Hot Rods IMAGES OF "THE GOOD OLD DAYS"- OUR MISSPENT YOUTH

My misspent youth...early '70s. Beer drinking, pot smoking long haired hippy with a loud, obnoxious V8 Chevy coupe. I pretty much "checked all the boxes" for the local cops

 

I should point out that, most of my adulthood has been equally misspent

 

Hello,

By this time, I was getting pretty good at using my dad's movie camera to record everything. We did not have a small hand held still camera, so we had to use these movies for our family photos. The official family photos came when our dad broke out his huge, 4x5 large format camera. I had already shot several reels worth of drag racing at Lions Dragstrip. I had also started the cut and edit portion of movie making. The end product for my efforts was to make some family films for my dad, so I felt a little brash doing the home filming thing.

It just can’t be during our times as teenagers that were the good old days. This old 1959 photo of 4 ladies going out for a nice lunch and shopping in a stick shift Chevy 4 door sedan is classic. (skirts and all…pun intended)

They even waved and smiled at a teenager with a movie camera standing on the street. Filming my mom and her friends going out for a "ladies day" was different, but fun. As you can see, the big blue 57 Buick is in the driveway, so my dad was home.
1959 4 ladies out for a spin...

The heck with being chased by a neighborhood guy in his new 1959 Impala… they were out for a day of fun and being together. What is more typical 1959, than women out for an afternoon lunch and shopping in a 4 door Chevy sedan?

Jnaki

That 4 door Chevy sedan was where, as a little kid, I practiced shifting the column shifter and using the clutch pedal in our cousin’s house driveway. As I grew up, things I learned in that 4 door Chevy was applied to any stick shift car. Back then, we started young and they were the good old days...

 

A picture is worth a thousand words.... hippy daze me on left, age 16 with my partners in grime :

 

That looks too familiar....

 

High school girlfriend & my '48 Chevy
Prom night...it appears we were already on our way to getting "wasted" by picture time

 

Hello,

After all of these years being with my brother, I am now amazed at this old age time period that he was an amazing teenager. I am watching a TV show about starting a race car from scratch and the prep work it took to get things ready for the build. My wife asks if we did that on our 1940 Willys C/Gas coupe. That was a lot of prep work. As I have mentioned before, the whole 1940 Willys was in pristine shape. Everything we wanted to unbolt and remove, came right off and nothing was attacked by the welding cutter torch. 15 turns with the ratchet and socket and most everything came right off.

In the TV show, the person begins to cut and remove, reshape parts of the frame and proceeds to get everything off that needs to be modified. We did cut the firewall off, remove the whole front end and rebuilt the suspension. We refinished the frame as far back as we could, as there was no need to remove the cab from the frame. It was amazing that we knew what to do. Actually, my brother had all of these plans in his head and on a list he created.

I was the muscle, the tear down person and assembly person. He was the master planner and technique handler. Then, at some point, he just said to install the traction bars, the radiator, the rear shocks, etc. among other items, without any over the shoulder monitoring. That was a great starting point for all thing learned and for that point in time. His confidence grew and he shoved it off on me.
teenagers at Lions Dragstrip

Where did he get all of the information on how to tear down an old car, set it up for a modification and install all new running gear? He did read a lot of tech articles in Hot Rod and other magazines, but he must have had some ingrained talent and vision for the ideas that he had and implemented. He would start the rebuild of the Chevy SBC, show me how to do the process and lay out some of the parts in succession for the install.

Then he did one or two parts and left the rest up to me to finish and torque down everything. He had it planned out. I was learning on the go. It was too difficult to write down what he did and planned, but it just stuck in my own brain.
Two brothers

So, for a 17 year old kid, he was very knowledgeable about all things automotive and racing. He was a good listener and did a lot of one on one talks with Joe Reath at Reath Automotive. Those sessions were invaluable and the ideas from Reath Auto were the first things he did when he came back to work on the Willys or SBC motor. As his talent and bravado grew, he was getting confidence to race the 671 SBC Willys against some of the toughest competition on the West Coast or USA.

Doug Cook, K.S. Pittman, Junior Thompson, Al Hirshfield, etc to name a few class competitors that were the trophy winners in the Gas Coupe Classes. Our foray into B/Gas was not as spectacular as the revamped 671 SBC powered Willys in the C/Gas class. We were a few ticks off of the E.T. national record. Despite the level of competition, we pushed on during our times at Lions Dragstrip and So Cal hot rod building.

Jnaki



As I have said before, Thank you, James, for the intense teachings and motivation to be the best hot rod/drag racer that I could be, while growing up a teenager in a world of experts. My brother turned his normal teenage life into an intense hot rod/drag racing world and met the challenges along the way. My youth was spent listening to my older brother’s words of wisdom and experiences.

Then that laid the groundwork for the “later on in life” challenges and lifestyle that required many lists and preparation. The initial teenage information gathered in hot rods and drag racing helped to have confidence in doing just about anything with stability and structure. No more “misspent youth…”


1958 Impala=rewards