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Saw an article in Autoweek about the passing of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth.
Now those of you who're under 45 are probably wondering "Who????". Ed Roth was an icon of our hobby. Back in the late 50s and 60s, Roth was doing car-related graphics for the SoCal Hot Rod set. His best known creation was a creature named "Rat Fink" - a slimy-looking rodent with flies buzzing around its head. His graphics were everywhere - T-shirts, window stickers, painted on dragsters... Every car magazine featured ads with Ed's stuff including (politcally incorrect for today) T-shirts declaring Coors beer to be the 'Breakfast of Champions", and references to Viet Cong as "Gooks".
Anyway, news of his passing made me dig up some of my collection of 60s car magazines looking for ads for Roth's stuff. Not only did I find plenty of those, I found a virtual anthropoligical mother lode of background on where the car hobby came from... Two words, "Southern California" kinda summed up the basis for our hobby.
Just looking at articles about drag strips and road courses in SoCal back in the sixties that are all now long gone brought back a flood of memories about just how important Southern California was to the developmentof the car hobby and the cars we all love today.
A number of us here are old enough to remember those days, but many are not. I would suggest that the next time you're at a swap meet or yard sale and you see a stack of 35-year old magazines - buy a handful of them. See Ed Roth's ads and others like the $80 set of Magnum 500s or the complete early Mustang dual exhaust systems for $50 or Carrol Shelby crowing about his European race victories or hawking his dollar-fifty Cobra T-shirts.
Very cool stuff....
Glenn Morgan: 66 GT V-Burgundy Fastback 351w+toploader+9 in. TracLoc. Started out as a rusted-out Chicago-area crusher. After sacrificing a solid 66 coupe for its sheetmetal sub-assemblies, I have one solid (and expensive) work in progress!
Now those of you who're under 45 are probably wondering "Who????". Ed Roth was an icon of our hobby. Back in the late 50s and 60s, Roth was doing car-related graphics for the SoCal Hot Rod set. His best known creation was a creature named "Rat Fink" - a slimy-looking rodent with flies buzzing around its head. His graphics were everywhere - T-shirts, window stickers, painted on dragsters... Every car magazine featured ads with Ed's stuff including (politcally incorrect for today) T-shirts declaring Coors beer to be the 'Breakfast of Champions", and references to Viet Cong as "Gooks".
Anyway, news of his passing made me dig up some of my collection of 60s car magazines looking for ads for Roth's stuff. Not only did I find plenty of those, I found a virtual anthropoligical mother lode of background on where the car hobby came from... Two words, "Southern California" kinda summed up the basis for our hobby.
Just looking at articles about drag strips and road courses in SoCal back in the sixties that are all now long gone brought back a flood of memories about just how important Southern California was to the developmentof the car hobby and the cars we all love today.
A number of us here are old enough to remember those days, but many are not. I would suggest that the next time you're at a swap meet or yard sale and you see a stack of 35-year old magazines - buy a handful of them. See Ed Roth's ads and others like the $80 set of Magnum 500s or the complete early Mustang dual exhaust systems for $50 or Carrol Shelby crowing about his European race victories or hawking his dollar-fifty Cobra T-shirts.
Very cool stuff....
Glenn Morgan: 66 GT V-Burgundy Fastback 351w+toploader+9 in. TracLoc. Started out as a rusted-out Chicago-area crusher. After sacrificing a solid 66 coupe for its sheetmetal sub-assemblies, I have one solid (and expensive) work in progress!