Monkey-Wrench Men

By Preston Lerner

The memorial was in a cramped and grimy Costa Mesa race shop tucked among the war-surplus Quonset huts of a throwback industrial park. When I arrived that late-spring Saturday afternoon, only a few people were milling around the inventory, which was strewn over the floor and piled into grease-stained cardboard boxes. My immediate reaction was disappointment. Chuck Daigh deserved better than this, didn’t he?

Daigh wasn’t a celebrity. I’d met him many years ago while researching a book about road racing in the 1950s, and while he wasn’t nearly as cantankerous as I’d been led to believe, he was a private man who made no effort to promote his own reputation. Yes, he was a leading figure in the first generation of Southern California hot rodders, and, yes, he was one of the first Americans to make a mark in international motor sports. But he was very much a footnote in the history of racing, forgotten by all but the most rabid fans.

Then, behind the shop, I heard the signature crackle of a flathead Ford—the V-8 engine beloved by old-school hot rodders (and Clyde Barrow of “Bonnie and”)—sparking to life. I hurried to the parking lot out back and discovered that this was where the memorial was being held. More than 100 people were happily swapping stories about Daigh while several historic cars broiled in the sun, from the ’57 T-Bird that Daigh had driven to several speed records on the sand at Daytona Beach, Fla., to a home-built, 250-mph flathead streamliner that he’d planned to race on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats before succumbing to a brief illness in late April, at age 84.

Everywhere I looked, I saw another SoCal legend of a bygone era: Ed Iskenderian, who gave his nickname to his Isky cams; master fabricator Phil Remington, who’d wrenched on cars that had won everything from the Indy 500 to the 24 Hours of Le Mans; Phil Hill, who was not only the first American Formula 1 champion but also one of the country’s premier car restorers; Jerry Grant, the first driver to lap an Indy car faster than 200 mph; Bob Bondurant, the one-time Grand Prix driver who invented the modern concept of racing schools; and, most famous of all, Dan Gurney, whose boyish good looks and sunny disposition made him a perfect representative of the United States (and Santa Ana, where his company, All American Racers Inc., is located) at racetracks all over the world.

Dressed in a blue blazer and tan Crocs, Gurney lauded Daigh as a heroic member of the Greatest Generation. Gurney was referring not only to Daigh’s exploits as a World War II paratrooper who’d been shot three times, but also to his membership in a dwindling brotherhood of self-taught wizards who could build complicated mechanical contrivances from scratch—guys who could make things. As Daigh’s older brother, Harold, put it: “Chuck could weld better than a professional welder. He could machine better than a professional machinist. He was an automotive engineer who never graduated from high school.”

Flush with cash and full of ambition, former servicemen such as Daigh coalesced in Southern California after the war and created the foundation of what we now know as hot rodding. They chopped the tops and fenders off prosaic Model T and Model A Fords, massaged the engines with go-fast goodies of their own design, and staged races to see whose creations were fastest. Their need for speed took them from the dry lakes of the Mojave Desert to the salt flats of Bonneville, then to road courses from coast to coast, then to the hallowed speedway at Indianapolis, then to the storied racetracks of Europe, and eventually to the moon and beyond, because the same mechanical skills that launched the hot-rod revolution also made these Southern California craftsmen highly prized commodities in the aerospace industry.

I’ve often wondered why this movement took root here and not, say, in Oklahoma, or New Hampshire, or Alabama. There’s nothing to suggest that Southern Californians were smarter or more industrious than their counterparts elsewhere. I think it was something about the benign weather and the proximity of the ocean, the mountains, and the desert that gave hot rodding’s pioneers the room—physical and spiritual—to dream, as well as the resources to shape their creative fantasies into tangible products. This was the promised land for hard-core car guys, and they flocked here along with millions of other immigrants looking to forge new lives.

Of course, with this influx came problems. And as our sunny optimism clouded over from SigAlerts and workplace regulation, a lot of companies that had been founded here moved to greener pastures with lighter tax burdens.

But a funny thing happened even as people were forecasting the demise of Southern California as a car mecca: Another hot-rod revolution erupted in the 1990s, but the cars of choice this time around were utilitarian Honda Civics and Nissan Sentras, and the New Age hot rodders who modified them were kids who knew less about welding than about computer software. It didn’t take long for Orange County, with its computer literacy and high concentration of Asian Americans, to emerge as a center of the so-called import tuner scene.

Not that most Orange County residents would deem this a source of pride. Who really cares about cars any more? They’re so 20th century. These days, it’s vogue to dismiss them as mere conveyances or damn them as environmental monsters.

But think about your car the next time you get behind the wheel. Really think about how complex a device it is, with an engine designed to survive hundreds of millions of internal explosions and a suspension engineered to withstand five, 10, 20 years on the road. Sure, nowadays most cars are designed on computers and assembled by robots. But every one of them is the product of a century of guys like Chuck Daigh—guys who could make things.

Preston Lerner is an Orange Coast contributing editor.