A Visit with Ron Henderson
April 10, 2010
Biography by Ron Henderson,
Edited by Richard Parks
Photographic consultant Roger Rohrdanz.

  My family originally came from Scotland and England.  My father's father, John W. Henderson was born on December 28, 1866. He was a plumber and died from lead poisoning in 1901. He lived in Maynard, Massachusetts.  My father Willis Edward Henderson was born November 27, 1898 and lived in Marshfield, Vermont.  My father was a car racing and Motorcycle enthusiast.  He bought a 1918 Harley Davidson motorcycle and started to come to California in 1920. The motor packed up in South Bend, Indiana and he got a car ride to Pasadena where he became a chauffeur for rich people in the movies and drove a Pierce-Arrow Limousine from the Green’s Hotel in Pasadena.  He knew such people as Mable Normand, Irving Thalberg (the movie producer) and his wife, actress Norma Shearer.  As a child I remember my folks socializing with the Thalberg's at the Ice Skating rink in Blue Jay near Lake Arrowhead when I was four or five years old.  I was sliding around on the ice.  My father always told me that Norma Shearer was more interested in me than she was in her own son who was about my age.

     My father loved oval track racing and frequented the Gilmore Stadium and the Legion Ascot Speedway in Beverly Hills in the 1920's.  I inherited my passion for cars and racing from my father.  He knew people like Floyd Clymer, motorcycle rider and car racer Kelly Petillo, Ralph De Palma and in his later years he was a fan of Roger Ward who lived two houses down the street from us on Monterey Road in South Pasadena, California.  While working as a chauffeur, my father met a man who had made good in the Yukon Gold Rush in 1898.  His name was John Paterson.  Paterson had acquired interests in Lake Arrowhead in the 1920's. He convinced my father that there was more of a future in the mountains building houses than driving a Pierce-Arrow for someone else.   My father went to work as a carpenter at Lake Arrowhead in the early 1920’s with Paterson.  Before John Paterson had struck it rich in the Yukon Gold Rush of 1898, he had been a Marshal in the 'Old West' in the late 1880's and 1890's. Paterson had known such people as Wyatt Earp and Pat Garrett.  Paterson served on posse's that went after cattle rustlers.  He always wore his pistol every day when he was working at Lake Arrowhead with my father.  While my father was working at Lake Arrowhead, he met a man whose wife had a friend who was young and single and arranged a meeting at the Cedar Glen Dance Hall. 

     My father went to the dance hall and began talking to a beautiful girl and found out that she was the one he was going to be introduced to.  Her name was Ethel V. Allison.  She was to become dad's wife and my mother.  She lived with her parents at 5923 Monterey Road, South Pasadena, and she was a hair dresser for the movie stars.  She worked on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills and I remember that she mentioned Theda Bara, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford and other movie actresses were her clients.  My mother would tell me about her experiences and how the stars would want a particular hair style.  My parents met in 1923 and were married at her parent's home two years later.  My father had a 1922 Model T Ford roadster and he courted my mother to be in it. They took it to Lake Arrowhead and the Mojave Desert.  Dad told me that one time he and my mother were in the desert and the Model T threw a rod bearing.  They were miles from any help, so my dad took down the oil pan, with the oil still in it and replaced the rod bearing with a piece of his belt, then re-installed the rod and oil pan and proceeded on their journey.  Dad was moderately successful as a carpenter in Lake Arrowhead and he built a cabin in Blue Jay near Lake Arrowhead.

     My dad had seen the original silent movie, The Lost World, in his teens, before he came to California in 1920. He became very interested in dinosaurs as a result.  When I was four or five year old in the early 1930’s we were living in the cabin and dad made two wooden dinosaurs for me.  One of them was an "Alley Oop Dinny the Dinosaur," from the comic strip.  The other dinosaur model was a Brontosaurus that was almost as big as I was and later an eighteen inch tall Tyrannosaurus.  I have photographs of me with them.  I got wildly "into dinosaurs."  When I went on to school, dinosaurs were such a big thing with me that I became known as "Dinosaur Ronny."  My mother's father lost most of his money in the stock market crash of 1929.  He sold his big house and built a little house next door on the lot that he still owned at 5925 Monterey Road.  My father worked through the Great Depression and as I remember we spent part of our lives up in Blue Jay in the mountains and the rest of the time in South Pasadena at my grandfather's smaller home.  After the Model T, Dad got a 1927 Chevy Roadster and I remember riding in it up and down that mountain every weekend.  He bought a new '35 Chevy Sedan in late 1935.

     During this time we (Dad, Mom and I) went out to Beverly Hills almost every weekend to visit Dad's cousin, Gladis and her husband, a Mr. Warfell.  They lived on Linden Avenue, which was a very rich neighborhood.  It was almost like a pilgrimage.  I don't know what was going on, but Dad had some connections to movie people and I understand that Errol Flynn lived on that street.  The house was later used in the movie, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.”  Baby Jane was played by Bette Davis and she drove a 1941 Lincoln Continental in the movie.  I remember the driveway, the house and its interior in the movie.  One day we were just leaving Linden Avenue and we turned a corner and I saw a parked car that looked like a dragon on wheels.  It was a roadster and the top was up because it was raining.  The roadster had clamshell front and rear fenders, a sweeping curve paint job on its sides, outside exhaust pipes like dragon fins and a pointed tail. I was thunderstruck!  Dad wouldn't stop, but he drove by slowly so that I could look at it.  I didn't know what it was, but my Dad said that it might be an Auburn.  After that, every time we went out for a Sunday drive I had an 8x10 inch pad of paper and I counted all the cars that I saw on the road, A to Z, hoping to see another Auburn.  I later learned that the Dragon car I had seen was the Weyman bodied Duesenberg Speedster and it became a hallmark in my life.

     I later learned about Ab Jenkins and his Duesenberg, the first 'Mormon Meteor' and his speed runs. Jenkins was a Mormon and was the mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah.  He was very into speed records. Before he got the Duesenberg he raced his Pierce Arrow on the Salt Flats at Bonneville on a ten mile circle that he set up for twenty four hours speed record attempts.  The Auburn (Cord) Duesenberg Motor Company hired him to drive his Duesenberg which he called “The Mormon Meteor” on the same ten mile circle course for advertising promotions for their cars in 1935. 'Mormon Meteor' set a record for passenger cars at 135.47 MPH for the twenty four hour run.  That included all stops for gas and water.  August Duesenberg did the mechanical set-up for these runs.  Fred Duesenberg had passed away in 1932. These cars were the inspiration for the creation of my "Lady Dragon Speedster.”  It is a custom built one of a kind speedster and it has a resemblance in basic design to the "Mormon Meteor."  It is also similar to the one of a kind Cord L29 speedster designed by Phillip Wright for the Cord Corporation in 1930. I chose this basic design motif for my car, the "Lady Dragon Speedster," because to me this was the ultimate shape for a car.  I did not blueprint copy any of the original lines or shapes of either car. I wanted to go beyond the design of these cars and create my fantasy "speedster" in real life.  The Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg Speedsters did not have side mount spare tires.  In my design of "Lady Dragon," I lengthened the front fenders and added sidemounted spare tires.  I did this to give an elegance to the car in keeping with the classic motif that I was striving for.  A personal aside, the mother of the woman who introduced my Dad to my mother to be, dated Ab Jenkins in Salt Lake City in the 1920's on his motorcycle.  Her name was Berti Peck.

     I was born on November 29, 1930 at a midwife's home on Monterey Road and given the name Ronald Wesley Henderson.  It was near where Roger Ward lived.  Roger Ward was older than me.  As a young kid I can remember him racing his roadster around the oval race track-like grass park that was in front of where we lived.  I walked by his place every day to and from school and there were always car parts and his roadster in the driveway by his house.  My dad gave me the interest in dinosaurs and medieval dragon lore at a very young age and I talked about them a lot and drew pictures of them at school.  Once when I was coming home from school, Roger was standing by his roadster talking to some girls, he noticed me and said to the girls, "There's the kid that knows all about dinosaurs."  In 1939 my father sold the cabin in Blue jay and bought a lot in Temple City California and built a house there.  I attended Longdon Avenue Elementary School, and then went to Wilson Junior High in Pasadena.  From there I went to Pasadena City College Lower Division, which was the last two years of high school. In junior high I took the general academic and shop courses.  At Pasadena City College I majored in art, before transferring to Los Angeles City College, also as an art major. When I was a kid in Temple City I sold newspapers and balloons on the street corner.  When I turned sixteen, my father being in the carpenters union, got me into the labor union and I became a union laborer.

     My hobbies were dinosaur lore and rockets.  The rockets were inspired by Buck Rogers in the comic books.  In World War II, I started developing actual chemically fueled rockets and my father let me have a chemistry lab in my bedroom.  I went into designing and building small rockets.  When the German rockets were falling on England my rockets were falling on my neighbors, not to any serious consequences thankfully.  A friend of mine and I experimented with chemical compounds to fuel the rockets and we had some powerful stuff.  My father took us take us out to the desert or deserted areas so that we could fire the rockets safely.  One time a rocket tipped over at thirty feet altitude and shot right towards my father who was standing 100 yards away on the road.  It hit the road and blew up, narrowly missed him.  He was visibly shaken.  When I was sixteen, in 1947, my father let me have a Cushman motor scooter.  He felt that if I got a car I would endanger our home from a possible lawsuit from a wreck that he felt would likely occur due to my possible driving negligence, so he let me have the motor scooter.  He felt that the scooter would be less of a liability to him.  Dad got me into the labor union so I could earn the money to pay him back for the motor scooter.  I souped it up and after having it for less than two months, I was going to Alhambra to return some parts. 

     I was going as fast as the scooter would go and I looked to my right where some friends of mine lived for just a second.  I woke up nine days later in St. Luke’s Hospital.  I had hit a car broadside that had turned directly in front of me when I took that side ways glance.  I went over the handlebars breaking my right thigh, and smashed into the car.  My right hand broke off the door handle on the right front door, and my left shoulder was shattered on the rear door as my head went through the rear door window.  I suffered extensive lacerations to my face and neck.  The glass almost decapitated me.  I fell back to the street and almost bled to death while waiting for the ambulance.  I was first taken to the Temple City Emergency Hospital where the doctor sewed up my neck and face.  I was given several pints of blood plasma and a blood transfusion.  Then I was taken to St Lukes Hospital.  I remained in a coma for nine days.  When I finally regained consciousness my right leg and left arm were in traction.  My right forearm was in a cast.  I found that the fingers on my right hand weren't the right length.  The doctor cut off the cast and I was immediately taken to surgery where two platinum screws were installed in the fractured bone in my hand.  I am not sure how long I was in the hospital, but after they took me out of traction for my leg and shoulder (the doctors tried to fix my foot but it didn't work), I was put in a full body cast, covering my chest down to my right foot.  I was taken home where my mother cared for me. This happened in August 1947, and by November I was able to walk on crutches.  I made up my fall school semester with a tutor.  The accident almost killed me and altered my life considerably.

     The following year, in 1948, my dad let me have a 1933 Chevy coupe.  I was still going to school.  I felt that I should have died in the wreck.  My buddies said that I was living on borrowed time.  My early car experiences were mostly loafing around with my buddies, who weren't into hot rod racing. That was another completely different culture of the times.  My friends were into girlfriends, driving crazy and partying.  We had no sense of danger.  My friends and their girlfriends thought that I had a charmed life because I hadn't been killed in the motor scooter wreck and they would ride with me anywhere and do any crazy thing with me that I had the guts to do, like racing the street car on Huntington Drive to the next crossing and zooming across in front of it throwing empty beer cans at the trolley.  I had a problem with girls.  They must have thought I was untouchable because of my wreck experience and the things that I did.  The guys called me "Big Ron."  The rest of my buddies had girlfriends.  Perhaps my brainy personality put girls off, even though I was a hero of sorts to the guys in the gang.  My friends and I specialized in doing strange things with cars, like changing drivers on mountain roads, driving down the pedestrian sidewalk in front of stores on Saturday afternoons, throwing empty beer cans out of the window in town and driving on golf courses in the middle of the night with the police in hot pursuit.  One time at full throttle we went up a steep embankment and the car, a '39 Chevy sedan, flew onto an adjoining road and the police didn't try to follow, they had chased us off the golf course.

     In 1948, when I had my Chevy coupe, my friends got jobs working at the Hopalong Cassidy Holster factory in Arcadia during Christmas vacation. The factory was owned by the father of one of our associates, a guy named Alfonso Sainz, whom we called 'Fonzie.'  I got a job there too.  One of the guys, by the name of Don, had a 1931 Pontiac Sedan with 8-50 x 15 inch smooth tires.  At lunch time we all rushed out to the car. Four guys piled into the rear seat.  I got in the front seat with Don.  The other guys didn't want the front seat because it was dangerous due to the tall gear shift and I learned why: Don was disturbed.  He didn't have a girlfriend either and had a dysfunctional family.  He was trying to find an expression in life.  I had just got the job at Hopalong Cassidy Holster factory and every day Don would take us for a hair-raising drive literally through the Park.  Don did this every day at lunch time during Christmas vacation.  It seems that his mission in life was to destroy authority with automobiles and eventually destroy the automobiles.  There is much more to Don's Story than this lunch time rampage. But that is another tale.

      One of my friends was Bob Black, his older brother owned a Cord Sportsman Convertible.  He had two other Cords for parts to keep it running.  One of his Cords that he used for parts had been raced at Gilmore Stadium in the Jalopy Derby.  The other Cord that he used for parts was just the body of a 'Beverly' sedan in beautiful condition.  It was out in his avocado orchard.  The upholstery was perfect and the dash and electric gearshift was intact.  It had all its glass and had a curved middle arm rest in the rear seat.  When Johnny, Clyde, Don and I went to see Bob, we would go sit in the Cord just to feel like rich movie people.  Bob's brother sold the engine from the 'Beverly' to his neighbor, Bill Picket, who put it in a Model T frame with a '25 T bucket body.  The Cord engine had four overhead curved wide open exhausts that made it look like a giant spider.  It had no mufflers and when Bill ran it, the car shook the ground.  It was after my high school graduation that I got into racing.  Hot rods were a whole different culture from the one that my friends and I were in.  My friends were lounge lizards, only looking to party, trying to cause havoc in the community and get girls. There were other guys in town that were serious about cars and they had hot rods, a '32 coupe, '34 coupe, Don Waite's '27 T Roadster.  God I loved it!  These serious car guys went to El Mirage Dry Lake and raced.  It seemed that the hot rodders had all the girls, so I decided that to get the girls I would become a hot rodder.  My buddies were simply losers. 

     My father reluctantly let me have my second car, 1936 Ford Sedan.  I souped it up, but it wasn't fast enough.  I wanted something special.  I heard of an engine for sale that supposedly had "never lost a race" and was owned by a guy named Leroy Lehman.  I went to see him.  The engine was equipped with Evans heads and an Evans dual carburetor manifold.  I had a Spaulding dual ignition from the other engine.  The hot engine had been built by Vern Holt of El Monte Automotive.  It was actually worn out and that was why Leroy was selling it. It had a cracked block, but Leroy said it only needed some block sealer in the radiator to keep it together.  It was an over-bored flathead Merc with pop-up pistons delivering 12 to 1 compression.  At first I blew head gaskets every time I tried to get it started.  Finally I found the combination and then I reigned supreme for a little while.  I raced my '36 down Rosemead Blvd in Temple City and any other place that we could get a race.  I hung out at a gas station in town. One Sunday someone came into the station and excitedly said that there was a legal drag strip in Newport Beach.  We piled into our cars and made it to the coast.  The "drag strip" was an auxiliary Marine landing strip.  Cars were racing two, three at a time all over the place.  There was almost no semblance of order.  Guys were racing in all directions.  It was crazy.  Then the Marines showed up and were driving their trucks back and forth trying to stop the frantic hot rods.  There were no drag strips at the time. 

     I joined the Velociteers car club.  The Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) and Russetta Timing Association (RTA) held time trials at El Mirage dry lake in Southern California.  That was all that there was in the way of legal hot rod racing.  The Velociteers were in Russetta Timing Association.  I drove my 1936 Ford Sedan with this radical engine to El Mirage dry lake.  I was put in Class A Sedan. When I was at the starting line I was told that the lakebed had become too rough and about half way down the course had been angled to the right.  I started out and was accelerating well when I saw the new direction of the course.  I steered into it with some wheel spin and headed for the timing lights. Then the engine blew up.  I stuffed in the clutch, put it in neutral and coasted through the timed quarter mile.  I turned 107.54mph, with a dead engine.  I also raced at the original Santa Ana Drag strip at the airport, my best time was 97 mph.  I blew the transmission gears trying to go faster.  In order to get home to Temple City from Santa Ana, my friend Norman Wyck held the transmission in high gear with a big screw driver.  We also raced at the new fairgrounds raceway in Pomona.  I was with Mickey Thompson when he raced at Pomona.  I was there when Chet Herbert was dropping nitro into the little fuel tank of his bike that he called The Beast, just before a run.  My regular friends were Johnny Ash, and Clyde McQuoid, but they were not involved with racing.  But they were my fans.

     We mostly raced down Rosemead Boulevard in Temple City out of 'Dick's Drive-In.'  There was one race in particular that I remember.  Several of my friends and I were hanging about at 'Dick's.'  We had just been to El Mirage and I had the numbers '254 A' on the side of the car.  A hot looking fenderless '34 with the front axle, shocks, spring and all the fittings chromed came into the Drive-In.  The car's engine was loping, like it really had something going for it.  My friend, Jerry Robinson, hollered, "If it don't go, chrome it!"  The driver with menace in his voice said, "Anybody here got anything that goes?"  Jerry said, "Ya! See that mangy '36."  The guy behind the wheel of the chromed '34 said, "Drag it out!"  My ever stalwart and devoted buddy, Johnny Ash, hopped in the "screaming '36" with me.  All the cars at Dick's rolled out on Rosemead Boulevard and positioned themselves on the roadside below the first traffic signal. The railway underpass was approximately a quarter of a mile away.  I slowly pulled out onto the street alongside the '34 and we headed for that first traffic light and rolled up to the signal. We waited through one complete red, green, red signal change to let cars in front of us go on down the road to avoid running into them in the race.  It was agreed that the second green light was to be go!  The cars on the roadside flashed their lights and we were off!  We rolled to about 12 mph, and then the '34 coupe jumped out a nose in front of me.  I was still in low gear and I floored it.  My "screaming '36" surged in front of him by a car length.  He shifted into second and I was still in low pulling away.  His headlights were in my rear view mirror when I shifted into second at 80mph.  We went under the railway underpass, and then Johnny and I pulled into a Drive-In restaurant on the right side of the road. My opponent in the '34 coupe had vanished and I never saw him again.

     The incident of the chain over the police cars rear axle and then looped around a concrete stanchion at a drive in restaurant as depicted in the movie American Graffiti really happened at Dick's Drive-In, probably around 1952 or '53.  The police were not in their car when the chain was hooked over and secured to the axle as shown in the movie.  They were in the restaurant.  When they came out some guys in a hot rod roared out of the parking area and the two police officers jumped into their police car and took off after them, ripping their rear axle out from under their patrol car.  I was not there at the time.  I was in the Army and came home on a week-end pass a few days later and saw the gouges in the asphalt where the rear of the car had come down.  My buddies told me the story.  My dad's interest in racing and my own preoccupation with cars since childhood gave me the love for speed. I saw the John Cobb Speed Trials in the Reid Railton designed streamliner at the Bonneville Salt Flats in the late 1930's movie news reels.  That was an inspiration.  My racing took precedence over my looking for girls and became my main expression.  Then my lakes racing, my escapades out of Dick's Drive-In and my budding speed dreams were cut short by the Korean War. 

     I was drafted into the U.S. Army, first I was inducted at Fort Ord then assigned to Camp Roberts, but my previous injuries from my accident, kept me from actual war combat.  I had been a near basket case from the wreck at sixteen and was assigned to "non combat" status.  One day I went to the camp hospital to give blood and the doctor that was taking my vital statistics asked me if I had ever had a concussion.  I told him that I had been in a coma for nine days from a wreck when I was sixteen and he asked me how I even got into the Army.  I was subsequently medically discharged as a liability to the army.  After my military service I really wanted to get into machine shop work.  I had a dream to build a special car and get into racing.  I had been told to look up Mickey Thompson regarding building my car. I took an interim job as a Fuller Brush salesman.  One day on my rounds in South Alhambra I went up to this little house and tried to give a lipstick door-opener gift to the pretty blond lady that answered the door.  I announced myself as her ‘Fuller Brush Man.’   She said to come in and she wanted to buy a brush.  Her child started to cry and from another room and she excused herself briefly.  I noticed that there were a number of racing trophies in the room and all of them had M. Thompson engraved on them. When she returned I asked if her husband was Mickey Thompson?   She said “yes.”  I told her that I was into racing and I wanted to build a special car and I had been told to look up Mickey.  She told me to look outside the window and there was a gray primed ‘36 Ford coupe with a crude Mickey Mouse painted on the trunk lid. 

     She invited me back to meet Mickey after work.  He was a printing press operator for the Los Angeles Times.  I met Mickey and our friendship developed.  My Fuller Brush job didn’t last long and I took a job in a small machine shop in Temple City.  The manager, Wally Bench, had been the driver of the 'Topper' movie car for the Gilmore Oil Company promotions in the late 1930's.  Gilmore Oil had a real lion in a cage as part of their promotion.  I remember the Lion's cage being parked on Monterey Road near where Roger Ward lived in 1938 when I lived there.  Perhaps the Gilmore Oil Company was courting him as a race driver even then.  Wally went on to become part of the pit crew of the 1947 speed trials of John Cobb's "Railton" Streamliner, at Bonneville.  Years later when I was working on my car at Jocko’s place I mentioned my connection to Wally Bench and the streamliner to Jocko.  He wanted to see him if possible.  I looked up Wally Bench and we went to see him.  Wally gave me personal photographs of the Cobb car at Bonneville and Jocko Johnson borrowed them.  Jocko sent them to Hot Rod Magazine and received credit as the owner of the photos and he never returned them to me.  Jocko loved the Cobb Railton Streamliner so much that he thought he owned anything about it.  Wally also gave me the only original photographs and negatives of the "Topper" Movie car that exist.  I have them.

     In 1952 Mickey had run a dual Ford flathead engine setup as a 16 cylinder engine at Bonneville in a Bantam bodied bullet nosed coupe and turned 182 mph.  Mickey later moved to El Monte, California in 1953.  One day when I went to see him, he was installing a Chrysler Hemi into the coupe for Bonneville. Then he took one of the flathead Ford engines from the previous year and chain coupled it to the Chrysler Hemi, but he added a supercharger to the Chrysler.  Both engines were equipped with four Ford Stromberg "97" dual throat carburetors.  Mickey, with his inventive genius, had built an intake manifold for the supercharger on the Chrysler.  Then a four carburetor manifold that mounted on the supercharger.  I did some work on Mickey's truck that he liked and he asked me to go to Bonneville with him as part of his pit crew.  The other crew member was Roger Flores.  Judy, Mickey's first wife, also accompanied us to Bonneville.  I rode in the bed of the truck.  When we were going up Montgomery Pass on our way to Bonneville, a fellow racer, Clark Cagle, was in front of us, with his race car and two fifty gallon drums of racing alcohol.  The rope holding the drums broke and they rolled down the side of the hill.  Cagle was an official of the SCTA at the time.  He was running a '36 Ford Coupe and Carl Maywalt was his driver.  Cagle had a place called Lakewood Muffler in Bellflower, California.

     Cagle and Mickey scrambled down the embankment and hauled the drums of alcohol back to the road.  Cagle could not secure the fuel drums on his rig, so Mickey volunteered to take them to Bonneville.  The only place where the drums could be transported was in the back of Mickey's truck, where I had been riding.  There was no space for me to ride except in the race car and for the last hundred or so miles I rode in Mickey's dual engine racer's driver's seat.  Roger Flores was a very calm person no matter what the occasion.  He did whatever was needed and was a really nice person to be around.  Judy took everything in stride and was wonderful.  Mickey was very charismatic.  He had a way about him that projected a feeling that he could do anything that he wanted.  He really believed in himself and he could "will power" whatever he wanted to do until it failed mechanically or he got it done.  The first day on the salt the Chrysler dropped a valve blowing the engine and caving in a cylinder wall.  Mickey pulled the engine, stripped the block and took it to Salt Lake City, Utah in his pick-up truck for repairs.  On returning across the salt flats his truck ran out of water and the only gas station out there wouldn't give him any water for the radiator, so he pulled into Wendover, Utah with a nearly frozen engine that was steaming.  We had very little money and Mickey called his sponsor, Webber Cams and got $50 cash.

     I was waiting at the motel, when Mickey came to me and said, "Let's go to the casino."  Mickey played Black Jack and won $200.  We left the casino and he told me to meet him at the garage by the motel.  Presently he pulled into the garage parking lot driving a 1940 Ford sedan.  He came over to me and said, "Ron, take the engine out of my pickup truck.  Take the engine out of that sedan and put it in my pickup truck."  He got me a cherry picker to lift the engines.  I accomplished these tasks.  Mickey and Roger got the racer together and we raced the rest of the week, but other problems persisted.  I made flanges for the supercharger pulleys to keep the belts from slipping off.  We got the "Hard Luck Trophy" for the 1953 Speed Week.  On the way home we pulled the racer on Mickey's dual wheel trailer up Montgomery Pass with that old 1940 Ford engine in his pickup truck.  Mickey, Roger and me had to get out and run alongside the truck and push it up the road while Judy drove the rig.  Mickey, Roger and I pushed that rig, truck, trailer and hot rod up to the only gas station and food concession on the pass.  I went into the snack bar to get a hamburger with seven dollars that I had won at the casino at the State Line in Wendover, while Mickey got gas for the truck.  When I came out of the snack bar, Mickey, Roger, Judy, the truck, trailer and hot rod were gone.  There I was on the top of Montgomery Pass, Nevada, alone.  I walked out to the street hoping to get a ride with another racer coming along.  I thought Mickey was fed up with me perhaps because the engine in his truck that I had worked on had failed him on the road back from Salt Lake City.  But when I got out to the road I looked toward the Summit of the Pass and there he was turning the whole rig around on that narrow road.  He then drove into the concession parking lot and they were all laughing at the joke they had just played on me.

     After the 1953 Bonneville meet, I went to Mickey's home and he was building a strange car. The driver’s seat was behind the rear axel.  Mickey said, "Ron, design me a body for this car."  I took the dimensions; wheelbase, height, width, engine placement and the driver_s seat position.  In a day I came back with a 1/10 scale swooped nose design.  Mickey pinned it on the wall of his garage.  I returned a day or so later and he had pop riveted an aluminum body, like my design over a tube framework that he had built on the chassis.  He sat directly behind the rear end.  This, I believe, was the first true "sling shot" dragster.  In 1953 Ellico Ford in Alhambra sponsored Mickey with a 1953 Ford coupe to run in the first Pan American Road Race in Mexico.  He took everything apart, had it all balanced, built roll bars and beefed up the suspension.  Before the race, while Mickey was in Mexico, he helped European road racer Piero Taruffi, who had a 1953 Ford as well, outfit his car the same way.  On the first day of the race a car had gone off the road in front of Mickey and there were people running all over the road.  To avoid hitting them, Mickey steered off the road.  Some people were actually killed as he helplessly crashed down the embankment.  I went to see Mickey shortly after he got back and he was running a film of the crash that had been taken by someone in an airplane that was flying over the crash site when it happened.  The pilot sent him the film.

     The following year, 1954, Mickey asked me to do a drawing of a '54 Ford and put a waving American flag paint job all over it.  He gave my painting to Ellico and he got another car for the 1954 Mexican Road Race.  Ellico gave the Ford coupe to Mickey before we went to Bonneville.  At Bonneville in 1954, Mickey went back to the two flathead Merc's that he had run in 1952. Mickey and Judy drove the waving flag Ford to Bonneville and Roger Flores and I took the truck and the racer.  Mickey used the waving flag Ford to push off the racer for its runs.  The '54 Bonneville meet was fairly straight forward, turning 182 mph as before but on one of Mickey's last runs, as he was coming across the salt for us to pick him up, the Hot Rod Magazine truck came out of the distance and pulled up to us and said, "Mickey, the lights didn't work, you have to make the run again."  Mickey was furious and threw his helmet on the salt and said, "Damn it! I tached 200 MPH!"  After 1954, Mickey asked me to build a model of a two-engined streamliner for him, a photograph of which was published in Hot Rod Magazine, with a picture of him sitting behind the wheel of his two Chrysler engined race car that the body was to be for.  I have the page. 

     When Mickey was running Lion's Drag Strip in Long Beach, California, I worked at Parliament News in North Hollywood, which was a girly book magazine publisher.  I would take him the first magazines off the press before they were published.  I went to see him with my second wife, Dorris, who was a black African/American singer.  He would come over to our car on his tiny motorcycle and say something like, "Man, what have you got for me today?"  One Sunday, Mickey came over to our car and he was sweating and wiped his brow.  I asked him what was wrong and he said, "I'll always stand up to a fight, but cold steel is the only thing that I'll run from."  I went to see him when he had his Hot Rod Show at the Los Angeles Pan Pacific Auditorium, possibly around 1962. Dorris wasn't with me at the time and Mickey was standing near the entrance talking to a tall young guy.  Mickey said, "Hi, Ron, I want to introduce you to Dave McDonald.  He's my new driver for the Indianapolis 500 this year.  I've got a couple radical new cars and he's going to drive one of them."  Dave shook my hand.  Then Mickey leaned over to Dave and quietly said, "Dave, Ron's married to a *****r.  Ask him if any of the color comes off."  Dave was embarrassed and said, "Mickey, that is no way to talk about a man's wife."  My mother and father thought Mickey Thompson was wonderful and just then they came into the Pan Pacific to see Mickey’s show.  Mickey saw them and quickly said, "Oh, there's Ron's parents," and rushed over to my mom and dad put his arm around them and said, "Hi, Mr. and Mrs Henderson, I want you to see the movie of my 400mph run at Bonneville."  He then took them downstairs to the filming room.  He didn't come back to see me.  Dave McDonald died in that Indianapolis race in Mickey's car.

     Back in 1951, before I went into the army and when I was running my '36 sedan on the streets and drags, the sedan had a habit of chewing out transmission gears.  Vern Holt, who had built the engine, was my only supplier of the illustrious "26 Tooth" Lincoln cluster gear that I usually needed.  I had dropped six trannies getting that big sedan going and I was in need of another cluster gear.  I called Vern and he said to come out to his mother's place in Walnut, near Pomona, California.  He had the gear there and I limped my sedan out there with the trannie grinding all the way.  Vern said, "You think that sedan of yours is fast, I want to show you something."  He took me to an old shed on the property.  We entered and I saw a '32 Ford two-door sedan.  I said, "OK, it's a '32 two-door sedan."  Vern said, "Lift the hood."  I saw what at first looked like a dual overhead cam set up for a four cylinder Ford Model B Engine.  There were two Ford Stromberg carburetors on a log manifold on the side of the engine.  Then I looked towards the firewall that wasn't there and I saw that there were two more Stromberg's on another log manifold on the rest of the engine.  I asked, "What is it."  Vern said, "It's a Duesenberg," a straight eight.  It was Duse engine #J419.  I was stunned by what I saw.  The car was incredible.  I realized that this is what I wanted, a Duesenberg engine, but not in a '32 Ford, but for my speedster and the Bonneville streamliner that I was planning.

     In 1952, while in the U.S. Army I saw an ad in Motor Trend Magazine asking to hear from any one that would be interested in starting a club dedicated to “the restoration and preservation of Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg automobiles.”  I joined the Auburn/Cord/Duesenberg Club as a charter member.  I later designed the Club emblem.  When I was discharged from the Army in 1953, Vern offered to sell his car to me for $500 and I bought the '32 and Duse engine.  He had taken it all apart and I bought it in pieces. I sold the '32 Ford body, grill and fenders.  I kept the chassis and the engine, which was the reason that I wanted it in the first place.  I took the Duse block to Mickey and he bored it for me for more cubic inches and got me special domed pistons for it.  In 1955 I was struggling to build a fiberglass boat-tailed speedster around this engine and the '32 chassis.  Marshal Merkes, who owned the Duesenberg Company, knew every person that had anything to do with Duesenberg cars or the engines.  He found out that I had Duse engine #J419 and he wrote to me asking if I needed any parts or information.  He had moved to Glendale, California from Indiana.  I went to see him and we talked about my love for the Duesenberg and my ambitions to build a speedster and a Duse streamliner.  Marshal mentioned my dreams to a person who had somehow acquired Duesenberg engine #J449 and was not able to do anything with it.

     This person called me and told me that he knew about my dreams and wanted me to have the engine.  He sold it to me for the unbelievable price of $50. He lived in Garden Grove, California.  He said, "Now you can build both your cars, the speedster and the streamliner."  He told me the story that his J449 and my J419 had both been in an all-aluminum boat that was scrapped for the aluminum in World War II.  The engines wound up at Charlie Gray's Marine Motor Company in Los Angeles.  J419 was bought by Jot Horn and Norm Taylor and they put it in a 1929 Ford roadster and ran it at El Mirage in 1949. I talked to Joe Rod who drove it and he said he was going 160 on the tachometer when he ran out of lakebed.  Horn and Taylor took the car to Bonneville in 1949, but only got 125 mph.  They couldn't get the four carburetors tuned right in the high altitude.  Horn and Taylor were disappointed with the Duesenberg engine and Taylor wanted to use a Ranger aircraft engine instead.  They sold the Duse engine J419 to Vern Holt, who put it into the '32 Ford two-door sedan.  The Duse ‘32 Ford was run at the Santa Ana airport drags and was driven by Joe Rod.  He told me that he went through the timing lights at 105 mph sideways. 

     At first I tried to use the 1932 Ford chassis and make a fiberglass speedster body on it and around the engine.  However, I did not have the knowledge or experience to do this and I failed miserably.  One evening I was at the "Golden Pheasant" Beer Bar in Temple City with some of my friends.  A guy came in and said he had seen an "Auburn Cord Duesenberg" car that afternoon in Glendale and it was for sale.  I told him that it could not be all three cars.  It had to be one or the other.  However, the next day we went over to the place where the car was and found out that it was a 1934 Auburn 12-165 sedan.  The asking price was $125 and I bought it, no questions asked.  I drove this car for a time.  I took it to the first West Coast ACD Club meet in Santa Maria in 1955. I chipped a tooth on the ring gear in the rear end and stored it at my folks place in Temple City.  When I decided to go to England with my singer wife I needed money and I didn't know when I would come back so I sold the Auburn.  After my military service and after my Fuller Brush experience, I worked in machine shops.  Then I went into drafting and then industrial design.  During the time, from 1958 to 1960, I married my first wife, had a baby daughter and started a coffee house business in Pasadena with two of my friends.  We called the establishment 'Dragonwyck.'  The reason for the name is another story. 

     We started our coffee house in an old wooden house on Lake Street that had been a tuxedo shop, and we put a lot of work into it to make it into a restaurant and night club.  To save money we did not get a new refrigerator and sadly the old one froze up and started a fire that burned the place down before we opened on the first night.  Although it was a disaster, we started again with the insurance money in a place on Colorado Blvd.  The city inspector really put us through the grinder because of the fire in our first place, but we managed to open and were successful right from the beginning.  In 1960, I worked as a draftsman during the week and ran the coffee house on weekends.  My wife hated the coffee house and we separated over severe personal differences.  I owned two Duesenberg engines and being a dreamer I started designing my streamliner, not knowing how I would ever build it.  I met a person at my Coffee house that was friends with a Cal-Tech physicist named Harry Bingham.  My friend said that Mr. Bingham could help me with the aerodynamic shape of my car.  I said that I would love to talk with him.  My friend brought him to Dragonwyck one night and I explained my quest.  I asked him “what would be the best shape of a land speed streamliner to go faster than the John Cobb Streamliner but with less horsepower?  Bingham told me that he would run some calculations on the computer at Cal-Tech for me. 

     I saw him the following week and he told me with that speed on the ground penetration of the air in front of the car was the most important thing.  John Cobb’s car had a rounded nose and came to a semi tear drop shape at the rear.  Bingham told me that if Cobb could have run the streamliner tail first he could have gone forty mph faster.  He said a streamliner shaped like a wing will have a tendency to come off the ground and many of them have.  Bingham also said the air as it comes off the front of a tear drop shaped car will cause a vacuum bubble over the rest of the car causing drag limiting forward speed.  The standard design to overcome this is to make the car at least seven times longer than the widest front part of the car.  This minimizes the air separation and the drag causing vacuum.  He said that the best way to overcome this would be to make the widest part of the car as far to the rear as possible then just cut it off or sweep the body in like a short vertical laminar flow wing section.  Bingham told me this in 1960. At first I worked on the seven to one idea.  Then I put the largest frontal area in the rear which came out to twelve square feet of frontal area.  Then I went to an almost pointed nose and a short front axle.  I covered the front tires with narrow wheel coverings.  This gave me four square feet of frontal area at the front axle.  At the time this seemed to solve what Bingham had described.  Years later Al Teague came pretty close to this design idea with his successful Speed-o-motive sponsored streamliner.

     In the mid-1960's, I met a man by the name of Carl Noren, who was in his seventies.  It was at a gas station and he and his wife both had souped-up Fords.  We became friends and he invited me to his home.  Noren had worked for the movie studios and had been the chief grip for the "I love Lucy" show. He had owned a Duesenberg that Walter Brennan sold him and he owned Bridget Bardot's "Facial Vega" when I knew him.  The entire interior of the Vega was blazing red velour.  It suited Bardot's movie presence.  He had movie posters all over his home.  He had a working model of the Black Scorpion from the movie and a movie model of the big gorilla from "Mighty Joe Young."  Noren told me that he had a large garage that he had let Craig Breedlove use to build his first jet car, the "Spirit of America."  I met Craig Breedlove at a Pan-Pacific car show with his jet car, and I mentioned Carl.  Craig said, "Yeah, quite a guy, Carl.  I never could have built this car without his help."

     A Duesenberg enthusiast in the ACD Club tried to help me raise money to complete the streamliner. He started a "Ron Henderson-Duesenberg on the Salt" newsletter, which he mailed monthly to all the ACD club members with photos of the model and a montage of photographs of the actual chassis, with me sitting in it.  Sadly, his efforts only raised $490. Realizing that his efforts had failed and I could not produce the car, I did a "dream painting" of the streamliner and sent it to him.  I wrote to him in 1995 to tell him that I had finally created a Duse-type speedster that I called the "Lady Dragon," but not the streamliner.  He wrote back and told me that he had recently been talking to some of the rich people that he had approached about funding the streamliner and they told him that if they had really believed that I was actually building a new Duesenberg streamliner to run at the Bonneville salt flats that they would have financed the whole thing.  Such is the irony of life.

     One night after my first wife Fran and I had separated; she brought our little girl into my coffee house in the dead of winter in a rain storm in a frilly dress.  My little daughter caught pneumonia and died in a week at the age of seven months.  I had no money to pay the bills and my only asset was my Duesenberg engine #J449.  I sold this engine to Jack Nethercutt for $800 which I used to pay the hospital and funeral bills.  My partners and I had other jobs and the nightclub became a burden that we couldn't handle.  I sold out my interest and got paid $100 every week from the new owner.  I moved to Venice Beach, California and started to hang out at a place Called “The Gas House.”  It was an old, long-closed bingo palace, but had been re-opened by an attorney named Al Mathews as an art gallery and general place for the “Beats” to hang out.  It was a “Citadel La Boheme.”  One night at the Gas House, someone said there was a rent raising party in Hollywood.  I volunteered my '47 Cadillac for transportation for the three of us that wanted to go but was out-voted by a crazy race driver with a '54 Cadillac that had run in the French Le Mons race.  We left Venice Beach for Hollywood, but had to stop for water for the radiator every few miles, which made us late for the party.  The other passengers were high on marijuana and the delays didn't bother them.  They didn't offer me any. 

     At the party people were running around outside with elephant ear plant leaves in their belts proclaiming that they were the tree people.  I was totally bored, and then I looked across the room and saw this small lady who had just come in and I got up from my seat and walked over and introduced myself to her.  We sat by the fire.  She had an autoharp and then someone asked her to sing.  As I passed out from the wine that I had been drinking all night I heard this heavenly voice like none I had ever heard before.  After a while she woke me up to say good bye and I accompanied her to her car and we talked for a long time.  I told her that I hung out at the Gas House, a well known Beatnik place in Venice Beach, and she said that she would find me.  A week later I was in the Gas House basement at a ridiculous party and I felt a tug at my sleeve and it was her.  I said, "Let's get out of here!"  I took her home to her place in East Los Angeles.  I left Venice Beach and moved in with Dorris.  She had three kids and I became their daddy.  Dorris and I drove my old '47 Cadillac around for transportation and she sang at the Troubadour Club in Hollywood, the Ice House in Pasadena, the Tanglewood Festival in Philadelphia and many other venues.  She never received the acclaim or praise that she deserved for her incredible voice and her singing. 

     Her career in the United States was disappointing, so after we were married a year, she went to England and got a record contract, while I stayed in California. I worked, took care of the kids and worked on my race car. While Dorris was singing in England I started to build the streamliner, with the Duse Engine J 419. I got a shop sponsor, A&L Watari Auto & Truck, in downtown Los Angeles, space and labor.

Lane Watari was a drag racer and he and his father were going into building dragsters big time and they thought astreamliner would be good advertising for their dragster business. I took my engine there and we built a tubular streamliner chassis with a dragster type role cage just behind the rear axle. Lane and I built leading arm torsion bars in the front axle and radius rods to the front suspension. I obtained 8-50 x 18 Indy tires and had 18” wheels built. Cooks Machine shop built short rear axles for me. I had a dual drive clutch and a ’37 Cad transmission and an Halibrand Quick Change rear end. I had to have a special spool built to connect the Duesenberg twelve bolt pattern on the crank shaft to the eight bolt Chrysler pattern on the flywheel. Lane built a scatter shield for the flywheel assy. The Watari’s had consigned $30,000 in parts and equipment for their new dragster building business, which they had hoped to pay back after expected sales.  Construction on my streamliner chassis was well under way when one night they were looted of all the new parts and equipment. This theft was a shock to their business.

They needed the space my car was in to use for work to pay back the money, so I had to move my car out of the shop. I took everything home and put it in our little garage under our rented house on the hill in East Los Angeles. 

I had approached the Firestone race tire sales manager Bill McCrary for tire sponsorship for my streamliner. I sent him photos of the model of the finished car and photos of me sitting in the under construction chassis. He shipped me two 400 mph tires.

Dorris returned at this time from England, a success and intended to go back. I had no immediate prospects for continuing any work on the streamliner. Dorris was going back to England, that was where her career and future was, which she said would be good for the both of us if her success continued, and I really needed to be with her. I had the 400 MPH tires at home and with no prospects for using them in the near future and not wanting to store them while I was in England, I gave them to Dean Moon. He put the tires on the 'Moonliner' that he had bought from Jocko Johnson, where they are to this day.

I worked in the aerospace industry with a dirt track racer named Norman Sloan. Norman had a large shop in Bellflower for his car. I told him about my problem and he said he had a lot of space in his shop and offered to store my car and all my parts until I returned. I left for England with my wife and expected to someday return to California and finish my streamliner with Norman.

My wife's career did not materialize as we expected. There was little money to get by on and after a year, Norman had an heart attack and died. His wife got rid of all his race car things and wanted $500 to cover my car and engine expenses or she would sell it as well. I didn't have the money to cover this. I was financially strapped, so I let her sell it. When this happened I felt that my car career was over. 

In England I showed photographs of my paintings to a person that was doing a “liquid light show” for a new group called “Pink Floyd”. He worked for other rock music groups also. He liked my work and let me do some color projection with his equipment at one of the venues. This worked out very well, because he was tired of doing the light show and he let me take the equipment and do the show on my own. He became the sponsor for my work permit, which gave me the right to stay in England.

I further developed the "Liquid Light Show" color backing for music and it became quite successful. I built a small color laboratory in my home and developed a color system that would pulse with the music that was being played.

My show was considered at one time to be one of the best liquid light shows in England. I toured England, Europe, Scandinavia, North Africa and Switzerland for two years. I did this alone and also with Dorris and her son, who was a guitarist. Her son, Eric, later became famous with the group "Heatwave," and for the song "Boogie Nights."

A curate vicar by the name of Hugh Maddox, at the Church St Martins in the Fields in London at Trafalgar Square wanted to have a folk music club in the burial crypt of the church and in 1970 he got it started. He also wanted a light show. Dorris was the opening act, backed up by my Light Show. My “Liquid Light Show” was so well received that the Vicar wanted it every week for his “Crypt Folk Club”. I did my show there almost every Sunday night for seven years.

One night while doing my light show at “The Crypt Folk Club” an emissary for the American Embassy in London introduced himself to me and asked if I would be interested in touring my show for the American Embassy in Tunisia. It seems that there was a lot of student anti-American unrest being expressed in the colleges, even riots. The American Embassy person also contacted Dorris and her son Eric who was a guitarist to do the Tunisian college tour with me and my “Light Show”. It would be a music and “Light Show” presentation. It seems to me with Dorris and her son being black and me being white that this “tour” was an effort by the American Embassy to show the North Africans that America was truly interracial. We were peace keeping ambassadors. We presented our show at five colleges. My show’s final appearance in Tunisia was at the main theater in Tunis. My photo with my projector was posted on the “Attractions” billboard outside. Before the tour I was requested to put on my light show at the American Embassy Auditorium in London, probably so they could actually see what they were sending us out to do in Tunisia.

My marriage to Dorris had ended by mutual consent and I married a Cockney English groupie, who became a nude model, but her interests went other ways and I was alone again. I applied for a permit to exhibit paintings at the open air art market on Bayswater Road in London. One day after selling almost nothing for a year I sold five paintings to the same man. The cute little blond on his arm kept saying, "I want that one too." One by one they bought five paintings with cash. My feeling was that this was a one time lucky thing. I had been doing the Light Show at St. Martins for seven years and it was growing old for me. I set up a friend of mine to do the show and I used the money to come home to California after twelve years abroad.

I went back to design drafting work and designed my Duesenberg type speedster. I decided to call my car the "Lady Dragon," because the dinosaur/dragon influence from my father and the first Duesenberg speedster that I saw when I was seven years old, in 1938. That car looked like a dragon on wheels to me. In 1938, I also saw the movie"Topper," with actress, Constance Bennett, who rode around in a speedster that also looked like a dragon type car to me. I was entranced by her and my mother said to me, "She is your Lady." In the beginning the dream of my car and creating it were beyond what I was capable of, but in the ensuing years I aquired enough experience and I finally did build the "Lady Dragon Speedster," my life's dream.

I went to work as design draftsman for a small company called Electro Plasma and in my search for someone who would appreciate my dreams with me, I met Mable Daniels. We were both searching for someone and we found each other. Mable believed in my dream of the Lady Dragon car and we put it together. It was a long and complicated project, but we did it.

This is the process that I used to create the "Lady Dragon": First using 1/10 inch scale I designed the complete body, fenders, built a model and then I designed a new frame/chassis under the body configuration. I then designed all the lofting curves for all the stages at ten inch increments of the body and the fender shapes, side view, front view and rear view by pencil. I plotted each stage of all the external curvatures of every part of the body and fenders by hand and by eye. I have the drawings to show this. Then I got 4ft x 8ft illustration boards and projected the 1/10th scale drawings to full size on the illustration board, by measurement and by hand and eye. I did this on the living room floor of the three room flat where we lived. Then I got 4ft x 8ft x3/4" plywood, which I cut to rectangles slightly larger then my external curvature requirements and transferred the drawing shapes by ice pick thru the illustration board to the plywood. I then redrew the stage configurations on the plywood and sawed them out on the big band saw at my place of work after regular working hours. I did all the curves by hand because using "French Curves" and "ship sweeps" was actually more complicated drawing-wise for me, trying to match up all the vectors from someone else's curve was too complex. I knew what I wanted and I drew it, piece by piece, shape by shape, curve by curve. When I got to the final design stage and I knew the materials that I needed to build my car, I started looking for the right person or shop to start to put it together. Having known Jocko Johnson for a long time and being aware of the cars he had built, I went to him to help build my "Lady Dragon Speedster." Jocko had built a streamlined dragster he called "Jocko's Porting Special." He then built an Allison powered streamliner with the same basic design. This car was later toured and driven by "Jazzy" Nelson after Jocko got tired of it. After that he sold it to Dean Moon and Moon called it the “Moonliner”.

When Mable and I got to his place in Twenty-nine Palms, with the raw materials to build my car he had just completed a beautiful replica of his "Porting Special" dragster for Don Garlits and his Museum in Ocala, Florida. Even having had this commission from Garlits Jocko still harbored hateful misgivings about him. He also had an hateful and negative attitude towards Wally Parks and the NHRA which was due to the lack of recognition that Jocko thought he should have received for the eight second run that his original “Jocko’s Porting Special” had made. He expected the NHRA to make a big deal of this run and evidently they didn’t.  He put the car in Garlits' truck and it was taken away.

During the time he worked on my car he took out his anger and frustrations of his past anxieties on my car At Jocko's place we built a 2x4 board jig for the frame and bolted the 2x3 rectangular steel tubing into it and welded the pieces together.  There was warp which had to be dealt with. The basic frame was my unique design and the welding came out good. I assembled the plywood fender "bucks." Sadly, I was working with an idea that Jocko hadn't done before and shaping the aluminum over the bucks was a problem for him. The shaping and the mounting and fitting work of the fenders had problems. Jocko got the right rear fender too high and in frustration he took a metal dolly and smashed the fender in. He later re-shaped it, but the final shaping became worse, with wrong curves, and mismatched crooked spare tire wells and a grill shell that couldn’t be rectified.

Jocko's work did not meet the requirements that I had hoped for and after two years of monthly payments for his work, I took the car away from him. The fenders, grill, tail and most of the other work that he did wouldn't fit or was lopsided. I tried to get a quote to redo the car from California Street Rods, but they didn't want to touch it. I went to Steve Valarcheck's shop in Corona and they rebuilt the tail and did a beautiful job rebuilding and fitting the doors. Steve went out of business and he went to work for Rod Heaven, and took my car there.  The fenders and grille shell were so badly made that there was no alternative but have them done over. Bob Beherens was recommended for the job. He re-made these parts for me and did excellent work. We cut up the fenders and the grille shell that Jocko had made and threw them on Bob's scrap pile.

I met Mike Cinqmars at Hot Rod Heaven and he was setting up his own place in Apple Valley and wanted to finish my car for me. He called his place "Mike's Street Rods." Mike got it close to the way I wanted it. Ron Mangus did the upholstery work. Cinqmars put the car together and did the paint job, but I still had to change a lot of his work. When I got the car home I saw that the top was lopsided and I had to reshape it to fit the body and have it reupholstered. Lynn Barnet at Thornton Auto Upholstery in Santa Ana did a good job on reshaping the top and getting it to fit the body and then he upholstered it again. Lynn hung the headliner on steel bows in an incredible feat of artistry.

The main problem in my project was that I was building a car that was not a re-do of a production car. It wasn't a Ford, Chevy or any other production car and the basic car was not there for these people to do their hot rodding on. The people doing this work with me did not understand what I wanted and none of them had ever seen an Auburn or a Duesenberg, which were my inspirations for this job in the first place, and I was creating shapes and configurations on my car that had not been done before. I was creating a new 1930's speedster.

Mable and I have toured the car across the country and to many car shows. Mable is my lady, forever. I am retired from actual racing, but it is one of my major interests. I took “Lady” to a “Cruise In” at the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum and I met Richard Parks. He saw my Lady Dragon speedster and liked the car and we have become good friends. Richard and I took the Lady Dragon to the 1/8th mile drags at Irwindale Speedway one Thursday evening and raced it. We turned 79 mph in 6.9 seconds. Richard and I have taken Lady Dragon to many car shows and gatherings, including the Fabulous Fifties banquets.  At the Fab Fifties get together at Paramount Ranch, I met Rita Saiz who was doing a TV film on the racers that used to drive Paramount when it was a race track.

 Richard and I have also taken “Lady” to the Bothwell Ranch Auto Racers Museum and the Petersen Automotive Museum banquets. Jay Leno first saw “Lady” at the Loyola Multiple Sclerosis Benefit Concours. Mable said hello to him in the VIP lunch line and invited Leno to come see our car.

Richard, Mable and our friend, Rita Saiz have attended the Gale Banks bi-annual Gearhead Bash party with Lady Dragon on three occasions and Jay has always comes over to see the car. Jay had his picture taken with “Lady Dragon” and myself.

Richard and I took race drivers Danny Oakes and Roger Ward to many car shows, races and reunions. One time at Richard's home, his uncle Vance Ziebarth admired Lady Dragon, but didn't want to bother anyone for a ride. Richard and his family coaxed his uncle to go for a ride in the speedster. When we returned he said it was one of the highlights of his life.

I met Wally Parks when I ran my ’36 Ford at El Mirage with Russetta Timing Assn. in the 1950‘s. On another occasion I went with Richard to see his father's new home in Claremont and we helped do some gardening.  Wally Parks was such a gentleman.

I have designed a new Bonneville streamliner for a Duesenberg engine. I would like to find a sponsor and another Duesenberg engine!

Since designing and building my car the "Lady Dragon Speedster," I have been involved in working out it's problems, which being an original work of art and an automotive engineering creation, has been a really extensive challenge. It runs well now and we have taken her to many car shows and have a room full of trophies. I am also painting in oils and writing music for piano. I have written a sixteen minute piano composition that I call, "Opus One, Overture to Lady Dragon."

 I have also owned a 1966 Plymouth Belvedere II Hard Top for the past twenty-two years. It now has had three engines. The latest is a1970's 318 that I put a four inch stroke "Scat" crankshaft in. It is doing quite well and I have had several people approach me who want to buy it. 

Ron Henderson standing with the “Lady Dragon”. circa 2009

(l-r) Jim Miller with Ron Henderson in the “Lady Dragon”.

The “Lady Dragon” at a party. circa 2004

The “Lady Dragon” dash.

A young Ron Henderson.