MAGAZINE

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THE NEW ONE - YUP - WE DONE IT AGAIN

HOP UP 2002 - VOLUME III

Oh, yeah. it's shipping in a couple weeks, so we want you to be the first - the first in your neighborhood - to see and read................ veritas 2002.

Yeah, Baby.

It's the annual report on traditional hot rod and custom innovation (not invention); it's the gut, the vibe, the style showcased by our people nation and world wide.

The cover is innovative yet again - a Weesner illustration - and - if you are da kine hot rod daddy; if you are cool-livin' and unfettered with fraud-rod doin's; if you want to see what the other Truehearts in the culture are up to.............send the scratch, Man...................you prob'ly still got a job........

AND, you will want to also order the reprint.

THE WHAT?!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, the humanity! We (and MBI) have reprinted the first 12 issues of Hop Up. Yeah, like Hot Rod Mag did. But this is "HOP UP" For a lousy $24.95 you will have the original tome, the basis of comparison, the marked-in-time, dead-nuts best review of what was (is) meaningful in the day. And it won't cost $10-20 per mag like it is on e Bay or at swap meets.

Not since Montgomery's books came out has there been anything more vital to your library. It's where truth originated. Not exactly the 'Tablets of Stone' but pretty fairly well important to the coolest, realist, most-happening Daddies out there on the pike..........

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THE FIRST 12 ISSUES

******Note that American Auto Mags handles worldwide orders (Europe, Oz, etc.) and Canadian Orders should go directly to Motorbooks.

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VOLUME II STILL AVAILABLE

"WHAT I DID ON MY AUTUMN VACATION"

Went away for 8 days. Took a regular vacation. Cold turkey. Yeah, Man, like it was no stinkin' cars anywhere and the cause was righteous and we're glad we did it but jeezus, Man, how are you going to enrich the senses? How ya gonna plot the next step? How ya gonna feel the vibes? How ya gonna ...........well?

You can live without it. If priorities are right and you're open-minded and you recognize duty to those around you, why, you can.................aw, bullshit.

I stole every moment I could, looking at.... or for.... cars.....letting my vision morph cars at a distance into something boxy and old.

I envisioned every mile in a car to be a mile in a hot rod.

I looked out of airplanes and dreamed of driving that hiway - that very hiway - on a trip to go see friends in places like Kentucky, and Oklahoma and Massachusetts, and everywhere Hop Up Guys are.

But the original cause was a just one. I'm thankful to have had the opportunity and person that caused me to go........but in a perfect world we'da gone in a dang hot rod. There was no reason to expect I'd get my Ford-fix until............. I looked at the map.

"Ya know? Dave must live only a couple of hours from here."

"Who's Dave?"

"A Pal of mine who's fixin' up a car for me".

"The girls are doin' girly stuff on Tuesday......"

"You guys wanna sneak outa here in the rental car and do a 'car guy' thing?"

That conversation wrought an odyssey that lasted about 11 hours, took in some of the handsomest landscape in the world, and in the center of it, at the original destination, and before the circuitous and interesting ride back to and from paradise, I gotta fess up; the whole damned trip turned out to be a scam! We got to cram a Hot Rod Ford fix into our (MY, anyway) veins in a relatively short couple of hours that made it all well. All swell.

Worthwhile.

Nothing to complain about.

YEAH, BABY, WE TOOK IN SOME HISTORICAL MONUMENTS WHILE YOU GIRLS WERE AT THE SPA

We saw one of the collections and shops and homestead of one of the "Boys". You've seen some of it in mag features so we won't bore you with "Hop Up Does So and So", but that hard-earned (8-9 hours commuting for 2 hour absorption) time was monumentally well-spent...for a Hop Up Guy. Our travel companions were much impressed and kinda 'got it' but theirs was more a travel excursion than a pilgrimage. Mine, Daddy, was a pilgrimage. I got to see some sheetmetal that belongs to me. It has some holes in it. It had had some innovative (kind word) repairs done somewhere in its' life but......but now Boys....it belongs to Unk. It will get the 'press' and it will be fine. A genuine Ford roadster done..ya know, done how ever the commissioner of the art wants it done.

When it goes home, it will meet its' replacement foundation (it's own foundation will probably find some mischief of its' own some day) that has already had a master's touch and only needs the disassembly, paint and plate and lube where necessary before dropping the body on its' new frame, and, and...........I'll betcha if a guy was real clever, and took..........

WAIT!!!

There's another of those simplifications: "DROP IT ON THE FRAME?!!!!"

HA!!! We'll prob'ly hear more about THAT, no?

But no matter what it takes to become that car...no matter what the journey is............the point is that it is this journey that is now and it is this one whose thousands of steps and attachments and disassemblies and reattachments and touchups and farm-outs and subcontracts and new-learned skills and sightings and excitements and opportunities...and even.... it is this one from which we'll walk away one day: "Fuck it!" we'll say, with finality.............

And then we'll go right back at it the next day with new resolve to beat the FERRIC DEMON that tried to cheat us out of the satisfaction of seeing our dream come to life. We'll not be denied. And when it is done....when it is complete....it will be a tangible, useable reminder - a trophy- of that experience, and...unlike the photo album of that wonderful autumn vacation.....we'll be driving it.

Try that with the receipts for your green fees! Oh, Yeah...............

COPS

The Hooda. The Man. Fuzz. Whatever you called them when they were - kind of - the enemy, they were the symbol of authority: older, tougher, straighter, and narrow in interpretation of the law.

There was a "Refer Madness" type of equipment enforcement (we got more crap from them with 'too low' tickets on our sleds than for anything else.) Our cars -rods or customs - telegraphed to them that we were kind of anti-social and prob'ly merited some kind of shake-down because anybody who was (or thought he was) that cool, must be a bad person. Anti-social. Drag racer. Felt girls up..............'member?

THEY'RE GETTING HYSTERICAL ABOUT NO FRONT PLATES?

Then we got a little older and customs went away and the hot rods became resto-rods with cast iron power glides and child seats and the police knew we were family guys: wholesome, working, had the Ol' Lady along and, probably because the cars were not very sinister, the cops - growin' old gracefully themselves - noted that we were growing up and they just did thumbs-up when they saw a streetrod with a 'safety 23' decal on it.

Eventually they retired and a new generation of cops came on, who didn't know that we had been cool, but weren't any more, But glory of glories, we rediscovered hot rods and kinda got tacky again, and the historically impaired cops didn't 'get' hot rods and started to enforce silly shit like no front license plate (don't get me started) and sometimes now, again, there's a certain amount of trepidation when we see 'The Hooda' out there on the pike!

Now, please don't think I'm going to go the 'guilt by association' route and sob that 'rat rods' are giving us a bad name and, "When one of those guys kills somebody out there we'll all be screwed...." We've heard that crap and can tell you that tie-rods can fall off of painted cars as easily as they do off of primered ones. (Just check it out when you change the oil). And the funny thing is that a few (trust me, a very few) Greybeards sound just like the hysterical anti rock n' roll and anti hot rod hooligan oldies of the fifties! Have some of us become our parents?

Back to the cops. We seemed to have kind of a 'pass' for a long time when the cops knew what we had been and that we were more mature by now and not much of a threat. Peers, kinda. Their heirs to the badge, though, just may not know how important 'cool' is. No shit. They may not know that Hop Up Guys may just be wearing a different costume on any given day: the same cat that has a regular grind in slacks and modern sedan (or wagon) has an alter-ego that - when he pulls on his jeans and slides onto the old t n' r seat of his coupe...... transforms him; transforms his attitude; transforms his perceptions, his looks, walk, talk and here it comes.......STYLE. Thank ya, Baby!

And the Hooda might just get a load of it when he rousts ya for no front license plate!

Or not. The beauty here is that all that comfortable cool, all that attitude ...........is internal.....probably doesn't really show.......probably won't be detected by the un-knowing, historically impaired Policeman.

It's a state of mind that the old Ford facilitates. There's actually no anti-social behavior (maybe a squallin' tar now and then?) and no bad attitude with cops, but the style, the cool, the savoir-faire, is a reality. Hot rod guys/gals, Hop Up Guys/Gals got the stuff.

Even the middle aged ones.................... who, BTW, ain't going away for a long time......really.........the torch ain't bein' handed off any time soon......have the stuff.

Style.

It comes with the territory, they say, and your birth certificate doesn't give you a free pass or a termination notice.

Most of us will be doin' hot rods long after some of the trendy cats finish paying off their first Bimmer and we will still - although quietly and respectfully - resent the Hooda! It's only right.

No front license plate, my ass.

BONNEVILLE/WORLD FINALS FOLLOW-UP

Ron Jolliffe (the Rocket Science Hop Up Guy) didn't let 'em get him down. They tech'd him outa town in August, so he went back into the shop, did some hot rod sorcery and went back in October. Here's what he wrote to Hop Up:

HOT IRON AT BNI MEET

"Hi Mark, I enjoyed your comments about the SCTA protest on my 34 race roadster last month. Here's an update; On September 28 I finally got a written response from the board about what was so illegal about my car.............essentially the grille was too small by about 60 sq. in. and the floor continued under the drive shaft. Shooting for the October 17 World Finals at B'ville..........we stripped the car and strung it up like a beef carcass at a butcher shop, cut it in half lengthwise and glued it back together with a structural driveline tunnel that exposed the trans and drive shaft to the salt. On October 14 I built the new grille that was just bobbed and not chopped so it lost a little of the 34 character but gained 90 sq. in. We left for Wendover on the 16th and after a thorough inspection by what seemed like the entire SCTA board, all their relatives, and their proctologists.........No 534 A/STR was declared legal! Our first run on Thurs. was a qualifier at 229 against a 219 record.....we backed that up with another 229 later that day for a record and that red hat I've wanted since 1961. The salt was so good that we decided to lean the mixture one step and make one more pass.......we qualified again at 234 and change. the new record is 233.299 (that's faster than any unblown street roadster has ever run at Bonneville, and faster than the A and AA blown street roadster records! I was pretty upset with the "powers" at Speedweek for declaring my car illegal and making me cut up a brand new powder coated frame, but after we found out how much faster the required modifications made it go, I was grateful and took every opportunity to thank them. We's feelin' pretty good here in Idaho these days, and just wanted to share it with you. Ron Jolliffe."

Whoa, Daddy! (Ed.)

PRIMER CLASSIFIED

Joe Mac Rebuilds Ford Stuff Hell, NO! Nobody wants to work on your V8-era trans. OR the banjo rear-end. I sure wish Joe Mac Clelland was around.................... He is, of course. The trans-master turns them around in about a day and you can find him at: (909) 371-3111, in Corona, Cal.