Lawrence Welk hosted at the Lick Pier with live dancing and later television. He was sponsored by the Dodge Corporation and there was a Dodge dealer
Claude Short that sold Dodges and Plymouth's. Members of Welk's orchestra were given new Dodges to drive and a couple of the musicians lived on Michigan, the next street over from Olympic where I lived so you could see the shiny new cars all the time. I spent a lot of time behind the wheel of a Dodge and some time under the hood,
There were two high schools in Santa Monica. One was Samohi the public one and there was also St. Monica Catholic. The Lennon Sisters went to St. Monica and they were also the stars of the Welk TV Show. When I was in High school the sisters appeared at my school.
They were so sweet and also cute
As I tend to jump around here lets go back to cars. Southern California could claim to be the start of hot rodding but many in the mid west would differ with that. The dry lakes on the other side of the mountains
were El Mirage and Edwards (Muroc). The dry lake racing predated the local drag strips that were later situated on seldom used airports. My mentor to this world was Carl but my cousin Ronald Powers was a hot rodder and his sister Gloria's husband Pete Hoffman raced at El Mirage. Pete had a 1936 Fiat Coupe
that was seen first in my Uncle's driveway.
Carl was into Fords but he also had a friend named Russel that was into MGs. My first ride in a sports cars was with Russel driving over Topanga Canyon in his semi-hopped-up MG. Russel had a 1918 Dodge roadster with a Model A in it. Carl kept the roadster in his garage and we worked on it until one afternoon it blew up setting Carl on fire. We would work on the old Dodge body for a while and after the banging session Carl would try and start the motor. He would crank the starter a few times with negative results then quit. One day after a few cranks the gas that had been slowly seeping past the pistons into the crankcase exploded out the breather pipe blowing the cap off and hitting Carl in the face with flaming oil. The garage floor was dirt so I grabbed him and pushed him down and rolled him in the dirt. I then ran into the house and got his mother who drove him to the Santa Monica Hospital. He was badly burned and his face was a mess for awhile but he recovered. The Dodge didn't.
Carl joined the T-Timers Car Club which was in Santa Monica. It is hard to find any information about this early car club on the web as like so many things prior to digital cameras and computer usage information is not popping up in a Google Search.
My experience is the club started in Santa Monica by three individuals. One was Mr. Petrie the Dean of Boys at Santa Monica High School, a Hal J. Hild from the local Elks club and a Santa Monica Police sergeant. I can't remember his name but he had a white 51 Ford coupe that was completely stock on the exterior but everything under the hood was either chrome or polished aftermarket.
The first car plaque for the club was a T that was a cigarette with a ash on the tip. A the "T" was a reference to marijuana. A slang term used by Jack Kerouac and the Beats when referring to marijuana, seen in Kerouac's novel On the Road.
The club had a garage on Lincoln Blvd. between Broadway and Colorado sharing the building with a local welder. Across Lincoln was an old Italian market and deli with a swinging screen door at the entrance. Once you entered you knew where you were as the your nose lit up.
To raise money the club would throw car washes at the garage. Most of the club members were 21 or over and the deli sold cold beer. So the car washes often turned into a beer party.
The club met once a week on Wednesday night in a elementary school at next to the Little League Field around 14th and Olympic. The club had officers and required dues plus you had to be voted into the club by the existing members. There was an actual box for black balling those trying to join. You had to be a car nut and have a working knowledge about cars.
After the meeting we would all pile into the cars (early ride sharing) and go cruising the drive-in eateries. There were two haunts on Wilshire plus the Clock in Culver City Bob's Big Boy in the Valley and one Scrivner's on Manchester in Inglewood.
Gas was around 30 cents a gallon then.
Carl and I used to drive around the canyons searching for metal that we could resell to the local auto junk yards on Colorado at 11th Street for a penny a pound. The junk yards were across from the lumber yards and the tracks.
The rail roads tracks divided Santa Monica both physically and racially. Santa Monica was segregated as where you could live and go to school. The High School was not segregated but the two Junior Highs were. Lincoln Jr. High was north of the tracks and all white. John Adams was south and a rainbow of students.
Several members of the T-Timers had serious dry lake race cars. El Mirage dry lake ran two associate groups. The SCTA
and the RTA. Our club belonged to the Russetta Timing Association and when we went to the lakes each club had to perform duties similar to the SCTA does today.
At that time racing was on Sunday and we rode there in the back of a pickup leaving very early to get started . My first job as a teenager was to perform fuel checks on the race cars. If you were in a Gas Class you had to have your fuel tank contents checked to make sure you were really running gasoline.
I also worked as a crew member on Dick Gish's 32 alky flathead. Dick's full fender car ran 132 mph on the dirt when is extremely fast.
One meet I was a crew member on a Triumph powered 2 wheel stream liner than the owner had trailer hauled over from Riverside but didn't have enough helpers. The thing ran on fuel and needed to be held up and push by hand until it could maintain balance.
We got it pushed off at the starting line and we jumped in a Ford pickup chasing it. The stream liner beat us to the end and was circling as we approached . Dallas didn't realize how fast we were actually going and jumped out while we were doing forty.
Funny how life is as I was a crew member with Don Vesco many decades later.
Work in progress needs a lot of editing
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