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The Cal Rods car club got its start in the 1954 at Baldwin Park High School, in Southern California. At the time there were about 15 car clubs on campus and past Cal Rod president Vic Cunnyngham has found 14 car club plaques so far. The Cal Rod club averaged 30 to 50 members, but had disbanded by 1962. They were hot rodders and drag racers in those early days and many of the original members are still in the area. According to Cunnyngham, "At the Pleasanton Good Guys West Coast Nationals in 1997 there were 13 attending that all attended Baldwin Park High School. At that time we talked about re-starting the club. When we returned home I looked up Don Scurti, the first president of the club in 1954 and told him of the plan to re-form the club. Don had owned Bob's Auto Parts in Baldwin Park for 40 years. Don said, I don't own a street rod now, but I will get one and let’s do it." The original Cal Rod members had left the car culture and focused on jobs and families over the years. As their families grew up and left home, these men and women rediscovered their hot rodding roots and sought to relive their past. Cunnyngham continued the story of the club, "We planned a picnic and car show for the first Sunday in May and it was an instant success. This picnic, still on the first Sunday in May, always has about 1000 people and 100 or so cars. I took the president's job for the first three years and Don Scurti is now the president of the Cal-Rods. We are going strong and currently have over 300 people in the club. Using the 2007 membership list, I count 107 of those (our current members) were attendees of B.P.H.S. in the 1950's through the 1960's."
I asked Vic about the current leaders and he replied, "Of the current board of directors, 6 of the 10 are from B.P.H.S. Don Scurti (President), Jack Ferguson (Vice-President), Tom Flenniken (Secretary), Claire Ensminger (Treasurer), Vic Cunnyngham (Past President), Don Ford (Board Member) and "Big John" Morehead, who runs the web-site. Steve and Gloria Gibbs are B.P.H.S. grads too." The club members asked Roger and me to join them on February 5, 2008, for their monthly club meeting, held on the first Tuesday of every month at the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsport Museum. This wonderful hot rodding and race car museum is their clubhouse and they are its unofficial guardians. The club volunteers to help run the museum’s Twilight Car Cruise, held on the first Wednesday of the month, from April through December. The Cal Rods also volunteer at the Grand National Roadster Show held each January at the Los Angeles County Fairplex, in Pomona, California. They have their own car shows and raise money for various charities and are always ready to lend a helping hand to hot rodders everywhere. Vic Cunnyngham, John Duran, Captain Ed Ballinger, Jim Chamberlain, Big John and many of the Cal Rodders were on hand to greet us and to make us feel welcome. I was honored that they would ask me to be their guest speaker. The men and women in the hall were long time hot rodders, drag racers and car enthusiasts. What could I possibly tell them that they didn’t already know? They were the doyens and experts in the field, but there was a message that bears repeating, no matter how many times or by whom.
Hot rodding is a vibrant sport, but it can be fragile, I told the audience. My father, Wally Parks, spent his entire life in trying to protect it from interests that despised the car culture. In the 1940’s, it was the Dills Bills that were proposed in the California Assembly. The purpose was to derail illegal street racing by passing onerous laws that made it illegal to modify, customize or alter a car. Such laws were aimed at young people who souped up their cars, increasing the typical 40 horsepower engines by threefold and outrunning the police. Before World War II, street racing existed, but was self-policed by groups of car clubs and associations like the Southern California Timing Association (SCTA). They would take a dim view of street racers, because it posed the likelihood of police crackdowns on legitimate land speed racers who enforced safety measures. Some SCTA members would ‘call’ on recalcitrant street racers and try and reason with them. The ‘reasoning’ was usually effective. During the war many of the organized land speed car club members were in the service and illegal street racing became deadly. Thatcher Darwin and others fought long and hard to convince California’s politicians to allow hot rodding to continue unmolested. Where would hot rodding be today if Darwin, Wally Parks, Ak Miller and the other SCTA members had failed to stop the anti-customizing assembly bills from passing?
In 1951, Parks formed the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) as a way to bring to the rest of the country the programs found in the SCTA. By 1955 the NHRA had become a full-fledged drag racing sanctioning body with programs to get young people to stop street racing and race their cars on safe and insured drag strips. The battle to protect our sport never ends. Whereas it was illegal street racing that spurred on opposition to hot rodding in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s, today it finds foes who dislike what we do for other reasons. They feel that we contribute to global warming, noise and crowd control issues and exacerbate the fuel and gasoline shortages. They see hot rods parked in our driveways and peer over our fences to see our cars in plain sight, considering them to be eyesores. They see our metal machines as recyclable and can’t understand why we won’t crush “those old pieces of junk.” We shall always have adversaries towards our car culture. There are several things that we can do. The first thing is to form car clubs like the Cal Rods and serve the community. Another thing that we can do is record our biographies and tell our family, friends and even our adversaries, what the car culture means to us. Those who leave behind a history, create history. If we don’t record our history as we saw it, others will and that version may be vastly different from what we saw and heard. Roger and I said our goodbyes to the Cal Rods, but we’ll see them again, wherever there is service to be done or where hot rodders congregate. For more information on the Cal Rod Car Club see www.calrods.com.
Gone Racin’ is at [email protected].
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