The Beach Boys are blasting from the PA system at Harry Fleming’s 130-acre junkyard in Egg Harbor township, the venue for “Wheels of May,” a one-day exposition devoted to the American hot rod. Unlike car shows in Atlantic City and New York, there are no klieg lights bouncing off shiny sheet metal, no cars draped with impeccably tailored young ladies rotating on giant turntables. Harry’s is a decidedly funkier setting, but real hot rodders wouldn’t have it any other way.
With a light drizzle falling most of the day, it is only the diehards who have brought their precious four-wheeled babies to show off. Bruce Aydelotte has driven here in his 1932 three-window Ford Coupe, the “L’il Deuce Coupe” of Beach Boys song and legend. Aydelotte, president of the Egg Harbor chapter of the Wheelers, a national club, built his deuce from the ground up ten years ago. As is so often the case, it was a piecemeal project.
“I began with the frame,” he explains. “It was used. Then gradually I added the suspension, the wheels, the engine, the body, and the interior. I got parts from everywhere, some from right here at Harry’s.”
Though Aydelotte saved money on labor, doing most of it himself, the cost of parts and equipment adds up to a considerable sum. “The frame cost $2,000, the body cost $8,000, both used,” he says. “Then I had a lot of custom work done.”
This included the car’s roof, which he “chopped” (lowered) 3.5 inches, and the powerplant, a four-cylinder 1951 Mercury flathead with Offenhauser heads. The wheels are authentic Ford, though from 1948, and the tires are radials specially made to look just like skinny, old-fashioned bias tires. “They cost twice as much as normal bias or radial tires, but they look just like the kind they used in the ’50s.”
How much did it wind up costing?
“To tell you the truth,” he says, “I don’t know. I tried to keep track, but I quit counting when I reached $30,000.”
Nonetheless, he says, $30,000 all in is a bargain compared to what building a hot rod can cost today. “An original body by itself costs $30,000,” he says. “You can get a new fiberglass one for about $12,000, but some guys just don’t want anything but the real thing.”
Aydelotte is one of those kind of guys. In his quest for authenticity, he eschews plush upholstery in favor of heavy Mexican blankets. “Hot rodders in the 1950’s couldn’t afford upholstery,” he explains, opening the door of his car, “so they covered their seats with Mexican blankets just like these.”
What does his wife think of his expensive hobby?
“She’s not here, is she?” he asks, rhetorically, prompting a guffaw from his fellow hot rodders. “Actually,” he adds, “she used to come, but the shows got too much for her.”
Joseph Johnston, a car collector from Detroit, is familiar with the syndrome. “If you’re dating, engaged, or maybe newly married, women will go everywhere with you for a while,” he says. “But after awhile, well, there are limits to true love. There are too many things to attend.” These, Johnston says, include car shows, auctions, race weekends, club meetings, hoedowns (open-air concerts) and “cruises” (informal gatherings at diners or other destinations).
In New Jersey, says Larry Lazareff, who publishes Cruising (cruisingmagazine.net), devoted to hot rod events in the six-state (NJ, NY, PA, MD, DE, VA) region, “I could go to an event within an hour of my house every day of the week. It can take over your life. It’s addictive.” Nobody claims to know exactly how many hot rod clubs there are in New Jersey, but Lazareff estimates there are at least 350, with memberships ranging from a half dozen (the Road Devils) to 327 (Garden State ’50s), both In Millville.
What’s the appeal? It isn’t utilitarian. Any relatively new, factory-made car will be more economical and reliable, and easier to maintain than a hot rod. Nor is the goal necessarily mind-bending, State Trooper-attracting, high-performance.
“I never race mine,” says Aydelotte of his snazzy-looking roadster. “The engine doesn’t put out more than 150 horsepower. And this is 70-year-old steel you’re messing with.”
John Taylor, a TV repairman from Dorothy, in Sussex County, owns a wicked looking, jet-black “T-Bucket,” a 1924 Model T Ford with lightweight bicycle-style wheels up front, slick “gumball” tires in back, and a supercharged, 550-horsepower Chevy V8 in between. But as Taylor admits, all that muscle is strictly for show. “The car is too dangerous to race,” he says. “These tires would go all over the place.”
More than anything else, the hot rod seems to be a time machine. “When I get behind the wheel of my hot rod, I’m a kid again,” says Bob Cross, 60, of Mount Laurel, who owns a laser red 1932 Ford Coupe and serves as state representative for the national “Good Guys” hot rod organization. “I love the deep, throbbing sound the exhaust makes, especially when I’m coming through a tunnel.”
The next best thing to driving your hot rod is talking about it with other hot rodders. “It’s a very social scene,” says Taylor. “We all like getting together with the other owners.”
At the heart of hot rodding is nostalgia for a simpler era in motoring (whether or not one is old enough to remember that era). This was a time before anti-pollution controls made engines more difficult for the do-it-yourselfer to modify, before onboard micro-processors monitored every car functions, before foreign cars flooded and then took over the market.
“The car was a member of the family,” says Rich Mushenski, 64, founder of the Freewheelers hot rod club in Netcong. “You’d wash it, you’d tune it up, you’d change the oil and plugs and tires yourself. You were expected to have an allegiance to the brand. You were either a Ford man or a Chevy man. It was a personal relationship.”
Hot rodders still have that personal relationship with their wheels.
The event at Fleming’s drew all kinds of cars—many that fit the Rebel Without a Cause image many people have of hot rods, but others that look like well-mannered suburban stock from the 1960s or ’70s that just happen to be pristine. It all raises the question: what is a hot rod? The answer depends on whom you ask.
“It’s usually a Ford built between 1926 and 1934,” says Mushenski. Bob Cross recalls a time when “hot rod” meant a car built before 1939. “But nowadays some define a hot rod as pre-1948,” he says.
In recent years, hot rod culture has developed two subsets. One is the “street rod,” which generally refers to a vintage car on which spare-no-expense transformations have been lavished by professional customizers. Ever since 1997, when hot rods made their first appearance at the hoity-toity Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, people speak of “investment grade” street rods, some selling at auction for upwards of $400,000 or more. In response to this inflation, another subset has emerged: the “rat rod.” This is typically a crudely finished vehicle that eschews the gloss of a professionally finished car for the more primal look of primer and unabashed rust spots.
According to some, rat rods are a political statement, a protest against the elitism and high cost of the “trailer queens”—high-priced street rods that are trucked, not driven, to shows. But for rockabilly deejay Professor Ouch, from Princeton’s WPRB-FM, a rat rod is more a matter of attitude than sheet metal.
“Rat rods are the counterculture,” he says. “They’re sideburns and tattoos. James Dean and Elvis. Burlesque and roller derby. They’re sex appeal and rebellion.”
This ethos has made the goateed “professor,” a man in his mid forties, something of a cult figure on the tri-state circuit where he and his broadcast sidekick, Scott Binder, host numerous parties, hot rod shows, and cruises. These include their own three-day extravaganza, the Hot Rod Hoedown, which last year drew 1,200 cars to Oakford, Pennsylvania. They expect more for this year’s show, set to take place September 11, 12, and 13 at Adventureland in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.
The Hoedown, explains Binder, was spawned in 1999 when he and the Professor were turned away from a hot road show because their cars—a 1950 Hudson with primer across the front and a customized 1961 Studebaker station wagon—were too scruffy.
“Our cars weren’t shiny like the others,” says Binder. “They were unpainted and primer-coated and had blankets on the seats. What we liked about them was they were old.”
Now the Professor has his own club, the Lucky Hell Drivers. “We don’t have regular meetings,” he says. “We come and go.”
Best of all, says Binder, “Nobody can tell me my Studebaker’s not a hot rod.”
Now that the crude, unfinished look has been acknowledged as a style it has taken on a kind of chic—but has also generated a backlash among classic hot rodders. “It’s supposed to be an anti-snobbery thing, but we avoid that ‘rat rod’ label like the plague,” says Mark Sunday, 37, a tattoo artist and president of the Millville Road Devils. So saying he swings open the door to the club’s garage, where the steel ladder frame of an old Model A leans against a wall. “Some people think we’re rat rodders because we don’t just go out and buy parts new,” he says. “We’ll go to swap meets and find things used. It will take me seven years and $10,000 to $15,000 before this one’s finished.”
Ultimately, Sunday’s Model A might roll on fat whitewalls, carry a performance-tuned Cadillac V8, and gleam with a bronze matte finish. But until then, as a work-in-progress, it could be taken for a rat rod. “You know,” Sunday says, as we move out of the garage, “It’s become very trendy to call yourself a rat rodder. You even see some of these people driving fiberglass replicas of rat rods. Their cars come complete with touches of fiberglass rust.”
There is another kind of car customizing that, unlike hot rodding, is completely nostalgia free. It’s so different it has its own name—tuning. While there are a few twenty-something hot rodders, most are older. Tuning, however, is almost entirely a young person’s game.
“Hot rodders are nostalgic; they harken back to the mechanical age,” says Nick Wong, 27, an IT consultant from New Brunswick and president of the Scikotics, a club of Toyota Scion enthusiasts. “Tuners are into electronics—we grew up with videogames and the internet.”
Instead of pre-war Fords and Chevys, tuners customize compact, mostly Japanese cars from the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s. One aim is to jack up the performance, possibly to engage in a type of dirt-track racing called “drifting,” the point of which is to keep the car going sideways through a turn by hitting the apex at high speed and then drifting through the corner at high speed.
Tuning has an aesthetic dimension, but one very different from hot rodding’s love of chromed engines and painted flames on body panels. Mike Stauffer, 28, of Sayreville, for example, has put a lot of work into his Scion xB. Stauffer, who works for a software development company, is president of the New Jersey chapter of Team Scion NRG.
Much as he loves his boxy xB, he admits that “it is the ugliest car I’ve ever seen.” That’s not a problem, because the car is customized to titillate his passengers rather than passersby. It packs 10 TV screens inside.
Older Americans owe their impressions of tuners—the term refers to the cars and to the people who drive and build them—to the 2001 cult movie The Fast and The Furious, which centered on Southern California street racing gangs. By that time, New Jersey had already become a center of East Coast tuning, says Jackie Ling, director of Urban Racer, a national tuning magazine.
“Tuning officially arrived on the East Coast in 1998, when Englishtown hosted the first Formula Drift event,” Ling says. “It continues to host some of the country’s biggest shows and tuning events.”
Click here to read Hot Wheels- a photo essay about hot rodders meeting in South Jersey.