Kickin' Rocks

with Don Pennington

Ogling, Magazine Heros, and Flame Tattoos

Brain freeze comes in two forms, one with ice cream and one when you sit in front of a keyboard to expound on the world as it should be. Often when talking about stuff that happened in the earlier days of hot rodding, I get the feeling that I am circling the elephant bone yard while whistling in the wind and that there are a bunch of car guys that started life about the time the Edsel came out, who are having a chuckle at the old people. I wonder if what I babble about is reaching anybody that remembers, understands or even cares. Then I look around and feel a lot better when most of the people I see at hot rod events either has graying hair or a lot of the gray has come and gone, if you know what I mean. By the way, you'd think that one cool thing about having less hair is that hair cuts would be like two bucks, actually what happens is the follicly challenged are being reclassified as "advanced skin care patients" which costs about a thousand times more than the $20 hair cut, but not to worry... the Feds are working on a way to protect us against the high cost of medical stuff.

But in case you haven't noticed, G-man and the crew put on events where the average age is a lot closer to zero, there are follicly challenged guys there too (and a few gals) but they do it on purpose, shaving until their shiny noggins are showing, a great place for a tattoo of flames, ear to ear. I went to one of those "kids" events recently, and man-o-man what an intimidating deal. I had no idea I was that far out of touch. Things have changed... clothes... maybe they should be called rags that don't match anything except garage floor maintenance wipes. Then there is the "body art" which runs the A to Z from stuff you stick in your chin and tongue, to little hoop looking things lined up like little soldiers in your eye brow, to a variety of metal adornments attached to areas of the body that seldom see the light of day and must be removed before trying to have a family.  I just don't get it, and don't mind looking at it as long as the "attachments" are limited to 3 or less, and can be seen without removing any clothing, well maybe we could rethink that part.

And then there are tattoos. Have you ever seen a painting that looks like it was done as beginning therapy at the local funny farm. Well I think they let those people out and they are working in tattoo parlors. This is not to say that all tattoos are nuts, but some could stand a little basic design thought. Others are absolutely beautiful! I see them and think "I wouldn't mind getting one of those..." and then I come to my senses, it's hard for me to make such a commitment. I am one of those guys that think everything should be on renewable contracts and we have the right of first refusal. "Uh... sorry honey, but time is up and it's either you or somebody that actually likes what I do". This is not sexist, it's just reality.

During the old guy events, we'd walk around among the cool cars and there'd be an opportunity from time to time to hold up the 10 card on a cool car... or other uhhh... moving art that strikes our fancy. One thing I have noticed in the last few years, there are less and less of the really nice "art" running around, until you go to a low rider or street machine get-together, then the atmosphere changes. If you do attend one of these events to see what I mean, wear wrap around sun glasses, the homies get a little pissy when you start ogling their beautiful women, errr... I mean art and cars of course.

Ogling is what we do best. The core reason we line up at oh-dark-thirty with a Crispy Creme in one hand and some Jo in the other, is to get inside the gates so we can ogle stuff, and the ever popular people ogling. This ogling has been here since hot rod number one appeared. Guys gather to look at other guy's cars. The one thing that has stayed constant in car stuff is ogling. There are two main things we look at, with clear intent attached to each, cars that we want and car guy friends that we.... well lets just say... appreciate. Everything else has changed. Back in the day, as they say... magazines were the center of most of our universes. The very few that lived in SoCal and the great mass that lives outside L.A. that ever saw these magazine cars. Magazines and the people that put them together were our heros, not so much the guys in the magazines, but the guys that made the books. The most visible guy I remember during the early years (I of course, was not old enough to see a Hot Rod magazine until it had been on the newsstands for decades) was Tom Medley. This guy was, and still is... someone I greatly respect for his endless contributions he made to hot rodding. A funny guy with a terrific talent who worked for years and was a key player in Petersen's success at HRM and responsible for the reincarnation of Rod and Custom, only to be dumped by his friend after a mere thirty years of service. But that's another story. The magazines might have been the strongest influence we had with hot rods, we depended on the monthly pages to give us how-tos and places we could get the stuff. Every month when the new issues arrived it was always a race to see who could get the new books first, this image of a guy running into the club garage waving his arms and yelling... "the new phone books are here... the new phone books are her", oops that was somebody else, but you get the idea..

Today many of us are proud to admit that we are a bubble or two off because we have collections of hundreds and thousands of these old musty magazines (my wife really likes it when I bring a stack in the house to look for an article that you are sure is in this pile somewhere... it smells a little like dead people... she says). In the early years there were many titles, most didn't last more than a few issues, but nonetheless are still coveted for the history they hold, not to mention the pictures of cars long gone. There were full sized mags like HRM which actually started life larger than they have been since about 1950. There were also the "small books" like Rod and Custom and Hop-Up. This was a cool size but wasn't really appreciated until they became collectible some four plus decades later. There was a clear east coast - west coast slant to the magazines which was real clear when you look at the cars, the two worlds of hot rods and customs had very different styles. The collecting of these musty relics is a big deal and they are a hell-of-a-lot more fun to look at that high school annuals which of course expose your actual school days exploits as opposed to the ones you have been telling your buddies about, not to mention that great picture. You don't see the old magazines at swap meets as much as you used to, there were stacks of mags for ten bucks a pile, now they're on ebay for ten bucks a piece (plus another $3.50 or so for shipping). There should be two bullets for every ebay magazine sale, one for the seller and one for the goof ball that paid that ridiculous price. Speaking of the price of shipping, did you know that a few years ago when JC Whitney went banko, in the reorganization (that's legal speak for deciding who we are going to screw out of what you owe them and who you're not) it was found that the only profitable part of JC was the shipping department. The entire company was reorganized around that income! I wonder how long it's going to be until ebay starts taking a cut of the shipping fees too.

Magazine always were and continue to be a great source to get the blood pumping. The for sale ads are a good start for me every month, for the magazines that have them, like the terrific new full color Goodguys Gazette. Looking through those usually pumps up the blood pressure numbers a bit, some of those guys must be nuts asking that kind of money for those cars! I think I said again the other day... seems to be a monthly deal. Recently looking through the for sale ads in the back of HRM I noticed an ad that I had apparently notices years ago. I bet you didn't know HRM had those ads... nobody ever looked at them because the cars were SO EXPENSIVE!  Anyway, it was an ad for Butch Leal's Z-11 ‘63 Chevrolet, then owned by some guy in Florida, I think this was 1966 or so. In the ad it talked about the aluminum front end and Z-11 engine, AND EXTRA PARTS!!! all jammed into the allotted 24 words. In 1966 you could buy a new 396SS Chevelle for $3000, this guy wanted $3500 for the car. Well, you can image what I thought about that, in 1966. In fact I wrote something in the margin next to the ad (thankfully in pencil)... "this guy is nuts". Well... I guess over priced sellers have survived time and some of the magazines are holding their own in this world of change.

Even though the essence of many magazines is still offering what we live for, some just barely get the job done, it seems their reason for living is to pump up subscription count with 2 years for $7.99, raise ad rates and sell ads, interesting content be dammed. One magazine in particular in the street rod world carries a 55% ad content, meaning 55% of the printed pages are ads! Almost none do it with the passion and personal interest they way Wally and Pete did it in 1948. Yeah- I know- times change, but thankfully someone is holding the line. The books that are leading the way with creative content, photography, layout and writing are The Rodders' Journal and Hop-Up. The only axe they have to grind other than selling enough to stay in business, is doing the best job they can to create something memorable.

Ogling, whether it's in a magazine or in person is a big part of what we do, gray haired slow walking flathead rattling hot rodder or noggin tattooed twin turboed air bagged rice grinder. Not pumping the Goodguys Gazette here, but there is a lot of car pictures in here for a reason, it's what we do, ogling is cool, and that seems to interest us more than just about anything else, I said almost, especially in color! We all like it and a really cool thing is that we can all ogle each others cars and steal some clever ideas and call them our own.  If you really want to get your car in the magazine, put it in the for sale section, it'll last for decades, usually without the pencil notes in the margin.  

Now before we go I've got to fix something. Recently I wrote about having a bad day. In that column I talked about a guy that runs a yellow Stude at Bonneville who had a bunch of bad days year after year working the bugs out of a 394 Olds, that's a 1961 engine design! The effort that he put out was remarkable, but it didn't come across that way in the column. Over the better part of a decade this guy has thrashed on this thing and threw great gobs of money at it and now has the thing running 220, and the future holds nothing but good days. He is within striking distance of a record held by a combination that has all kinds of state of the art parts available to them, the Stude guy figures it out, one part at a time. He deserves a lot of credit and I certainly respect him for his accomplishments, and apologize for giving him yet another bad day. Sorry Bob.