Lately Ive been looking at alot of my dads old custom mags for the 50's and 60's and have been wondering what happpened to all those custom cars??? did they all get crushed or parted out?? an Im talking the Watson painted cars Barris cars Hines cars ect and not just the customs either the hot rods ad even the late 60's early 70's lowriders!!
I dunno if I'm a gonna give ya the answer ya want er not . A good many of the old Customs have been restored and shown . I will agree, I personally know of an old Barris Toronado that landed up in a Houston yard back in the 70's . Still, a lot of the Alaxander Brothers cars have been resurrected along with Daryl Star Bird's automobiles . I wish I could say the same of the Futuresta . It was supposedly wrecked beyond repair . The Shillouette was stolen . Still, I see a few of the oldies show up here an there ............ scrubba
When older style customs went out of favor many were eventually scrapped. Same when they were involved in traffic accidents. Also when some owner tried...and failed...to modify an existing custom the last trip was to the scrapper or junkyard. Many are likely still sitting in garages, sheds, barns, rental units waiting to be remembered and discovered. Perhaps the Toronado mentioned above was the Jeffries, not Barris, built Olds built for Houston oil magnate Bill Mecum? This car, slightly damamged in the rear, was last seen in the outside lot of a storage facility in the late 70s-early 80s off of I-10 on Shepherd Drive in Houston. At the time it was owned by a Mexican national from Monterrey who had ceased paying the storage bills. A friend of mine tried to buy the car but the owner never responded to his letters. The chrome wheels were stolen, the lift-up roof panels pried open, windows broken, and interior savaged by the pocal scum...then the car disappeared from the lot. Where is it?
Agree that many were scrapped. Many customs, it seems to me, did not age well due to both quality of bodywork and fleeting design trends.
1) Some were "freshened up" after a few years and became a different car. Some were reworked 2 or 3 times. 2) Some got wrecked and scrapped. 3) Some got sold, run into the ground, or wrecked, and scrapped. 4) Some were stripped for parts (especially engine). 5) A few survive. They were not history or art back then. Just old cars. Most suffered the fate of all old cars. In fact, a second hand hot rod or custom car could be harder to sell and worth less money than a stocker. Custom cars and hot rods usually got driven hard and often. Even show cars that were never driven, suffered a lot of damage from being shoved around and hauled around, and getting parts stolen off them. They looked pretty worn out after 2 or 3 years on the show circuit. And they were old hat, out of fashion, and everybody had seen them. So a show car that had near zero miles could be worn out.
My perspective having been there the cool car thing changed very quickly in the 50s and early sixties. Customs went out of "fashion" almost overnight when Detroit started the horsepower wars. Everybody wanted the drag car look. Every town had some mild customs that all of a sudden became almost worthless. Many were sold so cheap they were just somebodies transrortation. As someone else noted many were just considered parts cars. I remember several that were in the process of being built that were abandoned almost overnight as that style became unkool. Lots of the really big name cars were put in garages to resurface but an awful lot of very cool old cars just slipped away. I don't even want to talk about what happened to my 57 Ford hardtop with the rolled pan and cool tailights!
Search here or google Arthur Bentas Raven...great story and it was hidden in a chicken house right under our noses.
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