If That's Ed Roth,
This Must Be January
By Dave Wallace
Photos by Dave Wallace and Sky Wallace

I've always had mixed feelings about car shows. It's easy and fun to bash the angel-hair-and-mirrors crowd; it's hard to stay away. Show season is between seasons, even in California.

It's been months since the nostrils got their last hits of nitro and burning rubber. Rod runs and outdoor gatherings are done for the century. Pleasure drives in the '61 Belvedere or '71 New Yorker are curtailed to short bursts, this time of year; the mountain roads are too slippery for carefree cruising after the sun and temperature go down. Besides, I'm genuinely enjoying the quality time with family that comes only with wintertime, when the strips shut down.

We heat with wood at my house, and there's something special about a quiet evening in front of the fire, catching up on relationships and, after the relations fall asleep, on all the reading material that's been piling up since summer.

Until the phone rings, shattering my cozy cocoon. Almost nobody knows my unlisted home number. It's gotta be Jensen or Faddis or Bumbeck or my brother, wondering which day we'll do the big car show in San Francisco or Sacramento. Somebody heard on the radio that "Big Daddy" Roth and "TV" Tommy Ivo will be there, along with the usual washed-up movie stars and pinup models from magazines eight years old. If the weather's nice, we could even take one of my Mopars, or Rodger's '53 Studebaker, or Julio's 455 Buick, or Sky's second-owner '71 Dart. "Hey, c'mon! What else ya gonna do in January?"

Ed Roth was airbrushing "monster" T-shirts at my first car show. Ed Roth was selling silkscreened Rat Fink T-shirts at my last car show. In between lie three and a half decades of angel hair; Batmobiles; a motorized bar stool; overchromed "race cars" that never made a pass; Martin Milner in his Adam 12 uniform; coffins on wheels; surfing movies; a phone booth on wheels; Batman's original Robin; miracle-wax demonstrations; toilets on wheels; and a Tom Selleck lookalike with a phony-Ferrari kit car who'd sign the name "Magnum" for money and, for a couple more bucks, pose for Polaroids with gushing wives and girlfriends.

Unlike many of my diehard friends, I have no quarrel with such stunts. As a former drag-strip publicity man who promoted Evel Knievel and Bo Diddley and kite cycles and the guy who dove out of a hot-air balloon onto an air mattress on the starting line, I know that car-show promoters need to offer something for the spouse and kids who influence most entertainment decisions. I'm humored by such "attractions" for the same reason that I enjoy car burnings by jet jockeys and car-stereo competitions by hearing-impaired teenagers.

Besides, for every dead-movie-star car or motorized bathtub, there've been a thousand killer rods, kustoms, motorcycles, musclecars and real race cars that kids like me might never get to see, were it not for car shows. I also get to see a lot of old friends and colleagues whose paths no longer cross mine, except in the crowded aisles of a car show. We're usually wearing baseball caps and jackets, with hands stuffed into pockets, because the promoter or the facility's manager is reluctant to heat such a huge room.

That's often the first thing we bitch about, followed in no particular order by: all the angel hair and mirrors this year; the escalation of ticket prices since the Sixties; NHRA's reluctance to require Pro Stock Trucks to run blowers and nitro, no wings; those darn kids with flames on their forearms and rings in their belly buttons; the trend in nostalgia Top Fuel to aluminum cylinder heads. Meanwhile, family members stand abandoned in the background, eyes rolling, wondering where the soap-opera star (or his/her lookalike) is signing autographs.

One thing I never have seen is the World's Greatest Car-Show Display. That would've been viewed only by the lucky folks who attended one of Washington, D.C.'s, big Ramrods shows in the early Sixties. Legend has it that a beer-fueled gang of ne'er-do-wells from the Maryland suburbs decided to create an ultrarealistic setting to represent their car club. All around a member's Anglia gasser, these Greenbelt guys re-created their clubhouse environment, right down to the tiniest detail: oily rags, empty beer cans, cigarette butts, girlie magazines, the works.

Where else ya gonna get that kind of entertainment in January?

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