Folks Of Interest Old Timer's

Growing up I always enjoyed sitting back talking with the old timers who had been there before, listening to their stories and laughing along even if I didn't quite understand the context at that point in my life. I am younger than most of the population here but still older than the younger ones here. 40's bring alot to a mans life, reflecting, making a list of what doesn't hurt anymore, (small list for me)... But mainly remembrance of those who have gone away that shared some laughs with us, stories of the past etc. I was at the swap meet saturday with my kid, here I was sitting down with some folks where we covered 40s in years old to 90s in years old... Then there was my kid still in his teens, he sat back just laughing and listening.. I may not pass down every smidge of information I know to him, but hopefully these life experiences pass something down to him that keeps this alive. Its honestly amazing how some vintage tin, motors, and wheels create a brotherhood of people who in general circumstances would never meet or laugh or even talk, now have the common bond of this stuff to be as close or closer than family.

Share your old timer memories..

 

I was born in 1951 , I don't know how it got here so fast but now I am one of the old timers my damn self! I grew up hearing my Dad and his buddies stories of when they grew up in the 20's through the 40's. They were all WWII vets. There were lots of war stories, but there were also lots of tales of their cars, making do with what they had and all the fun they had along the way. A few of the guys were into stock car racing, one guy had a hot 50 Olds that was king of the street, my cousin beat him with his new 56 312 Ford so the Olds went straight to the garage for some more goodies in the engine. As I grew into my teens I hung out with the local stock car guys that were 10 to 15 years older than me, I cleaned parts, helped turn wrenches, went to the races every Sat. night and heard their stories, they were a wild bunch. The late 60's were the best times to be a gear head kid and me and my friends were all about any thing on wheels, street races, cruisin' and split tales
I got out of the Army in 73 and got right back into every thing I had always done, hot cars, drag racing, etc. making memories! My son and his buddies grew up on me and my friends tales of the 60's and 70's. They always ask how in the hell we survived the old days with big HP engines, bias tires and drum brakes. These days a BS session garage night often includes grandsons so they are getting to hear not only my stories but my son's stories and I"m sure they will have many hot car tales to pass down to their kids along with their own.

 

I can hear the young folks in 50 years ," man , I put a 950V battery in that ol Prius and it just plane flew " Good Lord. !LOL

 

I was born in 1950 and I too am one of the old guys, as a kid I didn't know anyone in the rural area of Anderson where I lived that had a hot rods or custom car.

My mom encouraged me to read and I absorbed all the Henry Gregor Felsen paper backs and one day my mom bought me a hot rod magazine at the local drug store, I fell in love with hot rods just staring at the cover, incidentally the red Ford roadster pickup on the cover belonged to our own Dean Lowe.

Within a few weeks of reading that magazine, that was dog eared by then, I bought my very first car a 1932 Ford 5 window coupe, I was about the happiest 12 year old kid alive but the happiness was short lived and because I didn't clear my purchase with my dad the car was gone the next day.

That experience only made me more determined to someday own a hot rod, my next car was a 1954 Ford, as the used car dealers use to say, "It's a cream puff", it indeed was a well cared for car but put a 16 year old with a size 12 shoe in a car that had been lovingly cared for and rarely driven over 50MPH the engine didn't last.

This is when I learned that if I was going to drive I had to learn how repair any problems I might have, my granddad had a neighbor how had a son several years my elder that helped me put inserts in the engine, only to spin them again a week later.

It's at this point I learned of Powell's junk yard and after pouring over my small collection of magazines I was confident enough to try and stuff a 390 in my old coupe, it was a cobbled up monstrosity but man would it fly, stopping was marginal at best and this car too was destinr to end up rolled up in a ball.

This could go on & on, but in the early 70's I met up with my fellow club members and we have all taught and learned over the years. HRP

 

Guess I qualify. Born in 43. Grew up with cousins who were racing jalopies at Madera Speedway-they destroyed many nice early Fords in the process. I was about 10 when they were into this-they were in their teens and both had really nice 49-50 Fords with period mods for the time.
They took me out with them cruising and street racing a good bit too-this was about 52-53. My Dad still had his 41 Ford convert as our main car that he had bought prior to the War as our main car. Lot of stories when he and his old Bomber pilot buddies got together.
At 15 my 1st ride was a 37 Ford pickup that I played with a bit then graduated to a 54 Merc at 16 then a 57 Pontiac at 17 and started running at the drags and street racing. Got in a good bit of trouble but that's another story-orange jumpsuit, buzz job haircut etc.
My Dad was killed on a motorcycle in 58. My mom married my stepdad who was a farmer. He taught me alot about working on cars, tractors etc. They had a 57 Olds tripower wagon. My mom would let me drive it now and then. They went on a trip fishing and we took it to Madera drags and ran B/SA and did quite well. There was a farmer there who told my stepdad how fast his Olds wagon was--that was the end of me driving their cars for quite some time!

 

Born in 1954 so I guess I am not a teenager anymore! Fell in love with hot rods while pumping gas as a 12 year old at the local Citgo station when Fred Steele came in driving his T Bucket. Saw him a while later in a purple 31 roadster. Can you say HOOKED!

 

Born in 45 The first car I remember dad had was a 50 303 olds 88 He farmed and only had a pickup before. Then a 56 ford custom with a 312.but the car that stands out was one a kid with a custom harvester crew had. His uncle totaled a 56 Desoto with a dual 4 341 and he swapped it into a 55 savoy

 

i was just setting here thinking the same thing.

 

Born In 1948 And Took A Ride Around The Valley(1965) In This With 2 Genuine Olde Hot Rodders To Find Me A Fordy..Scored...

 

Lots of stories... I remember when my aunt brought home an almost new, black and white '55 Chevy with a V-8. I was 4yrs old and it stopped me in my tracks.

We've lived in the best of times!

 

I was born in 46 so I guess I qualify as an old timer. I grew up in Dearborn Michigan so the car scene was good. my friends parents had a gas station so I hung around there and learned about cars. plenty of hot rods coming and going to the station. Got my first car in 1962 a 55 ford first car that I added performance parts to from that point on I was hook on working on cars and drag racing also at Detroit dragway. Woodward ave. and Telegraph were some serious street racing sites back in the 60's.

 

I'm one that doesn't have much faith the hobby will even be around in fifty years, government regulation will put an end to it.

 

I hope there will be enough intrinsic human curiosity in upcoming generations that our brand of transportation modification will survive. We supposedly have 200 + years of fossil fuel left , so folks will still probably use it ....

 

I'm 60. had some young truck driver call me "old timer". I called him a fuck you.

 

Born in '46. Saw a "small book" and built a '57 Buick model car,,,,, went to the White City Drag Strip (Agate Road) when I was 14.,,, saw the Slo Poks with all of their cars there,,,, and,,, the Glass Slipper,,, Ed C.'s car,,,, was at the end of the strip to see the winners,,,, Ed made a run and asked me to watch his car ( the Slipper ) while he went to get the push truck,,, I did,,, and when he returned, he asked if I wanted to steer the car back to the pits,,, I did,,, and have been an addict ever since,,, what a thrill for a young wanna be ! Now, involved with a car that runs at Bonneville ( the 505 , Kilger Family Racings roadster, and still, just a wanna be,,, but a very happy, old wannabe !

 

I was born in 1940 & love the old car hobby. Here in western Iowa the hobby appears to becoming larger all the time. I feel the Iowa laws have recently become more accommodating. Examples: We can now display yr of mfg license plate, we do not need to display a front plate, personalized plates are ok,we finally can legally run no fenders & no bumpers. I am one of the few guys who, yrs ago, paid a fine for no fenders. Many states are much tougher regarding titles. While in high school I saved my lawn mowing & paper boy money & bought a worn out red 49 Olds 88 rag top (pretty good chickie magnet, but I was too shy to really take advantage of it) I customized it, nosed & decked, lowered, louvered hood twin baby spots, twin pipes , J C Whitney steel pacs, frenched head lights, 48 Ford tail lights. As per Hot Rod mag I milled the heads a massive .125",hi lift rockers, 4 bbl carb, overhauled the Hydramatic. A year later I bought a 324 engine in K C Mo. A couple years later I sold & bought a black 57 Ford 2dr hdtp with 312 & 3 spd trans. It ran pretty well but of course I wanted more. I installed a 430 Lincoln engine, definately more poop but fewer rpm's. I fixed that by collapsing the lifters & adjustable rocker arms Had a lot of fun with that Fix Or Repair Daily machine. In about '63 I bought a,61 Ford Starliner 2dr hdtp , 401 hp hi perf 390, 3spd OD T85 trans, 5.12 ratio posi rear end. That FoMoCo was one moving machine, Previous owner had won super stock class at the Sioux City Ia dragstrip with it. Thats enough for today. Greg

 

I was born in 1941 and know everything. What would you like to know?

 

I need to preface this story, my dad is 70 years old.

I was talking to a guy about my dad's age who had raced dirt modifieds, I told him I was building a vintage oval track car, and was going to race not just display it.
He said "I am over that High Performance, and Racing!"
My dad looked at him and said "Holy Shit I hope I never get old!"

 

Hello,

How funny to talk about old timers, because we are old timers. When we were teenagers, anyone over 30 was an old timer. Our parents, the teachers, the local playground director, even the cool mechanic at our local Mobil Gas Station. To us, they were old. (probably the average was 28-35.) Now that I think about it, our grandparents were really old, but we never sat around with them and talked…shop.

It seems that their "old” generation was pretty solitary and there was never a time when a discussion was about “their time.” To a point, the same was true for our parents. It was difficult to get them to talk about growing up in Santa Monica, San Pedro or Terminal Island.

It was a different era and culture for them versus our newly found teenage lifestyle. For them, we were hard to understand and hot rods/drag racing…we might as well have been talking to the “woman in the moon.” But, since my dad left for his job in LA very early, it was my mom’s constant rattle coming my way. My brother was spared the “wave of adult information.”

Jnaki

There have been plenty of Old Timers in our lives that changed the way we look at things, historic and present day ideals. They were our history and helped shape our lives. When we did come across a hot rod/drag race guy that was “waaaay” older than us, it was eye opening, but educational. They were our age at one time or another.

It wasn’t necessarily hot rod building or drag racing, but the historic things that happened to them during the same time, when we were little. (Like taking our Schwinn bicycle fenders off and racing them on the school playground and baseball fields.) Those old guys did the same thing and did the same thing to full fendered roadsters.

What we found out was that there were more roadsters without fenders than coupes/sedans without fenders. That was just the way it was in So Cal, at least in our neighborhood of Long Beach. Now, that we are the old timers, when asked a question about our younger lives or at least a simple hot rod question, we have to make sure our answers are simple and to the point. The new generation looks like they will have a similar idea of independence in their future. But, it may not be becoming involved in hot rods.

That, they get from the old timers...us.

 

Well Stated Jnaki ..

 

"We are now them" Lippy

 

I'm a 1937 model myself. And if choffman doesn't know it, I do !!!

 

Dragged home a '30 sedan from a farmer's field.
Later found a '31 coupe body.
Fit down over that frame, drove it my last H.S. senior week w/a 265" in it, 1970.

 

This is an interesting thread no doubt. My date of manufacture was 1953, so in my estimation, I caught the tail end of the perceived " good old days " of how life was after WW 2. By that I mean, as a child, there was still a lot of very cool cars and trucks from the 40's, 50's, on the roadways, and everything was made with a sense of pride of craftsmanship, and life was a lot more simple in just about every category you could think of.

I was lucky, my dad and his cousin owned a wrecking yard and car and truck repair in the town of Atwater in the San Joaquin Valley California. So in essence, I was raised around the grease, and was privy to a lot of the older local gear heads that would hang around our business. The black arrow is pointing at my old 56 IHC retired bell telephone truck that I was working on in 1975, the year I got out of the army.

Some of the conversations and BS sessions that went on after hours, should have been caught on video, " it didn't exist at that point ". I was lucky that there was the Saturday night races at the local fairgrounds there in Merced, back when it was dirt, and the cars were true jalopy's from wrecking yards that didn't have a lot of money tied up in them. Who would have ever thought that the old cars they were racing back then should have never been cut up for that purpose, but hindsight is golden no doubt. It was still a lot of fun to watch them race on the short oval and all of it was a great experience.

I feel lucky that I grew up in an era of playing cards held on with clothes pins to make noise in our bicycle spokes. We could go to the old local Mobil gas station and the owners would give us kids, STP stickers for free. Having a bicycle meant that we as kids had a wide range that we could cover out in the countryside.

I was lucky enough to attend a real stock car race at the old state fairgrounds in Sacramento. It was known as the Sacramento mile at the old cal expo. A mile dirt track and the cars were the real deal, not the homogenized stuff you see in Nascar these days, back in the early 60's those cars were production cars that had a ton of weight cut out of them, and you saw the horsepower proudly illustrated on the hoods in big lettering that told you what was powering them.

I will never forget that race. This was when you got to see them all have to run a qualifying lap before the race actually started. There was this one guy that bragged that he and his 64 ford galaxy were going to set the track record for fastest qualifying time that day, and his performance that day was stellar in the sense that he would never be forgotten.

Keep in mind, that the state fair had just finished up a week prior to that race, and a lot of the vendor booths and stands had all been gathered about a hundred feet past the first turn which also had the exit point to return to the pits. When it was his turn to take his lap, he came out onto the track and put his foot into it deep, and he never let off, this rig looked and sounded fast, but in his zeal to be the speed king that day, he never let off the gas and didn't even make a valid effort to slow down to make the first turn, instead, the car launched like a rocket ship and sailed over the first turn embankment and flew about 50 feet till it touched down in the middle of a bunch of hot dog stands and it was a spectacle to be seen indeed! The car destroyed about 5 hot dog stands in a row, a tornado of plywood in the air, and one of the smaller 5 gallon propane tanks decided to explode and set all of the destroyed hot dog stands in a blaze of glory! What was really amazing is that the car didn't flip and it didn't catch fire. The crowd roared as the driver after the dust settled, got out of the car and raised both hands as if he had just won the INDY 500. The firetrucks came shortly and put out the blaze. It was amazing to actually see a real stock race on the mile dirt track.

I was lucky that I got to experience the era of when a kid could get a job at a gas station and pump gas, kids these days have no idea of what that was.

I was lucky enough to be able to buy a very cool 1941 G.M.C. K-18 signal corp's panel truck at age 17 and I drove it in high school. Needless to say, those days were very cool as compared to now. That old army truck taught me a lot about how, to repair what needs to be fixed. You look under the hood of cars today, its a puzzle that you don't have the picture on the box to tell you what you are looking at.

Amazing how time flies by. Here is the picture of that very immutable fact, me at age 17 on the brush guard of the 41 G.M.C. and me at age 66 on the brush guard of the 41 G.M.C.

One of the things I regret, looking back now, is that I didn't have the foresight to get involved in photography, to record a lot of the experiences I have had. Back then as kids, we were more interested in how to get gas money for our cars, and money for cigarettes, never had enough money for a camera and film, it just never occurred to us as kids, that those frozen moments of time would be very valuable to us in the future, for us to look back upon.

"EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN "

 

I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble,,,,but I was born in 1963,,,,,and Hell,,,I’m one of the old timers now !
If you don’t believe me,,,just ask any young kid you know,,they will be glad to tell you ,,Lol.

And you are right,,,my only regret is I wish I had taken some more pictures,,,I only have a few of the adventures of my life .

We see ourselves as we were then,,,,nope,,,,those days are gone !
Don’t feel too bad though,,,,we thought the same way back then,,,,LoL.
And after all the Prius and Tesla’s and whatever comes next fade away,,,,those old guys will be trying to find our old stuff to fix up and brag about .
The more things change,,,the more they stay the same .

Tommy

 

When I saw a brand new '62 Galaxy with a 406, 3X2 and really nice interior at a dealer, I thought this is the end of hot rodding as we know it. Why would anyone build a car when you can buy a ready made hot rod? Seems I was mistaken.

 

^^^ Read that the above engine, is the sound heard in "409" !

 

You young whipper snappers! what was the question?

 

Hello,

My brother and I were introduced to this mechanic, genius friend of my dad’s, in one of our late 1949 or possibly in 1950 sojourns to L.A. He was an automotive expert if there ever was a label. He had tons of experience with all sorts of cars and trucks. From an early age, we loved his gas station that was near our dad’s workplace in Los Angeles. Our families were friends from back in our dad’s teenage years in San Pedro and Terminal Island.

The old friend had opened an automotive place within walking distance to the LA City Hall. My brother and I used to look at the whole neighborhood and loved walking around exploring everything with my mom in tow. Our favorites were the only gas station within walking distance to the city hall, the hot dog stand, the toy store and the fabulous restaurants along the blocks.

Over time, we had our cars serviced in the beginning and then it was asking for knowledge from the expert. In return, he contributed vast amounts of knowledge to us and let it slip one time that he worked with Vic Edlebrock, Sr. At that, we were totally impressed. Over the years involved in drag racing, while building our cruisers and hot rods, we were the recipients of knowledge that we continued to use until we stopped our drag racing careers. I am sure a lot of it was used in the twenty plus years and beyond.

After our drag racing accident, he graciously offered us a 1956 Ford Sedan, fully street legal Bonneville race car. ( A Flathead, LaSalle trans with a giant floor shifter, custom upholstery, outstanding black paint and even screw in Moon Discs. He knew we needed a new direction and thought this two door, 1956 Ford Sedan would be a starting point. We could see ourselves driving this cool looking sedan on the salt.

In a drive around that part of L.A. it had the power and the mellow sound of a race car, but was comfortable on the street. Since it was street legal, cruising up the driveway at the two teenage gathering spots, drive-in restaurant, parking lots in Bixby Knolls would have been just classic. We almost bought it to add to our current hot rods. But, we were a sell one, buy one type of family and couldn’t part with the Impala or 40 Ford Sedan Delivery.

Jnaki

Our hot rod/ drag racing adventures as teenagers was completely fulfilled with the knowledge we gained during this time. A lot of it came from my dad’s friend in Los Angeles. When my wife’s 1962 Corvair got stuck in East Los Angeles, a place no one wants to be stuck, we had it towed to our friend’s place. Within a week, he diagnosed the problem, had it fixed and we drove it back to the OC, without any problems for the next few months, until we gave the Corvair to my wife’s uncle.

Thank you, J

Your information and friendly help is/was a welcome addition to our families being friends.

 

I'm a '43 and when I was 11, 12ish we lived in the little one-store town of Lawson, Texas on Beltline Road which kind'a/sort'a meandered around the far outskirts of Dallas. My older brother was 15 and he hung out with a slightly older boy who had a driver's license and a '50 Ford. Late one quiet night, Lawson didn't roll up the sidewalks because Lawson didn't have any, a small group of us were hanging out drinking RC Cola, because that came in the big, 12oz bottles while Coke and Pepsi only came in 8oz-ers for the same price. Somehow the conversation got around to the Ford, a steamboat whistle someone had and most townfolks being in bed with the lights off. The older boys got that whistle clamped on the exhaust and loaded us all in the Ford. We were a 1/4 mile from the store and the crossroad and able to build up a "good head of steam" for the whistle. It sure did sound like a Banshee dragging a soul to hell. After rolling to a stop on the other side of town and disconnecting the big brass steamboat whistle, we slowly drove back over our tracks and laughed our butts off about how many lights were back on in the houses.
I was highly impressed with the concept that nothing on vehicles had to remain exactly the way the factory had built it.