#collision course outtakes

[cameliawrites]

collision course outtake: mama & papa

When I was writing my most recent kanej fic, “collision course,” a lot of sections ended up moved around, rewritten, or just left on the cutting room floor. I thought I would share two short snippets that were deleted in the final draft, simply because I wanted Inej, Kaz, & Nina to be the only speaking characters in this fic, and I thought these scenes would distract from the overall narrative arc. The first snippet was going to be placed in the first third of the fic; the short snippet at the end would have gone right before the final section of the story, before Inej’s letter to Nina. So here is a “collision course” outtake featuring Mama & Papa Ghafa:

When Inej sends the dates of her upcoming visit to the caravan, Mama replies, Shall I make space for one or for two?

They pester her about this for a few years. When she visits, Inej doesn’t tell them, we always sleep two feet apart. On the bad days, we can hardly bear to touch hands.

She tells them, “He’s very busy. He works very hard at his businesses in Ketterdam.”

Papa scoffs. “A hard worker is a virtuous man, but the man who works too hard is as offensive as the one who refuses to work at all. So he does not throw his life away on gambling, and drinking, and parties. But you are young. The most important thing in your life is family. How can he have any time for family when he is working so much?”

Inej thinks wryly, I’ve told Kaz much the same. But she bites her tongue, and tsks at Papa, and reminds him solemnly, “He hasn’t had much family for a very long time.”

Mama says, “All the more reason to bring him here, then.”

But there is a deep, dark, persistent part of Inej that worries: “Will he fit in?”

Alone in her cabin on The Wraith, it is lovely to imagine Kaz as part of her family, but the images are all hazy and vague: Kaz and Inej, sitting together near the campfire; watching her little cousins practice on the wire; curled together beneath silk sheets, in a caravan of their own. What would it really look like, when Kaz does not know the words they speak, let alone the songs they sing around the campfire? When he does not know the rhythms of the work days when they practice, and the saints’ days when they rest? When he can bear the feeling of Inej’s skin against his own, but not the passing caresses of her mother, or the bone-crushing hugs of her aunties, or the relentless leg-tugging of her cousins?

But Papa says, “Him fitting in here isn’t as important as him being here. Have him come, and we will figure out the rest along the way. Family is not only joy, but also pain. You do not get to choose which one comes your way, only who you get to bear it with.”

. . . [intervening story sections]

When Inej sends the dates of her upcoming visit to the caravan, Mama replies, Shall I make space for one or for two?

Kaz writes,

Mrs. Ghafa,

Would you do me the honor of making space for two?

[joemuggs]

Double Drat!

Another one from the sponsored Vice series that’s no longer online... I did a paean to my favourite Roots Manuva track. 

If there's one track that sums up Roots Manuva for me, it's 'Double Drat'1, a track that only appears on his 2006 'Alternately Deep'2 album of outtakes and remixes. Sorry to pick an obscurity – this is generally deeply annoying behaviour, a classic music-knowledge one-upmanship technique – but go with it: in this case the obscurity is relevant. Because this is as close as Rodney Smith3's catalogue comes to a pop song, a bubbling, grooving mid-tempo dance track that I still regularly play out to great response when DJing.

The chorus refrain of “I seen scenes from Pluto to Saturn”4 grabs attention and lodges in the memory, the whole thing is full of hooks from start to end, and you can't help bobbing to it. It can fit alongside all kinds of things, its fizzing vocodered choruses sounding more current than ever in the current disco/boogie-friendly climate, the lovely reggae guitar licks giving it a vintage feel among all the hight tech sound, the loping, lazy bassline sounding like nothing so much as The Cure's 'Lovecats'. Yet there it is, flung away on an odds-and-sods compilation, with no hype and little ceremony.

Nothing against that compilation – it's a cracker in fact, also featuring a gloriously quirky guest turn on remix and rapping duties by a young Jammer, who seems like such a natural partner for RM that one can't help but wonder what a duo album would sound like5. It's just that slipping such an accessible track out with so little fanfare is a typically perverse move from a man whose rather awkward relationship with the limelight is precisely part of what makes him great.

Emerging in the mid-late 90s on laid back jazzy rap beats with a dub sensibility, one feels that RM could quite easily have ridden the trip-hop gravy train for all it was worth if he'd either taken a leaf out of Tricky's book and played the kooky personality game a bit more, or played the good-vibes card and let his rich baritone ride a few innocuous chillout beats. The big paradox is that he was too grounded for the former and too out-there for the latter. It's not even that RM is wilfully perverse or self-defeating, or not always anyway – more that he just seems to have a unique ability to navigate not the fringes but the spaces in between, to meander around trends and genres keeping no pace but his own.

Whether it's 'Double Drat', his 2001 anthem 'Witness (1 Hope)', or something like the weird underwater hymnal 'Wha Mek' from 2011, RM's music is similarly between things. Again, it's not deliberately marginal or off-key, and neither is it self-conscious fusion, it's just in Roots Manuva space, a world where influence seems to work slightly differently from everywhere else. Perhaps more than anything else, Smith is really a reggae vocalist – but it's in a subgenre of one, a 21st century collision of multiple eras of dancehall and dub.

Hip hop is in there too, of course, as is electronica in his unique way with synth tones, but again, these are done his way. And as a lyricist, he's as much in a great British tradition of wisdom-in-nonsense linguistic shamanism that takes in Lewis Carroll, Viv Stanshall, Shaun Ryder and Kate Bush as he is informed by rap and reggae6. This is, after all, the man whose biggest track ('Witness') kicks off with the line “Taskmaster burst the bionic zit splitter...” - and even when he's in his usual mode of laconic introspection, there's always a strange inversion of language that's in nobody's vernacular but his own.

All of which gives us a musician uniquely suited to the 21st century's fluidity. RM has spent so long navigating these strange passages and wormholes through the fabric of modern music that he's made himself a permanent presence; not dependent in any way on fad or fashion, never brand new nor retro, even his relationship with temporality is all his own.

And his influence operates in the same, complex way. A few years back I interviewed the great nomad DJ Kutmah7, whose foundational sets and club nights were vitally influential on the formation of the Brainfeeder / Low End Theory axis in Los Angeles, and thus on a huge tranche of late 2000s / early 2010s electronic sound worldwide. Kutmah cited the staggered, staggering beat and bassline of  'Witness8' as one of the most crucial influential records in the formation of the psychedelic electronic rap beat aesthetic that he would catalyse.

12 years after its release, that bassline is still reverberating around the planet, directly impacting on producers from Santiago to St Petersberg, and causing new sounds to be made. And 18 years on from his first release, RM is still slipping out weird and wonderful delights with minimal fanfare and – crucially – has a back catalogue whose proper influence may not even have been felt yet. If 'Witness' can still be such an important track after all this time, maybe 'Double Drat''s time is still to come.

1Almost certainly the best ever Dick Dastardly reference in a reggae funk rap pop track.

2So titled because it was a follow-up to 'Awfully Deep'

3Roots Manuva is one of the many great Rods in UK bass music, along with rap legend Rodney P, grime boss Rodney Pryce aka Terror Danjah and reggae elder statesman David Rodigan. Of course being a Rod is not a guarantee of soundsystem brilliance though, as extreme right-wing Spectator columnist and all-round troll Rod Liddle demonstrates.

4The track is one of the top five greatest outer space rap tracks, along with Eric B & Rakim's 'Follow the Leader' (“let's travel at magnificent speeds across the universe”), the Beasties' 'Intergalactic', Deltron 3030's '3030' and Afrika Bambaataa & Soul Sonic Force's 'Planet Rock'.

5It would sound brilliant.

6Although, of course reggae has its own long and rich tradition of wise gibberish; the combination of this with the very British references to cheese on toast and lager is one of the many things that makes RM unique.

7A Scottish-Egyptian-Brightonian-Californian DJ and visual artist who uses Leigh Bowery as his logo and is exiled in the country of his birth (look up his bio) – what better conduit could there be for RM's individualist sonics?

[stephbeatzweb-blog]

Welcome to Stephanie Beatriz Web!

Your newest and most comprehensive source on the amazing Stephanie Beatriz! Best known for her role as Rosa Diaz in the television series, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, movies like Short Term 12, The Light of the Moon & voicing some amazing characters like Gertie in Ice Age: Collision Course.

I have been working on the site for a few months now, and I’m so excited to finally be able to launch it! You will find a very large – and almost complete – gallery with high quality pictures covering Stephanie’s appearances throughout the years, promotional pictures of her career and a large photoshoot section with exclusive outtakes, currently holding over 26.000 images. Feel free to browse the site, and let us know of any errors that you may find.

Be sure to follow our twitter at @stephbeatzweb to keep up with any upcoming updates.

[itsworn]

Customs were Red Hot—In More Ways than One–During an Eventful 1957

Kustoms.

What a year this was for George Barris, starting with unprecedented media exposure and concluding with the disastrous shop fire that nearly put the planet’s best-known customizer out of business. George calculated damages to be a quarter-million dollars (equivalent to $2.2M now). Sure, the shop was insured for anything short of acts of God—one of which the courts determined to be exploding transformers, thereby relieving both the electric utility and insurance company of responsibility. Claim denied, the King of the Kustomizers had lost most of his shop and a dozen unpaid-for projects. No wonder he wanted to walk away without completing the Ala Kart that helped save the company with back-to-back wins as America’s Most Beautiful Roadster.

Full-custom pickups were all the rage out West, where the major magazines were produced. Prior to the fire, two radical trucks and reoccurring coverage in Petersen publications helped propel Barris Kustoms to new heights this year. Afterwards, those plus a third pickup helped keep the rebuilding company alive by touring car shows and media outlets. All three trucks were lucky to survive the night of December 7, for entirely different reasons. The Ala Kart was under construction in the only unsinged section of the building, saved by brave firefighters. The company truck, Kopper Kart, was on the way home from a Portland show. Rod & Custom magazine’s Dream Truck survived only because a fried transmission bearing delayed Editor Spence Murray’s delivery to Barris by one fateful day. Instead of unloading his pickup for additional custom work the next morning, Spence loaded his camera and recorded the devastation. All eight of his surviving frames appear for the first time in this series installment.

There’s a whole lot of George himself on these pages because (A) his creations had such an influence on the hobby and (B) Pete’s editorial staffs devoted such a disproportionate percentage of film and pages to the flamboyant self-promoter. Besides the black-and-white car features and how-to articles we remember from HOT ROD, Rod & Custom, Car Craft, and countless “one-shots,” Barris customs were often featured in full color by Motor Trend and particularly Motor Life. Collectively, in any given month of 1957, up to a million subscribers and newsstand buyers were bombarded by Barris projects. Much of that film was exposed by George himself, a skilled photojournalist who wrote out the accompanying stories in longhand, on legal pads. He was both a cover subject and a cover photographer.

Customs were red-hot in 1957, and young Dean Jeffries was another big beneficiary of Petersen exposure. Pinstriping cars built by Barris guaranteed magazine credits and introductions to Petersen staffers. Following his mentor’s path, the photogenic youngster furthered his own fame by participating in how-to articles on customizing and painting. Dean even brought a pretty model to the party: High-school-sweetheart Carol Lewis alternately appeared in print as a blonde and brunette. It was Carol’s famously flamed-all-over ’56 Chevy that Jeffries rescued after rushing from a nearby restaurant to unlock George’s burning building. Carol’s car and his own customized Porsche, which had been parked at the curb, were the only vehicles saved from the all-too-real flames.

Besides the geographic advantage of proximity to Petersen Publishing Co. headquarters, Jeffries, like Barris, shows up in so many behind-the-scenes outtakes because he was at the center of a scene that sold magazines. It didn’t hurt that young Dean was liked and befriended by those carrying notebooks and cameras, as easygoing a guy as George was polarizing.

As for the preponderance of young women in this series installment, we can offer no such explanations—only previously unpublished snapshots from the road, a teeny-tiny percentage of the spontaneous snapshots intended to bring smiles to the “lab rats” processing film back home in Hollywood. It’s about time the rest of us enjoyed them.

A dozen customer cars and most of George Barris’s building were incinerated before firemen extinguished a nighttime blaze ignited by a transformer explosion in the back alley. As Editor Spence Murray reported in the next Rod & Custom, “When sparks reached the paint area—blooie! Up it went.” The heat melted the considerable lead in a finished ’54 Merc custom that was here for upholstery only. That job was done; Bobby “Chimbo” Yamazaki was expected to pick up his car this very day. The new Imperial belonged to a forgotten oil-company executive. Spence evidently filled all 12 frames of a 120 roll on the premises, though the partial film strip containing Negs One through Four was discovered missing when their turn came for digitizing. The other seven surviving images were scanned and appear further into the layout. (Sixty-one years after the disaster, Barris fan Brad Masterson operates Masterson Kustom Automobiles on the same Lynwood, California, property.)

Most of the images on these pages were captured by this quartet of Petersen staff photographers (clockwise from top left): Eric Rickman, Al Paloczy, Bob D’Olivo, and Colin Creitz. The first two hired, Rickman (1950) and D’Olivo (1952), remained with the publishing company until retirement.

The all-time-ultimate barn find would be James Dean’s infamous Porsche 550 Spyder—which looks nothing here like the wreck in photos from the accident site and subsequent storage in Cholame, California. Rather, George Barris folded a sheet of aluminum over the ripped-open driver’s side, welded it to the stripped shell he acquired from a Porsche racer, then toured this exhibit at shows and traffic-safety exhibits for three years. A pallet held up the mangled chassis. In Lee Raskin’s book of photos shot by Sanford Roth on Sept. 30, 1955, between Dean’s hometown of Sherman Oaks and the accident site, Jeffries is said to have watched Barris Kustom workers “beat the aluminum panels with 2×4’s to simulate collision damage.” It was last seen in public around 1960. In subsequent interviews, Barris alternately insisted that the car vanished from a sealed truck or a sealed railroad car. (See James Dean: On the Road to Salinas.)

In late January, the first fire to strike a famous hot rod shop consumed part of Ak Miller’s Garage and most of his El Caballo II, the Hemi-powered sport special originally intended for the Mexican Road Race (cancelled in the wake of seven 1956 deaths), now being prepared for Europe’s Mille Miglia less than four months away. Ak’s employees and buddies were rebuilding before the ashes cooled. Tinsmith Jack Sutton rolled out a second custom skin for the modified Kurtis 500-X sports-car chassis. In May, Miller became the first American driver in the first American car to start the famous Italian road race. (See Mar. ’57 Motor Trend; Apr. & July ’57 HRM; Nov. ’11 HRD.)

Barris and Jeffries led a caravan of customers to NorCal for the big winter shows in Oakland and Sacramento (“No trailer queens yet,” quips historian Greg Sharp). Car Craft Editor Dick Day followed the Kopper Kart into the studio of NBC’s Sacramento affiliate to shoot a sequence of George hyping the eighth Autorama. His radical ’56 Chevy was voted Most Spectacular of the National Roadster Show and earned an Outstanding Award in Sacramento. This is an outtake to the lead photo in an Aug. ’57 CC article, “Make Your Car a Movie Star.” (Also see May ’57 & June ’58 CC; June & July ’57 Motor Life.)

George Barris and Dean Jeffries couldn’t resist the toothy mouth of this sporty roadster during Autorama setup. The kustom kingpins were shopmates and close friends before the relationship gradually soured over conflicting claims to projects that became particularly famous (e.g., James Dean’s Porsche and the Monkeemobile). They remained estranged at the time of Dean’s 2013 death, at age 70. George passed away two years later, at 89.

While in Daytona Beach for NASCAR’s acceleration trials, HOT ROD repaid Plymouth for the donor car by displaying Suddenly in a local dealer’s showroom. The name and number were inspired by the factory’s futuristic ad campaign for ’57 models: “Suddenly, It’s 1960!” Editor Wally Parks and Tech Editor Ray Brock flat-towed the Hemi-powered sedan from L.A. behind Brock’s ’54 Olds. On the beach, Wally’s 159.893-mph average was the fastest two-way flying mile ever recorded by a stock-bodied American car. (See Sept. & Nov. ’57 HRM; Nov. ’11 & Mar. ’16 HRD.)

Carroll Shelby (left) and mechanic Joe Landaker pulled double duty at Daytona, entering John Edgar’s Ferrari 410 Sport in both the straight-line acceleration trials and the first sports-car race staged during NASCAR Speed Weeks. Rough sand on the usual road course forced a venue change to New Smyrna Beach airport for an SCCA-sanctioned event financed by bandleader and racing buff Paul Whiteman, “The King of Jazz.” Shelby’s victory here was among 19 straight wins this season. The 24 Hours of Le Mans was another in the incredible streak.

Lucky Shelby won the race and got the girl, too: Model, actress, and Daytona trophy queen Jan Harrison would become the second Mrs. Shelby (of seven!) in 1960.

Never before or since has any particular powerplant impacted a motorsport like Cliff Bedwell’s unblown Chrysler did on February 3 at Lions Drag Strip. Back-to-back blasts of 165.13 and 166.97, fully 9 miles per hour faster than any reputable speed to date, got all fuels other than pump gasoline banned overnight, literally: Santa Ana announced its ban the next day, followed by Lions and most other SoCal tracks. NHRA went gas-only for the 1957 Nationals (then nationwide in ’58). SCTA introduced a dozen gasoline classes intended to wean lakes racers off of nitromethane. We thought that HRD had published every file photo from that fateful day until we recently stumbled onto this lone frame on a roll labeled “1932 Ford Coupe.” Though driver Emery Cook and engine-builder Bruce Crower developed the barrier-busting combination, Ed Iskenderian’s saturation-ad campaign convincingly credited a “fifth cycle” of combustion unleashed by a cam that Isky rebranded as the 5-Cycle Hyperbolic Crossflow 7000. (See Oct. ’57 HRM; Nov. ’11, Mar. ’14 & Mar. ’16 HRD.)

Had Norm Grabowski not succumbed to cancer in 2012, at 79, news that his iconic roadster pickup recently resold for $484,000 surely would’ve stopped his heart. Man and machine were captured during setup for Oakland’s ninth National Roadster Show.

At a March office party, Racer Brown received one of the countless custom greeting cards that Tom Medley drew for colleagues on special occasions. HRM’s popular Tech Editor was quitting the publishing racket to open Racer Brown Camshaft Engineering, specializing in hardcore-racing applications.

Just when we started to accept that every archive image of these T-buckets together at the Santa Ana Drags had surely been published at least once, the late Wally Parks gifted us this shot from the staging lanes. Contrary to erroneous reports in publications including HRD (ouch!), this was not their first match. They’d previously raced at Saugus Drag Strip, advises Tommy Ivo, who claims both wins. They never did again. After Roy Brizio Street Rods finishes restoring Grabowski’s T to its Kookie Kar glory, we’ll look forward to an overdue reunion. (See Apr. 20, ’57, Life; June ’57 HRM; Aug. ’57 CC; Mar. ’16 HRD.)

“Notice how far back the motor was in the car,” says Ivo (left). “I was killing them in Street Roadster class until the next-fastest guy noticed one day at Lions. You couldn’t have more than 10-percent setback. When they finally measured, I couldn’t even run Competition Roadster, which allowed 25 percent; I had to run Tony Waters with his fuel roadster! Well, that was the end of that. My crew guy is Dick Henman. His shirt says ‘Tom,’ so it must be one of mine. That roll bar was attached to the Model A frame with 3/8-inch bolts. I wonder why I had a rag in the end of the header. Maybe I was afraid of ants getting into the motor?”

We e-mailed all three outtakes from the Sunday that Life magazine visited Santa Ana Drags to 82-years-young TV Tommy, who called in fellow Road King member Jim Miles, 85, for assistance identifying the sharp dressers. (“Jim is older, but he hasn’t had as much tire shake!”) Ivo pointed out the white Road Kings club shirts, adding, “If guys wanted to be part of the pit crew, they had to wear white pants, as well. Going right to left, Larry Sutton is standing next to me, Dick Henman is on the passenger side, Ron ‘Reggie Rughead’ Rayburn is next to him, and between them, in the rear, are the head and shoulders of Dale Nordstrom. The others are spectators.”

You’re looking at a 1950s version of the two-story tower complex, fully portable. C.J. and Peggy Hart’s beater hearse contained the homemade timers for the Orange County Airport taxiway that magically transformed into Santa Ana Drags on Sundays from 1950 to 1959.

A crowd gathered at Hollywood’s Competition Motors, the German-car importer and repair shop renting space to Von Dutch, for what looks like the unveiling of El Caballo II’s pretty paint. He’s standing to the right of owner-builder-driver Ak Miller (in airman’s jacket), beneath Dutch’s “wailing” wall art. A month after HRM’s Eric Rickman captured the scene, the car landed in Europe for what amounted to a 992-mile shakedown run. In a postrace letter to HRM from Italy, Ak listed the mechanical woes that made him the second entrant to drop out—well after prerace favorite Stirling Moss, whose brake pedal fell off eight miles from the start. (See Mar., Apr., May & July ’57 HRM; Mar. ’58 MT; Nov. ’11 HRD.)

No staffer got backstage as often as Motor Trend lead photographer Bob D’Olivo, who excelled whether shooting vehicles or people, especially celebrities. Bob was on the set of This is Your Life the day that singer-actor Tommy Sands was lured to the hit TV show by his parents. Among the teen heartthrob’s surprises was an enlarged gold record commemorating a million-plus sales of his hit 45, “Teen-Age Crush,” presented by a slick label guy while Mom and Dad posed approvingly.

Here’s one interesting photo that we can be 99.99-percent positive has never been printed. Extremely rare among archive images, double exposures resulted from staff photographers becoming distracted by something—or someone—and failing to advance the film roll between shots. Another pose of Barbara Martinez in a setting that the late Gray Baskerville might’ve called a “beachin’ background” ultimately ran on CC’s racy “Coming Attraction” page, teasing an upcoming tech article about the “reversed-rim wheel, the latest styling craze on the Pacific Coast. Starting out on pick-up trucks, the trend to wider tires has been taken up en masse by the custom car fraternity. Cost for reversing wheels generally run [sic] between 4 to 5 dollars. Chrome plating costs approximately fifteen dollars a wheel.” (See Oct. & Nov. ’57 CC.)

After what must’ve been a very long day of multiple outfit changes in three different photo locations, Barbara Martinez seemingly has had enough of that chrome-reversed wheel and her photographer, CC Editor Dick Day.

Former teen supermodel Sandra Dee had just landed in Hollywood when Bob D’Olivo photographed the aspiring actress reading an April 30 Los Angeles Mirror-News article that opened, “She may be another Elizabeth Taylor.” Indeed, Sandra soon became world famous for a movie role based on author Frederick Kohner’s young surfer daughter, Kathy, the real-life Gidget. (Last time we visited Duke’s Restaurant in Malibu, longtime-hostess Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman was still greeting customers near the beach that her story made famous.)

“Most businesses try to hide their mistakes,” goes an old journalism saying, “but we editors publish ours.” Not all of them surface in print, however: This sequence is the first we’ve seen or known of R&C’s company truck colliding with a ’54 Ford. In the final frame of Spence Murray’s roll, he was photographed from behind by someone using the Editor’s own camera.

Sorry, we have no results for the Triumph TR3 at Santa Barbara’s May road race.

Prankster Eric Rickman apparently put the pretty lady up to grabbing an unsuspecting Wally Parks from behind. She may or not be dancer-actress Cyd Charisse, who made a parade lap of IMS with the Borg-Warner trophy in the Indy 500 pace car.

For its third iteration, the ever-evolving R&C Dream Truck sprouted distinctive fins from Ohio’s Metz Custom Shop. The project pickup’s much-publicized “wide-base” wheels sped the nationwide transition from modified hubcaps to chrome rims. (See May ’57, Mar. ’58 R&C; Mar. ’58 HRM; July & Nov. ’57 ML; ’58 HOT ROD Annual.)

MT Editor Walt Woron must’ve been a fearless road tester to climb into one of these homemade contraptions for a Nov. 1957 cover story subtitled, “We Flew … and Drove … the Flying Car!” The inventor, described as a former Navy pilot and engineer, had built and flown three production models since unveiling a prototype at Robert E. Petersen’s 1951 Motorama show. The detachable wings and tail folded into a 400-lb. trailer. A reported half-million-dollar investment to date was “supported by wife Neil’s beauty shop, and selling stock at $100 a share,” said MT. Powered by 320ci, 143hp, air-cooled Lycoming engines, they reportedly reached 100 mph airborne, with a range of 300 miles, while topping out at 67 mph earthbound.

It’s a tough job, but somebody had to pose those “Coming Attraction” models smiling at us from the last inside page of every CC. The Mar. ’58 edition identified the blonde as, simply, Miss Virginia Bell, but historian Greg Sharp recognized a famous ’50s stripper known as “Ding Dong” Bell. Along with an extraordinary number of poses, staff photographer Al Paloczy’s film rolls contained a feature on painter Dick Jackson’s custom T-bird.

Television was still relatively new, but Barris had already mastered the medium. We can’t read the engraving on a trophy purportedly being presented in this Los Angeles studio in October, but suspect that George was promoting an upcoming custom show in nearby Alhambra.

Scallops were seen everywhere this year, including on the playground where pioneer custom painters Jeffries (center) and Barris (right) joined Joe Zupan’s ’56 F100 and John Chavez’s ’55 Olds for a Motor Life shoot. We didn’t find any of Al Paloczy’s aerial shots in our incomplete 1957-’58 ML collection, but both customs did eventually appear in sister titles. (See May ’58 HRM; June ’58 CC.)

Robert E. Petersen had plenty of reasons to celebrate a year that sent newsstand sales and subscriptions soaring to new heights. MT Editor and apparent bunkmate Walt Woron got the candid shot during a November tour of European automakers.

Junior’s Fiery Memories (As Told to Greg Sharp)

Hershel “Junior” Conway was still painting for Barris when it happened. December 7, 1957, was a windy, rainy night. The wooden roof was of course soaked in paint, solvent, and thinner. Boxer Archie Moore’s magnesium-bodied, Raymond-Loewy-designed Jaguar burned, as did Jayne Mansfield’s pink ’55 Jaguar XK-140. George wanted to pack it in afterwards—go get a job somewhere—until his then-fiancée, Shirley Nahas, convinced him to stick it out and finish the Ala Kart for the 1958 Oakland show. So, the building was rebuilt and extended to the sidewalk. That’s where Lloyd Bakan opened an accessory shop, Wilfred Manuel did upholstery, and Dean Jeffries painted and pinstriped. In the process of identifying pictured vehicles and people for these captions, Junior revealed or confirmed details that only an insider would’ve known. —Greg Sharp

The chopped ’41 Ford coupe with hardtop styling is a total mystery. George owned the ’56 Continental Mark II in the foreground, originally painted “Sam Bronze,” now pearlescent white. The ’36 coupe in the background belonged to Ron Guidry of the Long Beach Renegades (soon to be named CC’s Car Club of the Year for 1958).

Junior was stumped by the ’56 T-Bird and the full-fendered ’32 roadster getting quad headlights. Imagine the view of the busy shop’s activity from those second-floor apartments!

Jay Johnston’s latest revisions to “Chimbo” Yamazaki’s evolving custom included canted quad headlights, a ’57 Olds bumper-grille assembly containing two Edsel grilles, ’56 Buick taillights, and Cadillac bumper ends. Note the charred interior of Ron Guidry’s ’36 coupe and, just beyond, a ’51 Ford that sat outside after sectioning, awaiting an owner who never returned.

Junior remembered the ’41 moving outdoors years earlier, abandoned by someone who failed to pay off the chop job. The Imperial was brought in by the president of an oil company.

In the first frame, customizer Jay Johnston (left) and longtime Barris employee Curley Hurlbert observe Archie Moore’s melted magnesium Jaguar. The ’54 F100 is the Wild Kat of Martin and Morris Srabian, a radical custom featured posthumously in CC (June ’58). After the shop rafters burned, a heavy-duty engine hoist further lowered the cab’s lid. (Wouldn’t we love to dig through that pile of parts?)

    The post Customs were Red Hot—In More Ways than One–During an Eventful 1957 appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

from Hot Rod Network http://www.hotrod.com/articles/customs-red-hot-ways-one-eventful-1957/ via IFTTT