I’m not really sure why I began writing these short stories of my history. I think it may have started in 2009 when I got the bug to organize photos of the race cars I had built over the years, in order to add them to my computer photo library. I had previously started organizing some of my photos in 1989, because of a book being written by Don Montgomery of Fallbrook, Calif., which covered one segment of drag racing that I was involved with in the 1960’s, the “Supercharged Gas Coupe” classes. And because I had built several of these gas class cars during this time period, Don contacted me to see if I could supply him with photos and write ups on the cars that I had built, along with other Northern Calif. gas supercharged cars. So when I did get around to organizing my race car photos to my computer library, I had a good start.                       

Also, around this same time period, and just by coincidence, Mike Bailey, a friend I grew up with who now lived in Washington state, gave me a call to say he had run across several photos of the cars he and I had owned and worked on back in the 1950s. I asked Mike to send me the photos so I could scan them, and I was very surprised when they arrived. The photos were like a missing link of my past, with one showing my very first car, a Model T Ford pick-up truck, and another photo of our high-school friends helping us work on Mike’s 1939 Ford sedan. Luckily for us, Mike’s older sister Cathy enjoyed taking photos during those years!

By 2014, I had my photos pretty much organized and thought it would be fun to do a short write-up on each of the cars telling its history, something like I did with the photos I sent Don Montgomery for his book. I decided to include all the cars I had been involved with not just the race cars, and I would also include other interesting car-related projects. I started off by making a rough list of cars off the top of my head, and over the next couple of months I went through my old photos adding to the list. Once I had the list completed with dates it helped jog my memory of other cars and their details, along with other car projects I had forgotten about, which led to a search for those photos and dates.     

Early photos were important, not only for the dates that were usually printed on them, but they also helped me remember a particular detail or an interesting side-story. The downside of the early photos were their quality, usually because of the affordable cameras we used. My family’s camera during the 1940s and 50s was a Kodak Brownie Junior, a box-camera which was shared by everyone in our family. And when someone used the camera to take a photo it usually stayed in the camera until all the photos on the film roll were taken, and that would sometimes take months.

Even though I only touched on some of my 1950s car experiences, I was lucky to have grown up during this time period. It had to be the best time to be involved with cars with so many exciting car-related things going on at the same time. Like the new car magazines, such as Car Craft, Hot Rod, Rod & Custom, along with the newly organized sport of drag racing and stock cars. And every year in the fall the new car dealerships would use large searchlights to signal that their new cars were on display, and in the winter months there were rod and custom car shows like the Oakland Roadster show, the San Mateo car show, and others.

Once I started writing I also felt it was important to add the address or location of the places where some of the stories took place. My thought was to allow the reader to use a map search, like Google, to check out those places to see what they look like now and their relation to one another.  

Some of my stories may be a little difficult to follow because so much was going on at the same time with different people and projects, which made it sometimes hard to organize in the order they actually happened. The majority of these stories are from memories, my own, and others. I tried to piece together the stories from photo recollection, discussions with the car owners, or the project owners, and friends that were involved with a side story to a project. There may be some errors in the details, but not enough to affect the basic stories. Everyone tends to tell their part of the story their way, so in some cases I took the average of their opinions.  

I wrote this collection of short stories not as a journalist, but as a designer and craftsman for my own personal historical record.  

My first hands-on experience working on a car, or a car’s engine, took place at a Shell gas station at the corner of Bush Street and El Camino, when I was 13 years old, during the summer of 1956. The gas station was owned by Bob Winborn, and his son Grant Winborn. This is where the father of Fred Pieracci, my neighborhood friend, kept his old International pick-up truck (I think it was a 1941 model). Fred lived at 519 Yosemite Avenue, just down the street from my parent’s house. 

The pick-up truck was a little beat-up because it had been used on the Pieracci’s family farm in San Jose, before they moved to Mountain View in 1944 to open a fairly large grocery store for the time, named Food City Market. The truck being beat-up didn’t make any difference to us, as long as it ran. We spent a lot of time that summer tinkering around with the truck, mostly trying to clean it up, but also trying to make it into a hot rod.

And usually in the evening when there weren’t too many people around the gas station, Fred and I would take turns backing the truck from its parking spot in the back of the service station to El Camino, and then driving it back to its parking spot, our first driving experience.

After reading about all the cool hot rod aftermarket parts that were now available, we decided to buy (with Fred’s money), chrome push-on acorn head-bolt covers. Luckily our local auto parts store, Tom’s Auto Supply, carried a lot of the cool hot rod aftermarket stuff. And after installing the chrome nut covers on the truck’s engine we would open the hood many times to look at the engine, as if we had added gold to it! This was my first experience with aftermarket hot rod parts and I liked it.   

To really make the truck’s engine have the hot rod look, it needed a couple more carburetors. I guess no one at the time made a multi-carb intake manifold for the International’s engine, so I asked my father if he would help me make a manifold per my drawing, which he did. My manifold design was a rectangular sheet-metal box that mounted 3 very used Stromberg 97 carburetors to the trucks one-barrel intake manifold opening, by way of a single flange on the bottom of the box! It wasn’t very efficient, but it sure looked cool.   

This led to buying other aftermarket parts that were very popular at the time, like a chrome fuel-block, clear fuel lines, and 3 polished aluminum air scoops! The truck’s engine did run a little on the rich side because of my poor manifold design, but it looked great. In fact, it looked so good that we would take the truck’s hood off once in a while just to show it off! 

One of our big events was backing the truck down the dirt shoulder of El Camino, about a block or so into Foster Freeze’s parking lot, making a quick cruise around Foster’s building and then trying to spin the truck’s rear tires on our way back to the gas station! But being 13 years old, and neither one of us having a drivers license, we only did this a couple of times!

Those couple of summer months Fred and I spent fooling around with his father’s truck was probably his only interest in cars. His real interest was golfing, and his ambition was to become a golf pro. And luckily his parents were members of the Los Altos Country Club, so he spent as much time there as possible practicing. When we started high school Fred attended a Catholic school, and I a public school, so we lost track of each other. But I did hear many years later that he had become a golf pro, or had something to do with the game of golf.  

During this same time period, Mike Bailey and I were attempting to round up old Ford car parts from the farms around town to try to piece together a car of our own. I also had a Ford flathead engine that I now don’t remember where or who I got it from. But I do remember taking it apart in my parent’s garage, which turned into a big oily mess! And when I needed a special tool to take it apart, like a cylinder bore ridge reamer, I would borrow it from Andersen Auto Parts, who at the time were located at the corner of Boranda Ave. and El Camino. I sure learned a lot, and my parents were very patient with me, never complaining about my messes, which I always cleaned up!     

I went from this simple beginning to building and racing drag race cars. And over the years, several of the cars that I have built set numerous track elapse times, or speed records, along with setting 11 NHRA national class records, won several best-engineered awards, and car shows like the Oakland Roadster show. And I guess the “crowning glory” was the Mallicoat’s last Barracuda, a sprung car I designed and built in my shop that ran an ET in the 5 second range at almost 250mph.

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