Merchants of Speed: The Men Who Built America's Performance Industry, by Paul D. Smith
Published: December 24th, 2010
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I’ve got this intimidating stack-o-car books to review— it’s been five months since the last one— and so I figured I’d skim them all and pick out a few winners. I cracked this one open, got hooked right away, and read the whole thing while ignoring the rest of the pile.
This 1938 shot of Ed Iskendarian and his Model T (note the valve covers— cast in Iskendarian’s high-school shop class— on the Ford’s Maxi F-heads) pretty much sums up the book; it’s a collection of short, well-illustrated biographies of 26 men who created the aftermarket performance industry during the immediate postwar era.
I’m already obsessed with Southern California memoirs and biographies (Richard Nixon, James Ellroy, Sister Aimee, Mickey Cohen, and Art Pepper, to name a handful; this one just dragged my head back to SoCal), so even without the rat-rodders-wish-they-looked-this-cool vintage car porn I’d be digging this book in a big way. With the notable exception of Harvey Crane (Crane Cams), just about every one of the 26 “merchants of speed” set up shop in the Los Angeles area, epicenter of the post-World-War-II racing and hot-rodding boom.
The stories of Hilborn, Edelbrock, Offenhauser, Weiand, and plenty of other familiar names may be found in this book’s pages. We also get the stories of big-in-their-time outfits such as Chevy six-cylinder kings Wayne Manufacturing. The ups, the downs, the ripoffs (according to Lou Senter of Ansen Automotive, the design of the Ansen Posi-Shift Floor Shifter was lifted by a person “who became quite a famous floorshift manufacturer” due to a legal gray area in a patent description), and the “where are they now” answers will allow the reader to geek out on engineering and hot-rod-golden-age tales to his or her heart’s content.
Speaking of Lou Senter, check out this blown Packard V8-powered monster! Yes, the first car to break 150 MPH in the quarter-mile on gasoline was Packard powered!
I’m giving [url=Merchants of Speed[/url]Merchants of Speed[/url" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"> a four-rod rating (out of a possible Mercedes-Benz-OM615-inspired five). Murilee says check it out! Motorbooks
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Check out the dairy truck behind Isky's t-bucket!
Contemporary hot rodding is actually a lot like the old days, it's just harder to find parts. Just this year alone I can count friends who have started three 50's cars, two late 20's cars, and similar projects. And these aren't "pay somebody to do it" jobs that they'll later claim to have built. These are "built in the garage from shit we carefully gather from the junkyard" hot rods. They are also not "rat rods," but that's almost not worth mentioning since nobody uses the term correctly anyway (protip: it's usually a pejorative unless you're somebody who probably actually belongs in the ricer set anyway). Nobody gives a shit about looking cool -- that's the car's job.