Folks Of Interest Dirty Doug ,..... RIP (of Ed Roth fame)

Big Daddy Roth wouldn't have been Big Daddy Roth were it not for Dirty Doug! An unsung artist from the best days of rodding and customizing. RIP Doug

 

Rip

 

id like to know about him too , RIP

 

Dirt at work,...

 

Godspeed Doug.....would like to see some shots of him back in the day if anyone's got 'em....



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Good job HW.....you read my mind.

 

R.I.P Dirty Doug

 

Found this w/ a quicky search

 

Lost another one.

 

prayers and condolences sent....Cherish your time everyone

 

RIP Dirty.

 

So sad to hear this. Thanks for letting us know. God Bless!!

 

RIP Doug. I loved the old pictures of him being the clean frontman for Roth, quite the clothes horse. Godspeed....

 

Godspeed Doug, a legend of hot rodding.

 

What a great inspiration, talk about a sow's ear into a silk purse, he could do anything. That guy! RIP.

 

Well, Ed's got someone to help with the plaster mess in heaven. Somebody put up a pic of his 59-60 Cadillac. RIP Dirty Doug.

 

Rest In Peace

 

Immortalized as well in Tom Wolfe's 1963 "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby":

(Roth) has a constant sort of court attendant named Dirty Doug, a skinny little guy who blew in from out of nowhere, sort of like Ronny Camp over at Barris'. Dirty Doug has a job sweeping up in a steel mill, but what he obviously lives for is the work he does around Roth's. Roth seems to have a lot of sympathy for the Ronny Camp-Dirty Doug syndrome and keeps him around as a permanent fixture. At Roth's behest, apparently, Dirty Doug has dropped his last name, Kinney, altogether, and refers to himself as Dirty Doug - not Doug. The relationship between Roth and Dirty Doug - which is sort of Quixote and Sancho Panza, Holmes and Watson, Lone Ranger and Tonto, Raffles and Bunny - is part of the folklore of the hot-rod and custom-car kids. It even crops up in the hot-rod comic books, which are an interesting phenomenon in themselves. Dirty Doug, in this folklore, is every rejected outcast little kid in the alien netherworld, and Roth is the understanding, if rather overly pranksterish, protective giant or Robin Hood - you know, a good-bad giant, not part of the Establishment.

Dirty Doug drove up in one of his two Cadillacs one Saturday afternoon while I was at Roth's, and he had just gone through another experience of rejection. the police had hounded him out of Newport. He has two Cadillacs, he said, because one is always in the shop. Dirty Doug's cars, like most customizers' are always in the process of becoming. The streaks of "primer" paint on the Cadillac he was driving at the time had led to his rejection in Newport. He had driven to Newport for the weekend. "All the cops have to do is see paint like that and already you're 'one of those hot-rodders,'" he said. "They practically followed me down the street and gave me a ticket every twenty-five feet. I was going to stay the whole weekend, but I came on back."

At custom-car shows, kids are always asking Roth, "Where's Dirty Doug?" and if Dirty Doug couldn't make it for some reason, Roth will recruit any kid around who knows the pitch and install him as Dirty Doug, just to keep the fans happy.

Thus Roth protects the image of Dirty Doug even when the guy's not around, and I think it becomes a very important piece of mythology. The thing is, Roth is not buying the act of the National Hot Rod Association, which for its own reasons, not necessarily the kids' reasons, is trying to assimilate the hot-rod ethos into conventional America. It wants to make all the kids look like candidates for the Peace Corps or something.

 

Rip d.d

 

I am sad to hear this. Doug is/was a legendary figure. Tom Wolfe knew this forty years ago!

 

just found out he died last week , he was my mother in laws first husband ,my sister in law did not find out untill last week

 

Memorial for Dirty Doug
NHRA Motorsports Museum
June 12, 2011, 2:00p.m.

 

I just returned from the memorial service. There were only twenty people there. I had expected hundreds and a parking lot full of H.A.M.B.-type cars and maybe even the appearance of the restored Orbitron. Robert Williams spoke for about five minutes as did a couple of others whom I didn't get the names of.

Other than the name "Dirty Doug" I knew nothing of him other than he had assisted Ed "Big Daddy" Roth in the '60s. Goober's post above from the Wolfe book was very helpful. I figured that people would have made today's event a big deal. Surely, there must be hundreds of people within fifty-or-so miles of Pomona who could have attended.

 

Bummer, A lot of that crowd is gone. R.I.P..

 

Like I would tell widows or widowers, "It's not the quantity of the people who show up, it's the quality of those who show up."

 

Much like most of us, we choose our friends and I hope the close ones were there to send him off. RIP DD.