
formative years downright fascinating and worthy of historical notice.


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Following on a point in the previous post, I found this 1950 SCTA item a piece of real hotrodding history -- in particular the first two paragraphs. You'll note the key date of 1937 and evidence of a real and growing need for one or more governing bodies in the hobby/sport. I was a tad surprised to find written evidence of the negative "public feeling" mentioned in 'graph 1, rooted as early as the late '30s. That there was a safety outcry as early as the late '30s was an eye-opener for me; I'd honestly assumed that this was a '50s and early-'60s thing! THANKS to NovaDude for unearthing this and posting it first over on Dog's "Vintage Shots" thread!

 

For the record, this '09 HAMB thread started by B.C. HAMBer gbgh raises many stimulating ideas about how and when the actual TERM "hot rod" itself originated. "Hot Rod". What is the origin of the Term?? Though it seems to have been widely accepted by 1945, there does seem to be evidence of its use prior to the war. And in loose use, perhaps, it even popped INDEPENDENTLY in different locations, by different guys, possibly for different reasons -- but surely out west.