My kid is a high school junior and is almost never home. Work,playing guitar,girls,running around with his buddies....I WISH he was home more. I know dozens of his friends too,and almost all of them have strong interests outside the home,mostly the local heavy metal scene. A few are even gearheads. There were dorks that sat at home back then too, I'm sure. Doing whatever dorky shit computer games replaced?
Absolutely they are. Any kid that gets his hands on the best or fastest car he can afford, and makes any modifications to enhance performance are really no different than the "hoodlums" in that old clipping. Right?
When I tore down an old house I found some issues of our local newspaper from 1941. I remember flipping through some of the papers and seeing some of the stuff that constituted as news. Things like "Mrs. Washington of 1242 Indiana Ave. has returned from a two week visit of her parents in Maine." or, "John Douglas was fined $2 for illegal parking on Wednesday." The old ads were great too, like ads for a suit for $25! Of course the cars for sale were unbelievable. Model A's, '32-'40 Fords for a couple hundred dollars. Oh, if only I had a time machine. Well, a time machine that would allow me to transport cars to the future.
Wondered how long it would be before someone conected this to the Amish Cruising thread ..... Excellent!
This was my cousins 49 chopped Chevy racing a Harley in Stamford CT back in the day. These are photos of the ragtop. It was dark Caddy green. Also very quick. It is one of the cars that made me the way I am today (hot rod crazy)
Being from a very small town where everyone knew everyone, including the police all they would say is, "Is your Pop home ? They would take you home explain what was going on and leave before the beating started. When I was a kid it wasn't the cops I was worried about.
Hah, that's not my dad, but I grew up about a mile from that intersection, and he might very well have been among that group. Pasadena was a hotbed of this sort of thing back then. Photo of him in my avatar, taken in the doorway of Blair's Speed Shop on South Arroyo Parkway (in those days). Old Dad, as they called him at the age of 19, because he was already married and had a kid, worked there as a machinist after the war. He always told me he hated it when the newspapers used the term "youths" when referring to various delinquents and worse. Guess I can see why, looking at this article. This article probably came from the Pasadena Independent - Star News, as I believe it was known in those days. Street racing was routine then, filling in between trips to the dry lakes. Bruce Blair (Don's brother) was killed in a street race on Foothill Blvd in Arcadia when the roadster he was in hit an oak tree that jutted into the roadway back in those days. They would leave a large old oak standing out from the side of the road, and just build a curb around it back then to avoid cutting down the tree when the road was built. The old man went to Pasadena Junior College early in the war, when it still was part high-school and part college. He was still in high school, and they offered him credit if he would do wartime assembly work, which suited him fine. So he worked over at the Lockheed plant in Burbank assembling P-38's, climbing into the tight spots the older guys couldn't get into to rivet panels together. Spent the rest of his time doing what was mentioned in the article, and was finally given the choice of joining the military or going back to school full time, so he joined the navy. He later worked as a machinist at Tim's Precision Engines in Pasadena, and built the engine for Duffy Livingstone's Eliminator, tuning it and helping Duffy out in the pits. Left the business in 1957 when Sputnik went up and spent 34 years at JPL doing design work on the gaschromatograph-mass spectrometer that landed on Mars with Viking in 1976, among other things. Gone now, but I still have his '40 Coupe. Sorry if this is too much information, but might be of interest to you locals.
I don't know last night when i came form work i found my 18yr old working on his beater ,it was freaken weird not having to threaten his ass to get him to do it.....
Man I thought that only happened to teenagers here in my little bit of New England.Got pulled over for driving slow in a 63 1/2 Galixie 427 4 speed car!it was night time and I was lost in a rural area I didn't know,I was driving slow to be able to read street signs on unlit back road.
The Jalopy Journal
