Wheels of Change: From Zero to 600 m.p.h., The Amazing Story of California and the Automobile

From the Introduction

This is a story about cars, California and perhaps surprisingly, youth and the passions of the young.

Craig Breedlove was in his twenties searching for more meaning in his life when he decided to quit his job as a fire fighter and take on what many regarded as a ridiculous quest: break the world land speed record. All his life Breedlove had been into machines. As the youngest member of the Idlers car club in southern California, he was hungry to own his first car. He begged his parents until finally they relented and let him have a beat-down '34 Ford. Immediately the 13-year-old took apart the engine and began rebuilding it to make it run better.

Phil Hill had him beat, though. Hill got his first car when he was twelve. It was a Model T, and his doting Aunt Helen bought it for him. Too young to drive legally on the streets, Hill went off-road and merrily flung his souped-up T around the back roads of Santa Monica Canyon.

Hill learned to drive with such verve and intelligence that the Italians, who admired both of these qualities, later recruited him for their Ferrari factory racing team. After thriving on the California sports car circuit, Hill became the first American Formula One champion and one of the finest Grand Prix drivers ever.

Both Hill and Breedlove are part of the California car story, a story dominated by teenagers and the young. The Beach Boys, a band with a pretty good fix on the passions of teenagers, particularly California teenagers, recorded a tribute song to Breedlove and his quest. The song appeared on the 1963 Little Deuce Coupe album, which features a candy blue custom rod on the cover. Hill and Breedlove both drove hot rods and the Beach Boys sang about them, but the hot rod craze did not begin with them--not by a long shot.

It began after World War II when all the American boys who had gone off to war came back home, joining all the American boys who were too young to go off to war and had stayed home. All these boys and war-weary men—and plenty of girls and women too, riding around, partying it up, having the time of their lives—started taking to the streets in their hotted up home-built Fords and Chevys and Dodges (but mainly Fords--the hot rodder's car of choice). There was such a groundswell of interest in these fast and wild cars and the fast and wild kids who were speeding around in them that a 21-year-old ex-GI, Robert Petersen, decided to start a new magazine devoted to the pastime. He called it Hot Rod.

Petersen sold the premiere issue of Hot Rod for a quarter apiece at the world's first hot rod show at the National Guard Armory at Exposition Park in Los Angeles in January 1948. The show's organizers wouldn't let him sell the magazine inside, so he stood on the steps outside the armory trying to get people to buy a copy.

Many of them did—so many in fact that by the next year Petersen established another magazine, Motor Trend, and he was off and running in his new career as a magazine publisher, a career that would bring him prodigious wealth and success. Petersen is one more part of the California car story, as is his buddy Wally Parks, who could not stop fiddling with machines. When he was in the South Pacific in the Navy during the war he installed a V-8 engine with open exhaust pipes into his jeep, making it a jeep hot rod. Fittingly, Parks, who founded the National Hot Rod Association, the governing body of drag racing in North America, was the first person to use the term "drag race" in print, writing in a 1939 issue of the monthly newsletter of the Southern California Timing Association.

Parks and others formed the Southern California Timing Association in the late 1930s because they wanted tighter controls on the breakneck racing that was going on at Muroc Dry Lake, El Mirage Dry Lake and other dry lakes in the Mojave Desert. These dry lakes are another reason why the California car story is so unique, and filled with such lively and unpredictable personalities. Young red-hots burning to go fast showed up at the dry lakes in their raked Model Ts (Breedlove, after he turned sixteen, raced at El Mirage) and challenged whoever was there, gunfighter-style. Sometimes cars raced five abreast on the mile-long timing trap, spinning out and bumping against one another and sending up plumes of dust and smoke into the desert sky.

Of course, it wasn't just crazy kids who were doing this; Hollywood big-shots such as Clark Gable and Gary Cooper raced at Muroc too. Gable and Cooper were authentic he-men on screen and off, squiring around the world's most beautiful and glamorous women in the world's most beautiful, glamorous and expensive cars. After Cooper bought a one-of-a-kind Duesenberg roadster, Gable, his rival as the screen's top leading man in the late 1930s, decided he had to have one too. So he ordered one built exactly like Cooper's except that, as Gable joked, his Duesenberg was longer.

Nearing the end of his great career, Gable judged a Concours d'Elegance automobile show in Beverly Hills in the late 1950s with a young television actor who also had an interest in cars and going fast. His name was Steve McQueen.

The star of two of the greatest chase sequences ever filmed—the motorcycle jump in The Great Escape and the Dodge Charger-Mustang GT face-off in Bullitt, shot on the streets of San Francisco--was only then just starting to discover the joys of driving sports cars. Imported sports cars also took off after World War II when all those GIs returning home discovered that the United States didn't have a sports car—nothing to match the quick and fun British-made Triumphs and MGs they had seen and driven overseas. In the years to come more quick and fun imports from Europe--Mercedes, Porsches, Ferraris—arrived in California, and the California sports car racing scene became like nowhere else on the planet.

More than 90,000 people—90,000!—watched Phil Hill race his Ferrari against other Ferraris, Triumphs and homemade "backyard specials" in a 1952 race at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. But Golden Gate Park was only one stop on the circuit; others were Torrey Pines in San Diego, Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, and the most beautiful and exciting road race in America, the Pebble Beach Road Race. These races are no more, of course, but the world-famous Concours d'Elegance luxury automobile show at Pebble remains a stylish carryover from those days.

In October 1955 Salinas was hosting a sports car race, and James Dean, having just seen a sneak preview of his latest movie, "Rebel Without A Cause," decided to enter his new Porsche Spyder in it. Blasting out of Los Angeles late in the morning, he was nearing San Luis Obispo when he crashed into another car at high speed on the highway and died instantly. When he was alive James Dean was famous for about nine months. In death his fame may never die, and his story--like that of McQueen, Gable, Cooper and other Hollywood fast car guys--is part of the California automobile story too....

And off we go. Wheels of Change: From Zero to 600 M.P.H., The Amazing Story of California and the Automobile, by Kevin Nelson, is now available.