When there were far fewer people around, far fewer laws and regulations, when the legal speed limit was 75 mph, when gas was cheap, when driving was a pleasure, if you owned a hot machine you could point the grill down an empty road and go!

The Age of Hot Rods

The Age of Hot Rods: Essays on Rods, Custom Cars and Their Drivers from the 1950s to Today  is a collection of essays that collect an automotive and cultural history that dates from the 1950s.

Discussing hot rods, custom cars, motorcycles, sports cars, and the people who built and owned them, these essays provide a record of the beginnings of modern automotive history. 

Other essays deal with the beginnings of drag racing and early car shows and automotive expos. The colorful writing illuminates the people, machines, movies and cultural events that shaped hot rod culture.


McFarland Press; ISBN: 978-0-7864-3404-6; Softbound 7"x10", 2008. About 90 photos with an index.




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Northwest Oldtimers


Northwest Oldtimers is a very personal book remembering and honoring the rodders from Portland and around the Northwest. Photos and brief oral histories of some of the people involved in circle track racing in the northwest drivers, car owners, car builders, mechanics, enthusiasts. Motorcycle racers too.

Some, such as Bob Scovell, date back to the 1920s and 1930s, to Ascot and early California tracks. Some offer first-hand information about what it was like to race during the good old bad days of thin tires and little safety equipment! 

It includes interviews, newspaper clippings from the heydays of rodding, and an appendix of rodders who have passed on. Packed with photos and insight from Drake, Northwest Oldtimers memorializes the spirit of rodding.

158 pages, perfect-bound (August 2007)
Throttlers Press; ISBN: 0-936892-21-8; Dimensions :11" x 8.25". Signed copy...$24.00 postage paid