Who cruised Van Nuys Bl in the 70's?

I remember "Genios" in Burbank. not sure if it is spelled correct but it was great food.

 

I first went to Van Nuys blvd in about 1974 at 14 years old with my buddy Terry Cox in his 65 Impala. After that ,I was hooked. As soon as I had a car of my own(1956 VW) I was down there 3 nights a week. Lots of street racing on Raymer, Oxnard and Kester, Woodman and Saticoy,Devonshire and Arleta, San Fernando Rd.etc. I definitely beat up on a alot of cars with my VW's over the years. I met a lot of people down there and quite a few I am still tight with. I also had a shop that did mainly VW'S (Tim's VW Service) so some of you may remember me. I cruised until they closed it for good and I feel bad for the younger people that don't know what a cruise is without a lawnchair! What's up Groucho?

 

I cruised from 77 till they closed it. maroon 68 GTX,70 Roadrunner,55 oval rag Vw. Groucho do you remember that big tire yellow vega Pat raced on glenoaks? I have to say that was the fastest car out there at that time. Vw tim had a race dune buggy

 

Hey Tim,

I was into the VW scene too, did my share of street racing in my '57 and later in a '66 back in '77 & '78.

Cruised my black '69 Squareback with the Buick V6 in it on Van Nuys a few times just before they closed it.

What's up?

Bart

 

nina,s sandwich north side of burbank. ate there all the time when i worked at Keyes Mazda

 

Yeah, Nina's! Great sandwiches. I'd go there a lot with Jim and Jeff Lirones when they worked at a foreign car place on the blvd (Holiday Motors I think)

If it was the one with radiused rear wells, that was Mikey Deitch's with my unit on it, then I owned it, then I sold it to Bottle Bob. Pat who?

What's going on? Refresh my memory on who you are.

 

Pat Mcmahon off white duster with a black top. He worked at a shop at moorpark & cold water cyn. The guy with the vega worked at a gas station laurel cyn & moorpark? Did that Vega ever race that green & white 55 with side pipes I think it was from L A all the guys with the 55 would wear service center jackets. Bottle Bob race him at woodley & roscoe

 

Iused to hang out with Pat & at west castle on the blvd. I also know Eddie from Pdq I was the service manager at Galpin Mazda before I moved from L A. Now here in OKC with 5 inches of snow. I'm sure you know Lee Baltzell

 

The first time I went to boa my brother took me with his friend dave in a 67 gtx we pulled in and scewie louie had his red white and blue roadrunner on a trailer. anyone remember Lonie Larson 64 plymouth?

 

I remember Lonnie's black 71(?) Duster. Small block w/hidden unit. A few of us went to L.A. to race. Lonnie won, but spun a bearing (rod knock). Jim Branham was driving my big block Elcamino, towing Lonnie home with a very short rope. It's about 6 AM and I'm sleeping while Jim drives. I wake up to horns honking violently, to realize it's Lonnie, flipping out because Jim's going a HUNDRED MPH! Jim says, fuck him, I'm fucking tired and wanna get home. We pull off the 405 @ Roscoe. Lonnie jumps out of the car, cuts the rope as he shouts, fuck you mutherfuckers and shoots down Roscoe, knocking away. God that was FUNNY

 

Yeah that duster ran good. I saw him race that white vega from glendale. He gave that vega 2 car and was by him before 2nd gear,but lost when the vega squeezed at the last minute. big argument after the race Lonnie said vega was not supose to squeeze. Anyway its cool to bring back these cool old stories.

 

That from a guy (Lonnie) with hidden nitrous

 

It's only illegal or cheating when your caught.

 

I've been reading through this thread from the begining and it is great. people keep refering to the wheelie van. If your talking about the blue or puple dodge a100 it had a lightning bolt painted on the side. It was a blown 440. the guy lived in N H all his cars were painted the same by him. he ended up chopping and channeling it. they would never let him run it at the track they said it was unsafe. He sold it in 97/98 after his dad passed.

 

OMG! Is Scimo still alive? He's been out of the loop so long I thought he passed on. He striped a couple of my cars back in the days. In 1981, I had moved to the SF Bay Area and bought a new car. I actually drove it all the way down here (375 miles) to have him pinstripe it. He did another of my cars in 2004. He's THAT GOOD! I'm glad to hear he's still around. I'll have to call him up.
Thanx!

 

I was there! PK

 

He did run it at LACR a few times. One of the issues was a concern for fire if I remember correctly. Something to do with the engine cover or lack of one.

 

That FUCK almost wrecked me on Roxford yrs ago, and did something VERY "wrong" to a female friend of mine years ago. I'd be deeply in your debt to NEVER mention that piece of SHIT ever again

 

Okee Dokee... Never knew him. Just saw the van

 

Sorry did'nt know that.

 

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Cruising returns to LA's historic Van Nuys Blvd.
JOHN ROGERS
From Associated Press
May 29, 2010 7:41 PM EDT
LOS ANGELES (AP) &#8212; As tricked-out old cars rumbled past on Van Nuys Boulevard, Reid Stolz still had trouble believing what he'd done.
This was not just any crowded six-lane urban thoroughfare but the storied street immortalized in the 1970s film "Van Nuys Blvd." and in folk tales as the place where cruising may have begun.
But much has changed here in the land of cars since then. The cruisers left long ago, driven away by police. In the years since, they and their gas-guzzling cars were replaced by the big worries of global warming and $3-a-gallon gasoline.
<SCRIPT>document.write('<iframe style="float:right;margin-left:5px" src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/news.earthlink.dart/news_300x250_top;sz=300x250;a=0;b=0;c=0;d=0;e=0;f=0;g=0;z=0;ptile=5;ord='+rand+'?" width="300" height="250" frameborder="no" border="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>');</SCRIPT><IFRAME style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px" height=250 marginHeight=0 border=0 src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/news.earthlink.dart/news_300x250_top;sz=300x250;a=0;b=0;c=0;d=0;e=0;f=0;g=0;z=0;ptile=5;ord=84257748?" frameBorder=no width=300 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME>Today, just as the decades-old American love affair with cruising seemed to be ebbing, the 52-year-old mechanic is all but single-handedly bringing it back to Van Nuys, giving thousands of car lovers a place again to transform it into a rolling ode to the 20th century.
"That first night, there were about 600," Stolz says as he leans back on the hood of his 1972 candy-apple red Corvette. "Then it just grew."
On this night, there's a little 1923 Ford T-bucket replica here, a hulking 1969 Camaro with its thundering V-8 engine there, and any number of 1970s Pontiac muscle cars. As the first anniversary of the return of cruising approaches, thousands sometimes show up on the second Wednesday of every month.
So far, however, they haven't brought with them a return of the huge traffic jams, drunken fights and other problems that led police to shut down cruising on Van Nuys in the 1980s.
Instead, as the sun goes down, cruisers rumble peacefully onto the historic if slightly ugly urban blacktop that cuts through the heart of the San Fernando Valley, looking to meet a fellow cruiser at a stop light and earn a smile and a thumbs up.
And they do it in seemingly every model of American car to roll off a 20th century assembly line.
"It's kind of like bringing a field of dreams on fuel to the public, a big line of cars that are actually moving instead of just sitting still," marveled Doug Auzine as he prepared to launch his 1955 Chevy Rocket into the parade from a restaurant parking lot.
Soon that old stationwagon-turned-dragster would join such other moving museum pieces as little deuce coupes, Ford flatheads, historic Model Bs and restored 1957 Chevys busy traversing a two-mile stretch of the street dotted with car dealerships, modest restaurants and small businesses.
Then they would all turn around and do it again.
Rikki Kirchner paused momentarily from buffing her mint-condition, pearl white 1970 Chevelle Malibu to wave at a middle-aged man rumbling by in a restored 1964 Chevrolet Impala. "That guy, he went to my high school, and he cruised back then. In that car," she says.
That was in 1979, the year a film called "Van Nuys Blvd." hit theaters and showed off the avenue in all its exhaust-fume glory, as it told the fictional story of a small-town boy coming to the big city to cruise "the street where it all began."
But just a couple years after that film left theaters, the cruisers left Van Nuys. They were driven out by police who had become increasingly fed up with streets gridlocked by loud, exhaust-belching cars driven by people who parked just long enough to pack restaurants and order little more than sodas.
After police began writing tickets for every minor infraction imaginable, cruisers got the message and drove away.
Stolz, who practically lived on the boulevard during those years, believes the police action was probably warranted, the crowds and the trouble they caused having gotten out of hand.
So he worried about what he'd started when he received hundreds of responses to a half-joking message he'd posted on the Internet last June announcing the Van Nuys Cruising Association's return to the streets.
For one thing, there was no such group, so Stolz quickly formed one and had T-shirts made up.
Then he notified the neighborhood what was coming and put out a list of ground rules: No alcohol, drugs or weapons, no drag-racing and no engines with open headers (an exhaust system alteration that can improve performance but also creates an earsplitting racket when the engine is revved).
To his relief, the thousands showing up pretty much follow the rules.
"Every now and then we'll get a loud-party call" or a complaint of a jammed parking lot, said Officer Anthony Cabunoc, senior lead police officer for the area. "But that's about it."
Stolz, who has since stepped aside as the event's organizer, says he expected all of his old cruiser buddies to show up. What caught him by surprise was the whole new generation of cruisers who had been looking for a place to go.
Gabriel Stasilli, 25, shows up in his 1969 Camaro Z-10, a replica of that year's Indianapolis 500 pace car. He thinks he knows why it was a hit in the old days: "the freedom, the camaraderie, people shooting the breeze, hanging out, grabbing burgers, just good old fashioned American fun."
Cruising actually began spontaneously in cities across the country in the years immediately after World War II, says Denise Sandoval, a professor of Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge, whose doctoral dissertation was on lowrider culture.
"The interesting thing is that it was interracial, intergenerational, even intergender," she says, adding the combination of postwar prosperity and cheap used cars made it a pastime available to anyone with a driver's license.
<SCRIPT>document.write('<iframe style="float:right;margin-left:5px" src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/news.earthlink.dart/news_300x250_bottom;sz=300x250;a=0;b=0;c=0;d=0;e=0;f=0;g=0;z=0;ptile=5;ord='+rand+'?" width="300" height="250" frameborder="no" border="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>');</SCRIPT><IFRAME style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px" height=250 marginHeight=0 border=0 src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/news.earthlink.dart/news_300x250_bottom;sz=300x250;a=0;b=0;c=0;d=0;e=0;f=0;g=0;z=0;ptile=5;ord=84257748?" frameBorder=no width=300 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME>No one seems to know why Van Nuys Boulevard became a focal point, although being close to Hollywood probably didn't hurt.
Nor did having three lanes in each direction, a Bob's Big Boy drive-in restaurant and a General Motors plant (both now closed), says Leslie Kendall, curator of Los Angeles' Petersen Automotive Museum.
As police chased cruisers off the streets around the country, the pastime often has been replaced by car shows, says Sandoval, with car clubs all over the country holding exhibitions some place just about every weekend.
But that's not the same as driving up and down the street, showing off your ride to the guy in the next car, says Stasilli and other serious cruisers.
Which is why, Stolz believes, that cruising will stay on Van Nuys Boulevard forever.
Then he adds with a smile, "Or at least until they tell us to go away again."

 

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Cruising returns to LA's historic Van Nuys Blvd.
JOHN ROGERS
From Associated Press
May 29, 2010 7:41 PM EDT
LOS ANGELES (AP) — As tricked-out old cars rumbled past on Van Nuys Boulevard, Reid Stolz still had trouble believing what he'd done.
This was not just any crowded six-lane urban thoroughfare but the storied street immortalized in the 1970s film "Van Nuys Blvd." and in folk tales as the place where cruising may have begun.
But much has changed here in the land of cars since then. The cruisers left long ago, driven away by police. In the years since, they and their gas-guzzling cars were replaced by the big worries of global warming and $3-a-gallon gasoline.
<SCRIPT>document.write('<iframe style="float:right;margin-left:5px" src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/news.earthlink.dart/news_300x250_top;sz=300x250;a=0;b=0;c=0;d=0;e=0;f=0;g=0;z=0;ptile=5;ord='+rand+'?" width="300" height="250" frameborder="no" border="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>');</SCRIPT><IFRAME style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px" height=250 marginHeight=0 border=0 src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/news.earthlink.dart/news_300x250_top;sz=300x250;a=0;b=0;c=0;d=0;e=0;f=0;g=0;z=0;ptile=5;ord=84257748?" frameBorder=no width=300 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME>Today, just as the decades-old American love affair with cruising seemed to be ebbing, the 52-year-old mechanic is all but single-handedly bringing it back to Van Nuys, giving thousands of car lovers a place again to transform it into a rolling ode to the 20th century.
"That first night, there were about 600," Stolz says as he leans back on the hood of his 1972 candy-apple red Corvette. "Then it just grew."
On this night, there's a little 1923 Ford T-bucket replica here, a hulking 1969 Camaro with its thundering V-8 engine there, and any number of 1970s Pontiac muscle cars. As the first anniversary of the return of cruising approaches, thousands sometimes show up on the second Wednesday of every month.
So far, however, they haven't brought with them a return of the huge traffic jams, drunken fights and other problems that led police to shut down cruising on Van Nuys in the 1980s.
Instead, as the sun goes down, cruisers rumble peacefully onto the historic if slightly ugly urban blacktop that cuts through the heart of the San Fernando Valley, looking to meet a fellow cruiser at a stop light and earn a smile and a thumbs up.
And they do it in seemingly every model of American car to roll off a 20th century assembly line.
"It's kind of like bringing a field of dreams on fuel to the public, a big line of cars that are actually moving instead of just sitting still," marveled Doug Auzine as he prepared to launch his 1955 Chevy Rocket into the parade from a restaurant parking lot.
Soon that old stationwagon-turned-dragster would join such other moving museum pieces as little deuce coupes, Ford flatheads, historic Model Bs and restored 1957 Chevys busy traversing a two-mile stretch of the street dotted with car dealerships, modest restaurants and small businesses.
Then they would all turn around and do it again.
Rikki Kirchner paused momentarily from buffing her mint-condition, pearl white 1970 Chevelle Malibu to wave at a middle-aged man rumbling by in a restored 1964 Chevrolet Impala. "That guy, he went to my high school, and he cruised back then. In that car," she says.
That was in 1979, the year a film called "Van Nuys Blvd." hit theaters and showed off the avenue in all its exhaust-fume glory, as it told the fictional story of a small-town boy coming to the big city to cruise "the street where it all began."
But just a couple years after that film left theaters, the cruisers left Van Nuys. They were driven out by police who had become increasingly fed up with streets gridlocked by loud, exhaust-belching cars driven by people who parked just long enough to pack restaurants and order little more than sodas.
After police began writing tickets for every minor infraction imaginable, cruisers got the message and drove away.
Stolz, who practically lived on the boulevard during those years, believes the police action was probably warranted, the crowds and the trouble they caused having gotten out of hand.
So he worried about what he'd started when he received hundreds of responses to a half-joking message he'd posted on the Internet last June announcing the Van Nuys Cruising Association's return to the streets.
For one thing, there was no such group, so Stolz quickly formed one and had T-shirts made up.
Then he notified the neighborhood what was coming and put out a list of ground rules: No alcohol, drugs or weapons, no drag-racing and no engines with open headers (an exhaust system alteration that can improve performance but also creates an earsplitting racket when the engine is revved).
To his relief, the thousands showing up pretty much follow the rules.
"Every now and then we'll get a loud-party call" or a complaint of a jammed parking lot, said Officer Anthony Cabunoc, senior lead police officer for the area. "But that's about it."
Stolz, who has since stepped aside as the event's organizer, says he expected all of his old cruiser buddies to show up. What caught him by surprise was the whole new generation of cruisers who had been looking for a place to go.
Gabriel Stasilli, 25, shows up in his 1969 Camaro Z-10, a replica of that year's Indianapolis 500 pace car. He thinks he knows why it was a hit in the old days: "the freedom, the camaraderie, people shooting the breeze, hanging out, grabbing burgers, just good old fashioned American fun."
Cruising actually began spontaneously in cities across the country in the years immediately after World War II, says Denise Sandoval, a professor of Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge, whose doctoral dissertation was on lowrider culture.
"The interesting thing is that it was interracial, intergenerational, even intergender," she says, adding the combination of postwar prosperity and cheap used cars made it a pastime available to anyone with a driver's license.
<SCRIPT>document.write('<iframe style="float:right;margin-left:5px" src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/news.earthlink.dart/news_300x250_bottom;sz=300x250;a=0;b=0;c=0;d=0;e=0;f=0;g=0;z=0;ptile=5;ord='+rand+'?" width="300" height="250" frameborder="no" border="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>');</SCRIPT><IFRAME style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px" height=250 marginHeight=0 border=0 src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/news.earthlink.dart/news_300x250_bottom;sz=300x250;a=0;b=0;c=0;d=0;e=0;f=0;g=0;z=0;ptile=5;ord=84257748?" frameBorder=no width=300 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME>No one seems to know why Van Nuys Boulevard became a focal point, although being close to Hollywood probably didn't hurt.
Nor did having three lanes in each direction, a Bob's Big Boy drive-in restaurant and a General Motors plant (both now closed), says Leslie Kendall, curator of Los Angeles' Petersen Automotive Museum.
As police chased cruisers off the streets around the country, the pastime often has been replaced by car shows, says Sandoval, with car clubs all over the country holding exhibitions some place just about every weekend.
But that's not the same as driving up and down the street, showing off your ride to the guy in the next car, says Stasilli and other serious cruisers.
Which is why, Stolz believes, that cruising will stay on Van Nuys Boulevard forever.
Then he adds with a smile, "Or at least until they tell us to go away again."

 

I started cruised Van Nuys Blvd June 1969.
I just bought my 63 Grand Prix. Took it to a muffler shop & had the spring torched. Yeah Bad Lowrider (LOL). After a yr of that I got a 32 3 window Ford. Now I was really bad ass. Girls were jumping off the curb for a ride. The 32 was purple with a 289 & big heavy chrome chain for traction bars (Just for looks)

Next ride was a 1967 Shelby Gt 500. 428, 2-4's auto trans. I carried a Oklahoma Credit Card with me just in case I needed gas.

Then I got a 1969 Mustang Mach 1 Super CJ 428 & 4 speed. Now I was ready for the street racing (I thought) I remember meeting at BOA then we would find a place to race. This guy had a Dart or maybe it was a Duster, anyway he had big meats on the back. He asked if I wanted to race for $20, I said sure thinking I had a bad ass car. Well we went off, my tires went up in smoke thru 3 rd gear & he blew my doors off. Ok one more time to get my money back, yep it happened again. Now I was out $40. So I said lets do it again double or nothing but from a rolling 30. He agreed this time he didn't have a chance. The big block Mustang made my money back.

So I cruised from June 1969 thru 1973. Good old days.

 

Yep. I was there. 68 Mustang GT Fasback. 500HP They called me PK

 

Yeah I did. I think it was the only shop that would do that.

 

Reading your bio, you & I have done some of the same things. I took a Datsun pickup & put in a 283 Chevy engine with the old 4 speed hydro matic. then a 302 in a Ford Currier. You were at Van Nuys Blvd with a 68 Mustang Gt & I was there in a 67 Shelby. I now own a 56 F100 & so do you.

Small world.

 

Ah, so you were also one of the guys from behind BoA? Now, look up our street racing thread

 

I remember some of the pussy rodders back then Bitching about NOS. Only the big boys ran that stuff. The Difference Between Men & Boys Is The Price Of There Toys.

Correct me if I'm wrong. I seem to remember a Broad driving a Vette with writing on the back that said "If you can beat me you can eat me. I think the vette was yellow.

 

I remember that saying on the back of a Chevelle.

 

Bet that saying was on the back of alot of rides.