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Words: Paul Garson
Driving down Memory Lane takes on new meaning when you peek inside one of Earle Bruce’s thick photos albums. Snapshots in both black and white and color spotlight some of his Hollywood buddies - the likes of Errol Flynn, Clark Gable and Howard Hughes. Saying that Earle lived large would be a major understatement.
There are also photos of Earle with dozens of sports cars (including the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing his buddy Von Dutch flame-painted for him… as a surprise, no less), and of course his ’40 Ford, which has gone through more than a dozen paint jobs over its seven decades of one-ownership, finally staying with a foot-deep metallic blue. Under the hood lies a blown flathead. Earle’s owned and driven six, eight and twelve cylindered cars as well, but that flathead outlasted them all.
Earle's been there, done that, and done it again. His anecdotes could fill several volumes or inspire a screenplay… Famous L.A. nightclub crooner, movie actor, USO entertainer, ultimate hotrodder. Although one would doubt anyone else making the claim, it's not so when Earle recalls streaking up behind James Dean's Porsche on that actor’s fatal last run. Earle, expletives deleted, said, "Some dumb farmer pulled his vehicle onto the road. Dean tried to miss him. He should have aimed for the truck. By the time he got there, the truck would have been gone. Bad strategy, but a nice Porsche."
Earle was in one of his Gullwings that day. He later focused on a Mille Miglia Ferrari. "Yeah, I got it out of Europe," he said. "It won some race, Torino or something. What a crude piece of work that car was."
Earle pays homage to no sacred cow or car. And the cars, lots of them, mostly in black and white, are all there, archived within one of his several scrapbooks… Earle and exotic cars and glamorous starlets. One newspaper photo shows a leggy girl climbing into Earle's Von Dutch flamed Gullwing. Another snapshot shows another girlfriend standing by her 1952 Studebaker, which Earle had painted with Zumolite, the texturized stuff sprayed on ceilings.
"She never had to wax that car again," he recalled.
Earle’s ‘40 Ford Deluxe Business Coupe has hunkered down in the garage adjacent to the small bungalow he's occupied for some 50 years. The lifelong relationship with what would later be heralded on the Feb. 1952 cover of Hot Rod magazine as "California's Most Customized Coupe" began on Sept. 15, 1939, when Earle entered the showroom of Al Stuebing Ford, then located on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Upon seeing the shiny new 5-window Coupe, Earle said, "Right on the spot I handed over crisp new 100-dollar bills, because I had just signed a seven-year film contract with 20th Century Fox. That was before they discovered that I couldn't act. Most of my movies weren’t released; they were paroled."
When asked how long he owned the car before he customized it, Earle said, "About eighteen minutes. I got in the car and immediately aimed for the northwest corner of Melrose Avenue and Fairfax where squatted a small, dirty body shop operated by the possessor of the finest pair of metal and paint hands that existed anywhere: Jimmy Summers. I told Jimmy, cut it four and three-quarters inches, then reshape the top, fill in the rear side windows, make the back windows smaller, throw away the running boards, door handles, the chrome strips, tail lights, deck handle and all the unnecessary garbage bolted to the vehicle. Then it was all about proper proportions, smoothing out the design line and keeping everything focused on the whole concept."
Stories of Earle and his “eternal” hotrod have appeared in several publications over the years. Even Britain's BBC television traveled to Los Angeles to film Earle and his car for a documentary program. Some of it had to be censored, since Earle is prone to very colorful language and says anything he feels like saying about anybody and everything. Let's say, he has plenty of strong opinions. And many of them revolve around his car.
In the seventy years since the project started, Earle's car has morphed through more exterior color changes and interior makeovers than the actors he partied with in the '40s and '50s, but its heart remains the same - a flathead Ford, albeit now with a supercharger under the hood.
Concerning the car’s interior changes, Earle said the upholstery has evolved from a white crushed velvet coffin lining to four-inch electrified lamb to black leather, then to naugehyde with the last "carriage tufting" version stitched by the famous Eddie Martinez. Over the decades it’s been treated to 16 complete paint jobs alone (including blue, cream, red, swift red, Groovy red, Bruce red, lime green metallic, purple and, lastly, Bruce Blue, painted by the Gary Svecko team at the Performance Paint Shop, Torrance, CA). It was given the name "Armored Car" because all the custom work was and has always been done in hammered metal, with no lead, plastic or other artificial ingredients added.
By the late '40s, after Earle had returned from WWII, the “Armored Car” was powered by a 326 cid engine (stock being 239 cid). "I ran almost 120 mph at El Mirage in it, and won more than my share in street contests, too," Earle recalled. He does not brag, he states facts. A plaque fastened to the right side of the Ford's dash offers documentation: May 29, 1949, Earle Bruce was timed at 119.52 mph at El Mirage dry lake by the Russetta Timing Association.
As for the invisible door handles, Earle claimed, "I invented those. Using '39 Ford convertible top motors, I hooked them up to open the doors. Then one night, I was in the car with my girl, and the battery went dead. I couldn't squeeze my carcass out the window, so we were stuck there all night, which turned out okay. But then I installed a manual door release, a hidden lever that with just one touch of your foot opens the door. I stole that idea from a very clever lady I saw opening her garbage pail with her foot."
Speaking of that flathead, don't ask Earle about his "motor." He goes into a diatribe that runs like this: "We didn't have a MOTOR. We had an ENGINE. A motor you plug into the wall. This isn't a vacuum cleaner. It's a Flathead Ford."
Knowing we were making a blasphemous observation, we said, "But Earle, flatheads are SLOW."
Unfazed, Earle replied, "It was slow. Then Eddie Myers put my first big engine in there. It was a brand new '49 Ford sent to me from the factory in a crate, because they had heard of my work with Fords. Since then I've lost track of the number of engines in that car, but they've all been flatheads. I'm a purist in that sense, but when new equipment comes out, I have to try it out. Funny thing - the car didn't go any faster. It's kind of an exercise in futility. It's more a matter of keeping the economy going, and I like to do my part."
More performance upgrades followed, including those provided by another of the great pioneers of the sport, Kong Jackson (Glendale, CA), who implanted a 59-H block, Jackson's own two-piece aluminum heads (first to be able to run on nitro). Upgrades also included Jackson's intake manifold and custom dual-coil ignition, and an Ed Winfield R-1 camshaft (the last one ground by the carburetor legend himself), a 3.78 rear end plus adjustable tappets (Gene Scott; Rosemead, CA).
Earle and his beloved flathead took a quantum leap forward thanks to the talents of one Dave Holst. If a car/engine builder could be awarded a Congressional Medal for Work Beyond the Call of Duty (or payment), Dave would be a shoe-in recipient. Overcoming a myriad of obstacles, not the least being the getting serious grunt out of the Ford flathead (and dealing with Earle's rather incendiary perfectionism), Dave focused on yet another major rebuild.
Dave said, "Besides dealing with the rear end, and curing some metal fatigue gremlins, I went through the whole engine, and replaced the Winfield R-1 camshaft for something a bit heavier - a Motor City Flathead cam with somewhere between a street and a hot rod grind. The bottom end runs a stroker Mercury crankshaft which I had magna fluxed and shot peened as were the rods. The block is the original unit from 1939 and has held up very well, but has had a few sleevings; I also decked it this last rebuild.”
The major addition was the B&M blower with six pounds of boost, matched with a 600 cfm Carter four barrel carburetor (replacing the Strombergs) and a set of Dan's 8:1 compression pistons, which Dave feels makes for an ideal combination. Earle's now able to run pump gas without a squeak of engine complaint. In order to cool off the engine, which runs warm because of the high water percolating Kong heads, Dave temporarily removed the trick Kong ignition, a rather large piece. He replaced it with a stock unit to allow space for the additional 17-inch fan in front of the radiator, to complement the 17-inch fan which runs off the crank. The Kong heads were furthered modified by having them welded up and re-surfaced to eliminate some head gasket leakage.
Said Earle, summing up the upgrades, “Although I'm not certain, the Flathead guys tell me the engine will pump out 300 hp, but that might be optimistic. For a car that old, it's holding its own, and runs very well. If you step on it, it moves."
And so did Earle, until he and his beloved car took one last run at El Mirage. In 2009, at 91, time and gravity finally caught up with Earle, but in preparation, he had made one last request: “Take me out to El Mirage in my car, punch it up to 100 mph, open the window and let me loose in the wind.”
We did just that on May 29, 2009. Earle always said, “Timing is the most important factor in all things.” And as always, Earle had the last word. We discovered, by reading the metal plaque attached under his car’s hood, that it was exactly 60 years to the day since he had first brought his car to El Mirage to have his speed timing officially recorded - so, a perfect day to say good-bye.
