If it looks like a hot rod, sounds like a hot rod, goes like a hot rod, then by damn, to me, it ain’t no Classic Car. No way, bub! But maybe I’m missing something here, something important that has been happening behind my back. And maybe it is on purpose. Calling any old car a Classic, I mean.  Maybe it has something to do with misdirecting official condemnation of hot rodding. Or something.  
   
The guys into preserving original sins have come together in calling groupings of older cars Antiques, Historical, Special Interest. They call hot rods an abomination.
   
This kind of misinformation is often created on purpose, for a specific purpose. Instance: The first several years of the Street Rod Nationals, it was often very difficult to get in the door of potential cities that were considered big enough, or centrally located, or whatever if we even murmured the words Hot Rods. Steep learning curve here, me lads, so we stopped calling them hot rods, and instead quietly inserted Street Rods. When this description was met with a blank stare by potential hosts, we adroitly began to explain that such vehicles were simply “fixed up old cars.” Absolute truth, the city officials would sign off on this, and we would cement the matter by pointing out how much money such an event with “old car enthusiasts” would bring into town. Money they understood. Money they loved.
   
So, is the term Classic being inserted into the hot rod lingo to placate some easily disturbed community leaders?
   
All this is a kind of virus that slips into the vernacular unnoticed. Example: The term Classic Car was coined by the old car hobby years ago. At the time it was used as a distinction for the really high tone uptown vehicles that roamed American roadways during the Twenties and Thirties. These were the top of the line makes from the ilk of Cadillac, Lincoln, Marmon, etc. Interestingly, when they burst onto the scene as Classics, such old used cars were not all that expensive.
   
Immediately after World War Twice (we didn’t learn from the first one!) those old metallic juggernauts were being hauled out of barns and fields by entrepreneurs wanting to feed America’s insatiable need for transportation. Not as collectable timepieces, just as usable old cars.  No new vehicles from Detroit yet. I was working at Albany Motors, a Ford dealer in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we had a razzle-dazzle car salesman who hit on the idea of grabbing a train to the east coast and buying up these battleships for around one Benny each. He would pick up a couple dozen, flatcar them to our California dealership, and we metal benders and painters got to make them presentable again. Interestingly, we couldn’t move that sheet iron most of the bodies were made of using our normal body/fender hammers. We had to use sledges! They usually ran fine, so the mechanics escaped forced labor.
   
I had a shirt tail relative name of Buddy Butler down in Bakersfield who found that he could pick up these old heavyweights immediately after War Twice for as little a five bucks. “Just get it out of my shed!” kind of thing. So he drove a scad of what would later come to be known as irreplaceable Classics. Usually, he would offload one of his treasures for the princely profit of another fiver. It was all interesting, and little else. Hot rods, which we had in spades around southern California, were a lot more fun.
   
Now, if you were to come to me with one of those same-era hot rods and claim it to be a Classic, I’d laugh you out of town. Clear out to Buttonwillow.  Just because a Hollywood Star once owned a Cord is not foundation for a Classic claim. Just because a certain A-V8 once ran at Harper Dry Lake does not make it a Classic, under the most liberal of interpretations. So, for the sake of sanity, let’s agree to call older hot rods, and new hot rods made to look old, something like Historic. But, even that kind of moniker is misleading. To me, something Historic should have performed a historic feat, and that would mean more than just racing a horse on a country road once upon a time.
   
So, let’s get some dialogue on this subject going. Let’s set some parameters here and now so that all this doesn’t seep into the bowels of the Net and become a kind of defacto truism. Already I am reading claims of hot rodding history that simply did not exist. I know so because I was around when some of these claims were said to have happened! Like a plethora of hot rods that were supposedly once owned by me, which somehow is supposed to make them more valuable. Horse pucky on all this stuff. Well, that is unless the horse that made the pucky is a Classic!
   
No, give me a nicely powered, fenderless, top-down roadster anytime. You know, something with that Classic hot rod styling!