Thread: Dan Woods Milk Truck on Ebay

Tweet

Crack open one of your hidden piggy banks Pops and step up!!!!! That's you!!!

The other day I was at the dentist for the 6 mo. cleaning. He knows I'm into "old cars" and he's a closet car nut but without the desire/need/whatever to directly participate. So each time I'm in the chair he starts a conversation about old cars (which is odd since questions presume answers, and they've got their hands shoved in your mouth.....but I digress). Somehow he steered the conversation to old show rods. We talked about bubble tops, angel hair, yada yada, and then he says "you remember that car that had the back half of the body shaped like a German helmet?" I can remember the names of many of these old show rods, but at that precise time it wasn't coming to me. He surmised he could find stuff on the internet if he only knew how to identify it. I told him it shouldn't be too hard and that I'd do a search and forward some links. Got home and found "The Red Baron" (yeah! why couldn't you remember that!!) in a few minutes and sent him some info. That car did a reverse of many, it was first designed by Tom Daniel as a model for Monogram and THEN built as a "real" car at the commission of show promoter Bob Larivee.

Doing the hunt for web info of course led to "stuff" about many of the show rods of the latter '60s, early '70s, and it occured to me that that was a unique slice of automotive history. Why did the offbeat show rods burst onto the scene, and then, just fade away? If you remember there were cars made from bath tubs, actual phone booths, outhouses, coffins, and so on. Many of them were flat out silly, but that's showbiz. Now of course, to appeal to our sense of nostalgia, they're being resurrected regularly. I wonder if any of you younger guys are mulling; "What were they thinking?"