East away from the Sierras, south from the Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders. Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain
February is a great time to go to the desert. It is usually cold, wet, and dreary, in the Bay Area and the desert promises the warmth of clear skies. This year is different, for the first time since 1860, February will not bring any rain to the Bay Area and while we were getting ready to go to Death Valley, the forecasters kept forecasting rain. I have been rained on in the California desert, maybe, five times and only once was the rain hard enough to get us wet and that was a cloud burst that lasted about thirty seconds, so the forecast did not seem very threatening.
I was aghast when I realized that I haven’t been to Death Valley in seven years. Seven years! In my mind’s eye, I go to Death Valley twice a year and, I did, from the late seventies to the early eights, but I tapered off to once a year in the nineties, and then, apparently, I kept tapering. And now once every seven years? However, going over Tehachapi Pass, at the southern end of the Sierras, as we climb out of the San Juaquin Valley – as the southern part of the Great Central Valley is called – and enter the Mojave Desert, nothing much seems different. Oh, sure, there are more windmills and bigger windmills but nothing else seems to have changed.
Once in the Mojave, we see a new lake only to realize it is a giant solar farm. One of the things that I like about the drive from the Bay Area to Death Valley is the subtle change from very urban to very wild. The Mojave nearest Tehachapi is strangely high-tech with Edwards Air Base – which bills itself as The Center of the Aerospace Testing Universe – the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake which tests naval air weapons systems, and The Mojave Air and Space Port in the town of Mojave where several billionaires are racing each other into space. Next comes the RV Mojave where more RVs are flying American Flags and now, some Trump flags, somehow, flying a Trump flag on an RV in a public campground in the desert seems like an angry act of defiance. It makes me wonder how long those feelings of injustice – both real and imagined – have been festering. Then Trona, an old-time mining town gone high-tech. North of Trona is the Slate Range Crossing with a super overlook into the Panamint Valley. We expected to catch the sunset there and then go on to meet Courtney, Gina, and JR at Panamint Springs for dinner, but the sky was getting increasingly overcast and the light flat.
Over dinner at Panamint Springs, Courtney said that the precise forecast was rain about five in the morning continuing until about eleven. We went to bed, under cloudy skies but there was no rain of any real substance until about seven the next morning. Then it started to rain for real. Then it kept raining and raining, off and on, all day. I’ve been seriously rained on in the desert in Nevada and Utah, even in the Atlas Mountains, but those were cloud bursts and this was different. Even though this seemed to be frontal rain, it was not a drizzle or steady rain, but big drops of rain that seemed to be falling through an otherwise very dry sky. Plop, a drop would hit my jacket with a noticeable sound, then another one, then another, even as the first drop dried so that my jacket and the ground was always almost dry.
Whatever reasons Americans may pretend for taking a gun out into the desert, most of them are going to fire at road signs, water tanks, memorial plaques, wind pumps or old beer cans.… Even if it is no more than a symptomof mindless vandalism, this mania for shooting at human artifacts is not quite senseless; the identifiable humanness of their origins gives these objects a different status from everything else in view. The works of man inevitably attract the attention of mankind. Reyner Banham in Scenes in America Deserta.
The next morning, we woke – well, some woke, some slept in late – to a clear sky without a cloud in sight.
We liked to go to Death Valley for President’s Day because it provided a couple of days of bright sun in the dreariest part of the winter. This year however the trees are blooming and we are on track for the dryest, sunniest, February since 1860.
I meant to send this out before we left. So even though we are back, here it is as a sort of placeholder.
I only know – defining know as having shared a meal – one person who owns a hotrod and he thought that my pictures of the Grand National Roadster Show presented a skewed picture. I told him that I would post some pictures of more normal hotrods.
I thought the ’34 car above was terrific but the custom Cadilac behind it was drawing the biggest groud.
I thought that the deuce above was particularly handsome and the paint job on the roadster below completely changed its look.
A restored drag racing truck, originally from Stockton, that raced in the mid60s.
I was impressed with this custom Thunderbird, not so much that I liked it, although I did, but at how hard it must have been to chop the top with that windshield.
Both Michele and I liked this custom 1954 Kaiser by renowned – I only say that because I read it on Kustomrama, a sort of database for all things hotrod – customizer Larry Grobe from Elk Grove, Illinois who built it as a homage to George Barris (the great California customizer from the 60s who I do know of).
Rick Dore’s “After Shock,” a 1937 Ford which would fit in perfectly with Art Deco French cars of the era.
I’m not going to make judgments now, I just think that it depends upon how we treat one another between now and the time we have a nominee. Joe Biden, six days before the Iowa caucuses, when asked if he would support Bernie Sanders.
I think Trump is beatable. A lot of why Trump won is because he ran against the establishment – both the Democratic and Republican Establishment as well as the mainstream, mostly Democratic, media – but he also won due to the terrible campaign run by Clinton. Unfortunately for us Democrats, Trump also ran a brilliant, transformative, campaign relying on Social Media (ironically because he didn’t have as much money as Clinton and couldn’t afford much television time). Beatable, that is If the Democrats run a good – probably modern is a better way to say it – campaign. Because the Democratic Media and Political Establishments wanted Joe Biden, who seems the best bet for creating the least amount of change, they convinced themselves that the nominee was going to be him. But they were concerned about losing the Bernie crowd, so they tried to make it very clear; the goal – the only goal, really – is beating Donald J. Trump. They wanted us to know that beating Trump is more important than any interparty squabble. During the last six, seven, months, I’ve been asked, probably close to twenty times, if I would commit to voting for the Democratic candidate no matter who, even if he is a moderate like Joe Biden. I always – very reluctantly – say “Yes”.
But Bernie Sanders got the most votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, is leading the nomination Nationwide according to several polls, and it is now looking like Sanders could actually get the nomination. I’m beginning to understand how those questioners felt, what if the “moderates” who like Joe Biden only think that beating Trump is more important if the moderates win the primary? Looking at the Biden statement at the top is sort of frightening, Biden is actually saying he will not commit to backing Sanders (right now).
A reasonable case can be made that the Democratic Party, the Nancy Pelosi party, the Biden party would rather Trump win than Bernie. I know that is heresy and I hope I’m being hysterical but, while a Trump presidency is worse for the world, it is better for the Corporate Democratic Establishment. They are in office because of the support Fossel Fuel Industry and the Pharmicidical Industry. The Green New Deal – which Pelosi has consistently denigrated and has refused to even have a hearing on – would gut the Fossel Fuel Industry and cut off a major cash cow, the same for Medicare for All and the Pharmicidical Industry. It scares me.
We went to Los Angeles a couple of weekends ago. The last time we went to LA, we were coming from Albuquerque via silver City and Tuscon and we both felt like we were coming home. This time, coming from Silicon Valley where it is 20° colder, LA seemed like a different world. I’m using Los Angeles in its generic form, we actually stayed in Glendale, which is a little north of LA, kinda because it is convenient to both Pomona and LA proper, but also because, across the street from our hotel, is one of the best Dim Sum restaurants we’ve ever been to, Din Tai Fung.
As an aside, Din Tai Fung is a huge Taiwan restaurant chain with two Michelin star restaurants in Hong Kong and restaurants all over Asia – Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand – as well as Australia, Europe, and here (obviously on the here part). Din Tai Fung just shouldn’t be that good, it is a big, impersonal, chain after all, but it is great (even the LA Times says it is the best Dim Sum around). The restaurant boasts that it is the second-best chain for world travelers according to CNN Travel. BTW, 7-Eleven is the first best chain with – as a surprising fact – 20,700 7-Elevens in Japan (as opposed to 8,500 in the US). End aside.
The excuss for the trip was the Grand National Roadster Show in Pomona but it was really a getaway weekend, the kind of weekend that, a couple of years ago, we would have used to go to the desert. The Grand National Roadster Show – I love the pomposity of that name – is completely different than I expected. If it’s not obvious, the show is for hotrods and their allies and I sort of thought that hotrods were a dying breed along with all the old white guys that have been the center of the hotrod world since World War II. Yes, the old white guys are dying out but they are being replaced by younger white guys who are collecting the old cars as if they were old Ferrari’s. Those previous sentences are a huge simplification, largely because the allies have become as big as the classical hotrods themselves and new people are building new old-hotrods. The allies include what we used to call lead sleds and lowriders, as well as restored old race cars, and the new hotrods are exquisitely built and very expensive (expensive as in sometimes millions). I didn’t expect this Grand National Roadster Show, I didn’t expect it to be so alive and vital. In many ways, The Grand National Roadster Show is like a three day Pebble Beach Concours in a parallel universe.
Like the Pebble Beach Concours, the Grand National has dozens of arcane classes – subclasses might be a better descriptor – so that there are lots of winners. A typical class at Pebble is Class P-1: Zagato Centennial Prewar. It was won by Lawrence Auriana a Portfolio co-Manager of Federated Kaufmann Fund and a member of the New York Society of Security Analysts. Auriana won the class with a 1932 Maserati Spider V4 – for some unknown reason, the Maserati Brothers called it a V4 although it had a V16 engine – which had been a racecar but was re-bodied by Ugo Zagato in 1934. At the Grand National, a similar class is Class 122: Early Street Coupe pre‐1935. At the Grand National this year, this was won by Jim Bridgewater, from Kankakee, IL with a 1934 Ford 5 Window Coupe built by Royboy Productions. Bridgewater owns Midwest Transit Equipment Inc. a bus rebuilder and refurbisher, whose website says is the #1 Bus Dealer in the USA.
One area where Pebble Beach and the Grand National are wildly different is the placement, kind, and number of vendors. At Pebble, the vendors – usually car care products or model car booths -are kept well away from the show cars but at the Grand National, the cars are sort of mixed in with the vendors, and many of the vendors are craftsmen who design and build entire cars, often to order, for a price well north of a million dollars. We stopped to admire a sort of Bugattiesque custom-built chassis.
and we ended up talking to another admirer and racecar builder about this strange new, to us, world and, eventually, Trump (he started the Trump part, really). The fellow admirer was for Trump – duh! – and suggested, maybe more than suggested, that the car people who were here were Trump voters because they, like Trump, are the kind of people who make things. They were the kind of people who did honest work. The Democrat he seemed to most dislike was Joe Biden who he thought was a typical Washington crook although I had the feeling that Bernie was so far out of the question that he wasn’t even worth talking about. Michele and I walked away thinking that there was no way this guy, or most of the people in the hall, would be voting for a Democrat no matter how moderate.
The show’s raison d’etre is to find America’s Most Beautiful Roadster (past winners are not eligible, so, like TIME‘s Person of the Year, don’t expect a repeat) At the center of this show are ten wildly different roadsters duking it out for the title. A roadster used to be a bare minimum kind of open car but, over the years, in the hotrod world, it has morphed into several broad but – seemingly – pretty formal design categories. These can range from subtle to flamboyant but the design is often based on, very roughly, an existing car that has been modified. One such car is the classic 1932 Ford – called a deuce for the two in 1932.
The winning car, shown above sporting a spectacular flame job, is a deuce, sort of. I doubt that it has any Ford parts and certainly it doesn’t have any parts made in 1932. This car started life, not in 1932, but in the late 1990s as one of a series of ten steel-bodied cars built in the style, called Murdoc Highboys, of a classic 1932 Ford hotrod. They were built in San Bernardino, California, by Angie’s Auto. The cars were designed by Chip Foose and Jerry Kugel, both hot-rodding icons and they were powered – overpowered is probably way more accurate – by a 5.7L Corvette engine built by Street and Performance of Mena, Arkansas. This car was bought by Monty Belsham, a large General Contractor from Canada, and completely taken apart and restored by Doug Jerger of Squeeg’s Kustoms in Chandler, Arizona where it was given an outstanding flame paint job. This car was treated with all the love and respect of a vintage Ferrari racecar except that it was designed and built in the United States rather than Modena, Italy. BTW, the black car at the top of the post, with the voluminous fenders, is another version of that series.
The more traditional deuce, below, is not a 1932 Ford either. It based on a steel body built by Brookville Roadsters in Brookville, Ohio, but it does have a Ford engine at least (and I love the wheels with the tire sidewalls scrubbed of all identifying info.
Another popular template is the Model T Ford or Model A Ford that we used to call a T-bucket and are often ridiculously flamboyant like this 1915 Model T Ford – actually built in 1970-71 by Danny Eishstedt on a body built by Tex Collins at Cal Automotive. It has been restored and is now owned by Walter Sigsbey. My favorite car at the show, however, was subtle in the extream, a 1927 Ford roadster with a track nose that was built by Mike Abssy at Schrader’s Speed and Style in Azusa, California and actually seems to have been built out of Ford parts, including an old Ford flathead engine (well, a copy of an old Ford engine).
Although I’m not particularly interested in hotrods, they are not usually my esthetic, I admire the workmanship and I’ve been to a lot of hot rod shows over the years. Often alone because I don’t know any hotrodders any more. Usually, I spend a couple of hours wandering around and will only find a car or two that grabs me, but the Grand National really is grand. It is chockablock with beautifully designed and built cars even if most of them are not my style. We sent about six hours there and left because we were burned out not because we had run out of cars. I don’t want to burn you out so I’m going to end it here.
If you still want to stick around, here are a couple of pictures of cars and details that interested or amused me. In order, they are another 1932 Ford Roadster, this one finished by friends of Ken Katashio of Ebnina, Japan after he died;
still another version of a ’32 Roadster was raced in Michigan in the mid-60s – in the AA Gas Street Roadster class – and lovingly restored over a period of 16 years Rich Conklin (sending out messages to fellow hotrodders like Hi there guys, We are in the process of restoring the Dorman/Koopman 32 roadster…This is a long shot but anyone happen to have any other pictures of this car? We are setting up the steering and any pictures would really help us out!);
The brute below is the great Shirley Muldowney’s NHRA Top Fuel Dragster. Shirley is the first person to win three world championships, man or woman. The quickest she has gone in this car is 1,000 feet in 4.64 seconds (with a top speed of 320.20 miles per hour). I especially like the Simpson parachute safety strap which says stopping your ass since ’59 on one side and remove before flight on the other side.
A 1930 Ford Model A sedan built by Dana and Lorne Hinkle from Romona, California. The paint job allegedly took over although 3,000 hours although I’m not sure they were hours well spent.
A famous car designed by the legendary Norm Grabowski in the early 50s and featured in 77 Sunset Strip. It is now owned by Ross and Beth Myers of Boyertown, Pennsylvania. Myers is the CEO of American Infrastructure Inc. which says it is a Construction and Materials Powerhouse.
