Art & Inspiration Still have your first " hotrod" magazine?!

Greetings fellow HAMBers!...so my wife had me " straightening up " my junk/great stuff and I found the first " hotrod" magazine I ever bought....I forget where I laid a wrench 3 seconds ago but I remember well being drawn to this magazine in the rack at " Jims delicatessen "at the age of nine ....So how many of you guys still have the one that first caught your eye?

 

sure do. July 1973....

 

Well, I was trying to upload a picture but my Hughes net is slow because of low cloud cover....

 

Custom Rodder Aug 1961.. 25 cents purchased at Roland Smith general store. Cover car was a 32 silver vickie.

 

Not at home now, but it was Speed and Custom in 1962, bought at Woodsons grocery store when I was 9. I only bought little books at first, cause they were cheaper, and most were East Coast mags, explaining my outlook on the world today. Went to the store with my dad all the time, and if I didn't have a quarter, sometimes I could talk him into buying one for me. Since by the age of 9, I was well on my way to being a 4 eyed dork fuckup, I guess he thought those little car mags were a harmless diversion, and they at least had pictures. By that age, I was reading high school level stuff, and above, and probably freaked my dad out by what I was bringing home from the library, after getting permission from the librarians to check out anything I wanted.
Maybe Dad thought I'd grow a set of balls if I read car mags. Surprised he didn't slip Playboys into my book bags.
He didn't know I was doomed from an early age.
Now the Zap comics I snuck home when I was about 15 or 16 were a different matter. My parents confiscated every damn one they found.

 

First one I got was March '56 Rodding & Re-styling, found at the dump. First one I bought was August '57 R&R, & it's still on the shelf. I've collected car mags for well over 60 years now.

 

My first was the September 1962 Car Craft.....unfortunately gone a long, long time ago......

 

My buddy had a hole under the gas pedal in his shoebox ford and asked me what he should do about it. I think he was looking for someone to tell him that it would be ok to hack it instead of cutting back to clean steel and welding in a patch.

“Do you ever read ‘hot rod’ magazine?” I asked.

“Sure” he said, “I have a stack of em in the bathroom- I know you do too. Got a good how to article in there?”

“Well,” I said, “They didn’t cheap out on paper, especially on the covers. If you lift up that floor mat and spread out a few issues it’ll take the better part of a year before you need to replace em!”

haha I was sorta kidding but my old dodge actually had that goin’ on for a while before I did the right thing. His shoebox got sold off years ago but for all I know the whole driver’s floor might be made of penthouse and hotrod by now!

 

Starting as a 13 yr. old I bought magazines and had stacks of them I had little books galore and one day I decided I had too many and thought I would give them to my girlfriends little brother to get him interested in rods. Did not work the little shit took them to the Azusa Swap Meet and sold everyone. I wish I was smart enought to have kept them..He has not changed at all the old shit, we don't speak.

 

The first hot rod magazines I got was a bonanza! I was 6 years old in 1957 and my neighbor was retired and collected scrap paper for the church. Once a month he made his rounds to several people that saved their papers and magazines for him, sometimes he would ask me if I wanted to help him and he paid me a quarter and bought me a hot dog and root beer at the A&W. One Saturday when I was helping him we stopped at a new place and as we were loading the stuff there was two boxes full of hot rod magazines dated from about 1950-1955. One box had the full sizes, mostly Hot Rod and the other was full of little books of all titles. He saw my eyes light up and ask me if I would like those magazines instead of my quarter! I was hooked, from then on every time we would go to the store I would talk my Mom or Dad into buying me a new hot rod magazine. I still have about every one I ever had, the top of my garage is full, two big closets in the house are full and my wife of 50 years is starting to get a little irritated to say the least. I have tried to give my son and grandsons some of them but they are more interested in newer cars, motor cycles and 4X4 trucks. Lucky for me(or my wife) I have cut down to only about four new ones a month now days and any thing newer than about 2000 I donate to local retirement centers.
P.S. Yes I still dig out a box of the oldies and re-read every now and then

 

Yes I do!

January 1962



I never dreamed the guy on the cover would turn out to be a fellow hamber Dean Lowe and a man I have never met but consider him a friend, it is this image that made that 12 year old kid say to himself. " One of these days I'm going to build a hot rod pickup" and I did. HRP

 

August 1953 Hot Rod and every one since for 65 years until last fall.

 

The first one that I bought myself was then August 1970 issue because it has Tom McEwen’s Mongoose funny car on the cover, pretty cool for an 8 yr old at the time.


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I bought my first Hot Rod Magazine when I was 12 years old, shortly after my Dad died in 1964. To this day I'm still a bit surprised that Mom let me buy it when we were at the grocery store! I still have it stored with about 10 years or more of Hot Rod Magazines.

The cover and feature article was Don Garlits' speed secrets. He had just broke the 200 MPH barrier or broke into the 6's, I forget which it was, but I guess I could go find it and report back, if I must.

The thing I remember was a large photo of his car completely disassembled, and spread out. The article was very thorough and I'll have to admit I probably didn't have a clue what half of the stuff was that they described in detail. Fast forward 55 years and I'm still crazy about cars and most forms of racing.

Life is good!

Lynn

 

Just out of high school I had a girlfriend that asked me for my hotrod magazines. I asked her why she wanted them and she said don't worry she was going to do something with them for me and promised me she wouldn't hurt them. I said ok then. When she brought them back to me, she had made a paper machete waste basket out of them. Needless to say she is long gone !

 

Sure do. May 1961 Rod & Custom magazine.

 

Yep! March 1959. Dad bought it for me when I was reading it at McKay's Market. It was my 10th birthday. Just last month I finished sorting the last 30 years and put them in slip covers. The first 40 years are mostly in binders.
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Not the first magazine I ever bought...but one I did save from my childhood, April 1963...because my picture is in it.

A "coke bottle bottom" bespeckeled hotrodjack at the Revell Model booth, Winternationals Car Show in SoCal.

 

Nope--had em all-gave em all away-some to old folks homes-boxes full sent to the troops. Only kept a few that had our cars in them. Still have a few of the little books.

 

It was that 1963 issue of Rod & Custom with Roth's Mysterion on the cover, however the first one I really wanted was the one with Gene Winfield's Solar Scene but I thought I had to be grown up to buy those things.

 

It was a Mopar Collectors Guide with a girl in a French maid outfit on the cover. Not sure of year or month but read it thoroughly repeatedly when I was 15 years old. Still have it in the short stack of the ones I consider keepers.

 

My first one was the August 1969 issue of HOT ROD magazine, was 10 years old about to turn 11 . The lady at the checkout cash register complimented me for getting a magazine that i could learn from. Ended up getting a subscription the following Christmas starting with the January 1970 issue and am still getting it today .

 

No, no. I got my first magazine, a green page HOT ROD from my barber
at age seven. I wanted to keep looking at it and my old man wanted to
split. The barber said "Take it, kid, it's yours". In my teen years my parents
decided (for me) that I didn't need three quarters of the things I had.

 

Still got mine in the garage someplace, ''Australian Hot Rodding Review''..December issue, 1974. I was 15. JW

 

Hey Danny, I have that one too!

 

July 1965 Car Craft purchased from a local Red and White grocery store. Little did I know that this 50 cent expenditure would cost me untold thousands of dollars and consume the rest of my life.

 

Yessir! Not home right now but a 1979 issue of Street Rodder. Has a multicolored T bucket on cover. Pretty sure I stole it from my older brothers friend when they were over my house. I was 13. . . .

 

December 1955 Rod And Custom, which I continued subscribing to the end, both times.

 

hard to believe I found it that quick, april 1965 Hot Rod. SS