I’m a generation removed from the guys who built these odd gems. As a kid I remember lovingly constructing the models and imagining driving them - as improbable as that notion seemed.
Then we had some gearheads move into the neighborhood. One was the son of a wealthy beer distributor who had the winning combination of good looks, incredible luck and a seemingly endless flow of dollars. His buddy Gary was a Tom Jones look-alike (at Jones’s pinnacle of popularity). Both were into “fast cars, faster women and wild times”.
They had drag boats and motorcycles, and cars that were to die for. My brother and I were constantly at their place drooling over them and instead of shooing us away they allowed us to see and touch and eventually help work on them.
When I was 14 and my brother 12 we got to enter our own car into the annual Seattle Hot Boat and Speed Show. It was a ‘23 T roadster that really belonged to Gary but he allowed us to assume “ownership” for the show. It wasn’t as exotic as the ones in the pictures but you couldn’t tell us that - we were floating on air that year!
Nice story. Thanks.
I was big into building model cars as a teen in the 60s and 70s. Used to customize them by swapping parts from other kits. Also used putty to modify bodies. Kept extra parts in a box which I called my “plastic junkyard”.
Slot cars too was a favorite hobby of mine. My brother gave me the idea of installing car bodies from model kits onto the metal slot car chassis. This opened up a world of great car body choices.