Customizing cars is a tradition that goes back to pre-WWII American car culture — it started with modifying rides for drag racing, but eventually grew into a phenomenon all its own. Today, car customizing has become a way for drivers to express their individual personalities through their vehicles. Whether it’s swapping out an engine to enhance performance or adding a bold coat of paint to set one’s whip apart from others on the road, it takes a considerable amount of creativity, as well as mechanical know-how, to do it right. Here’s a look at a handful of custom rides, and what went into creating them.
“Blackie” Gejeian’s Shish-Kabob Special
An industry leader and legend in the custom car circuit, Mike “Blackie” Gejeian was driving his father’s Model A around the family farm back when he was a kid in the 1930s, and after serving in the Navy during WWII, he built his first custom car, The Shish-Kabob Special, in the mid-1940s. He explained to Paso Robles Magazine how the culture has changed from where it was when he started. “Nowadays, if you want to build a hotrod you have to buy a part here and a part there, then just bolt it together. We built a car and made sure it would perform and do what we wanted it to do.”
Gejeian started building cars to take to drag races, which involved a different sort of customization. The first car he’d built, which he shared a nickname with, was stripped down to maximize its speed, as he explained to HotRod.com back in 2008.
“I had to make the car as light as possible, and take everything apart. All I had was a ’34 Ford frame, a seat, four wheels, and a motor in front of me. I made a modified roadster. It wasn’t an original-bodied car; it was bits and pieces, and all the rest was hand-built with a fuel tank in the back. Every pound you could take off the car made it faster. All the fenders, the running boards, even the upholstery came off. That’s how the serape blanket came in. I used my Navy blanket; I came home with it from the service and used it for my seat cover.”
With that car, Gejeian had begun to make his name as a drag racer. In 1947 he won his first race at El Mirage, then in 1948, Gejeian himself was t-boned by another racer while he was entering the pits. Gejeian suffered a broken back and the car was totaled. While he never again returned to El Mirage, rather than scrap his custom racer, he opted to redesign it. “When I started building the car back, the big gobs of chewing gum welds were ground out, and I completely leaded the body down to the frame. I leaded all of the cowling in. I made a show car out of it.”
Over the next few years, his beloved drag racer “Blackie” was remade into the Shish-Kabob Special, and it went from winning him races at El Mirage to winning the Oakland Roadster Show in 1955. “I won the World’s title in 1955 with it. I used it strictly for street drag racing. There wasn’t a car anywhere that could beat it, from Southern or Northern California!” That same year, the Shish-Kabob special was the co-recipient of the “America’s Most Beautiful Roadster” award, sharing the honor with Ray Anderegg’s customized 1927 Model T.
A creative problem solver, he needed a way to show off the car’s all-chrome undercarriage — an ambitious design that no one had done prior. His solution: once an hour he’d turn the car on its side so attendees could admire the handiwork. Though he figured out a solution by placing a mirror underneath it so passersby could admire it more easily — an idea that is now a common feature at car shows.
For 51 years, “Blackie” traveled to every car show he could, hand-picking those entrants for his own car show, the Autorama, never letting in the same car in the show twice from its debut in 1959… all the way up to the last one in 2010, which was also the year that Gejeian officially retired. He remains a figurehead in the custom car community — as does the Shish-Kabob Special, which still makes appearances at various car shows held throughout the year.
Ron Berry’s Surf-Seeker
Looking at the custom cars of mechanic Ron Berry, it’s clear that he has one defining influence in mind: animated cartoons. After turning heads with his modified woodie, the Shorebreak, which made the rounds at various car shows in the early 2000s, his crowning achievement (so far, anyway), has been his souped-way-up take on the VW Bus. He spoke with The Super Nationals in 2015 about his unconventional influence and how it leads to his unconventional creations.
“My concept has always started out with a cartoon flavor, which in a lot of cases was not practical or usable. So, I had to redesign it to be drivable and keep the cartoon look in a subtle way, without lips and eyes. They end up with a lot of character.”
Going all the way back to drawings he did back when he was in high school, and basing his design (very loosely) on the classic VW minibus, Berry’s finished product only uses some of the suspension from an actual VW 1965 Type 2 van, with the rest of the body being custom-built steel resting on 24-inch tires. It’s also packing a modified air-cooled flat-four engine designed by Pro Stock drag racer “Dandy” Dick Landy. It’s located in the trunk (of course), and supplies his custom-made bus with about 200 horsepower.
Berry started the bus back in 2010 and spent a mere 17 months putting it together, using everything from metal salad bowls from Wal-Mart and kiln-dried pine from Home Depot to line the interior before it was completed. What’s most impressive is that, aside from the paint job, Berry does all the work entirely on his own. “I was just looking for that wow factor with the animation. And with my background of 50-some years of doin’ this, I’m able to hammer out some pretty unusual stuff.”
It was awarded first in its class at last year’s Grand National Roadster Show. Berry himself shows off some of the finer points of his most recent creation via his YouTube channel.
Tom Sweeten’s 1964 Chevy Nova
Tom Sweeten, lifelong car enthusiast and owner of Sterling Hot Rods, spoke to us about the passion and process that goes into customizing your own vehicle, using his 1964 Chevy Nova as an example. He explains that the car “hadn’t been running for at least 10 or 15 years. It was a car that was special to somebody, it belonged to a relative, so they want to restore it.”
It’s this nostalgia that he says drives a lot of his business, but the cars aren’t always in the right condition. “The biggest pitfall is rust,” he explains, adding that “these cars were built such that they rusted a lot. That’s always the hard part.”
“Once the rust is dealt with, Sweeten says the next step is “you cut out the old you weld in the new,” which itself can lead to more problems. “In the case of this car, the reproduction world is re-manufacturing a lot of the pieces for because it’s a popular car, so we are able to get parts. Sometimes cars are made out of parts that we call ‘unobtainium,’ and you have to either repair the old part or make a new part. There’s just no other way to get around it.”
While Sweeten doesn’t discourage anyone from looking into customizing or restoring a car, he forewarns the kind of endeavor someone undertakes with a massive project like this.
“If you have the skills to do it yourself, hey, you can have a lot fun doing it and so on and so forth. Some people just kind of get way off in it, without asking for any help. There’s a lot of people like me around. If people call up or send me a link to a car and say, ‘Hey, what do you think?,’ I’m more than happy to give an opinion, because I hate to see people make mistakes. When you don’t have the experience you should always ask for some help and get some advice.
While projects like these can be both challenging and all-consuming, they can yield some amazing results. That is, should you choose to try and join the ranks of people who’ve customized a car with their own two hands.
