Thread: hot rod history ?

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I'd say there hasn't quite been this kind of divide in the past, or more accurately to this degree of discontent.

Being people, certain tendencies prevail. Rodders would often mock customizers and vice versa. The old "if it don't go, chrome it!" slur came from that. Rods were go, customs were show. Sure, there were exceptions on both sides, but the "image" followed that line. Competition is at the root of a lot of what motivates creative people, and that applies to cars as much as anywhere/anything.

Just some random thoughts;

I would point out that Roth never had a car that wasn't painted in shiny finish. He also worked the show circuit way more than he did the street/strip. He was an artist, a car was just the medium.

When rodders and customizers "went at it" in times past it was anywhere from mild ragging to moderate bickering, hardly the white hot rage thing. What's changed today is there is less respect in general throughout society. Also, there is more of a divide based on, what I would say with some reservation and wishing for a better term, class distinctions. In general I'd attribute it to the "warfare" fostered in the media and their close elitest cousins in politics. The temperament/mood spills over into everyday life and manifests itself in multiple ways. As such you see the self described "rat rodders" spew their "rich guys ruin the hobby" tripe. The older guys don't see themselves that way and resent the personal attack. They retaliate in kind and then the "young guy" feels compelled to do likewise, repeating the cycle. Envy, hate, and narrow mindedness lead to ugly things. While some of us "old guys" haven't helped the situation, I still contend the bigger chip is on the "younger guys" shoulders.

Now, that risks inflaming the us vs them mentality, which isn't what I would like to see. I'd much rather the young guys do what they want to do (within reason without hurting the hobby in general) and let their output stand on it's own. Rather, what we often see on sites like this is young, inexperienced guys making silly comments something like, "I hate those shiny, show car, trailer queens............they're not REAL hot rods". That gets followed with some blather about how cars used to be done, and that's the only legitimate way for a real rod to be. In this they show a complete ignorance of history/reality. The internet and book shelves of numerous stores are jammed with books that chronicle the history of hot rodding with relative accuracy. With a minimum of effort one could see that hot rodding has followed a "natural" progression to where it is today. Largely, well built, and admittedly expensive, rods evolved to where they are because their owners evolved. Many guys who drive high dollar rides today, were low buck guys 40 years ago, just as the young guns today are. As these older guys progressed through their lives they worked at careers that enriched them monetarily, that "improved" their tastes in hot rodding amenities. As an example, in the late '60's early '70's it was innovative to put an automatic trans in a rod. Just as "in the day" customizers were motivated to make their old cars look more modern, even futuristic, so too rodders wanted to put the latest technology in their old buggies. In time this meant adding things like power steering, independent suspension where it hadn't been originally, air conditioning, higher grade materials, and more contemporary colors, among other similar modifications. With each passing year, more and more people were able to afford cars (not just rods, but sports cars, race cars, vintage classics and so on). As our society became more affluent, so did our hobbies. Yet in rodding, the continuing thread was, adapt newer technology to older cars, not unlike what a mid '30's rodder did by putting a flathead V8 in a model T. Then along comes these young upstarts who start saying that that sort of rodding is somehow illegitimate, not necessarily in those words, but by the general tone of their comments and accusations. Well, the old guys who earned their stripes over a few decades of doing "real rodding" just flat don't/didn't like the bad mouthing.

Now, given that the constant thread in rodding since the 1920's has been to upgrade using the newest techology, can "retro rodding" really be hot rodding? Something to contemplate perhaps, but not directly applicable to this thread. I say that as someone who's spent a good part of the last 18 or so years doing mostly "traditional" cars, a term that doesn't necessarily have universal agreement on it's definition. By traditional, I mean representative of what I remember from my youth, with some "poetic" license. Most of them are posted in my gallery. A couple are in suede, both the '40 coupe and the '36 coupe were flathead powered, some were muscle car "restorations", or perhaps more accurately called restifications. The two '32's were more upscale, but not unlike early '60's cars with shiny paint, and small block Chevs. The '72 pickup was a typical early '90's style, and the '33 will be another primered car reminiscent of a car that was parked in a driveway along my paper route in 1961. And not unlike most of my contemporaries they are all driven, not trailered, even though some of them were/are what some would consider "high dollar".

If I had my druthers I'd just as soon there weren't any contentious divide. But as long as there are people new (relatively so) to the hobby who insist on trying to force a negative attitude on those who've walked the path ahead of them, there's gonna be push back.

There's a reason a fish doesn't know he's wet.