Building A Hot Rod… 1949

Back in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, I had a habit of calling Wally Parks and pestering him with questions regarding the publishing industry, his knowledge of it, and his predictions for it. These conversations would start friendly enough, but would almost always end with me in a fetal position and Wally on top of soapbox – exasperated… and annoyed at the stupid teenager with the endless list of questions on the other end of the line. I took meticulous notes of those conversations and every now and then, I like to go back and look at them.

This morning while I looking for something else, I found notes from my conversation with Wally dated November 3, 2002. At the time, the HAMB was littered with builds based on the car that Vern Tardel built (and Mike Bishop covered) in the book titled, “How To Build A Traditional Ford Hot Rod.” Of course, that book is now legendary and remains one of the most influential books of the traditional renaissance. Back in 2002, I must have asked what Wally thought of it. In my notes, under that heading I wrote:

“See Hot Rod Magazine. Dec., 1948 through Feb., 1949 – Walt Woron.”

Honestly I don’t ever remember looking up those issues and out of curiosity, I did so this morning. The December, 1948 issue featured an article by Walter A. Woron that was essentially a glossary to early hot rodding – frankly, nothing all that interesting or ground breaking. The following two months, however, featured the basics of building a hot rod chassis accompanied with some really simple, but absolutely gorgeous illustrations by Bob Hoeppner.

Now, this isn’t something you can build a hot rod from like you could with the really detailed account given later by Tardel/Bishop, but it is a really fun read. Give it a go… You’ll be glad ya did.

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