Creator of Custom Cars Is Big Daddy of Design

Early on there had been pep talks about the aesthetics of Mammon. The word was that good design, no longer a costly irritant to the all-powerful gods of the bottom line, was actually helping the big money men make their big money. This was supposed to cheer up all those rebel creative minds who were hunkering down at Stanford University last week for the school’s 14th annual conference on design.

“Cool sells,” instructed Nike’s Timothy Hatfield, a successful designer of cool athletic shoes, speedy merchandise that proves his point by fairly running out of the stores.

But what if cool doesn’t feel like selling? What if cool has better things to do with his time, which is kind of what makes him cool in the first place?

Later in the day, cool, which appeared at the conference in the form of hot rod meister Ed (Big Daddy) Roth, was packing up his stuff after his speech. Said stuff included a welding mask, a paper hat that could generally be described as rat-shaped--big ears, a big, droopy snout that bobs over the wearer’s own--and a white, knee-high portable toilet with a hook for a roll of toilet paper.

Humble as it is, the toilet, which Big Daddy fondly calls his “toy toy,” was designed for the conference. Big Daddy, whose crazy wheels of the ‘50s and ‘60s inspired many designers to draw in the first place, dedicated it to the Boy Scouts of America, whose mission, he said, is to neaten up when they go camping. “It’s a forest thing,” Big Daddy, 59, explained. “Drag it in. Drag it out.”

Some of the conference-goers, who could reasonably be described as grown-ups, were fighting over Big Daddy’s toy toy. Which brings us to lesson two of the Stanford design conference: Cool isn’t the only thing that sells.

“People were wanting to buy that thing,” Big Daddy said later. “They came up to me and said, ‘What do you want for the toilet?’ I said, ’50 bucks,’ which is outrageous, really, because it cost me 10 bucks to build it. So this lady says, ‘I’ll take it.’ Then another guy says, ‘No, I want it.’ I said, ‘I’ve got more. I’ll send it to you.’ ”

So it shouldn’t be surprising that Big Daddy was also besieged by middle-aged men who wanted his autograph. Guys such as Henry Bess, an environmental designer from Boulder, Colo., who grew up in California. “It’s wonderful to know that someone who’s been a hero for you is everything you expected him to be,” Bess said. “He’s completely unpresupposing, infused with integrity.”

In fact, that’s the way people were talking all conference long. Such as Michael Manwaring, a San Francisco designer who was one of the conference organizers. He introduced Big Daddy before he came onstage. “It’s the reason so many of us got into design and architecture,” Manwaring said. And then he finished with this: “Thanks, Ed.”

Even the renowned Los Angeles architect Jon Jerde credited Big Daddy during his own presentation with being one of the main influences of his designer’s life.

“In my case,” Jerde said later, “it was the whole issue of the object and the fantasy and the craftsmanship. I never much cared if (the hot rods) ran. It was the making of the thing and the camaraderie. And the moving from a garage with some real inspired friends into a studio didn’t feel any different.”

Are we talking about the same guy? The guy who designs toilets for Boy Scouts? The guy behind the deathless Rat Fink, his most notorious design, which began life as a T-shirt cartoon character for hot rodders at car shows, a big old ugly rat the color of lime Jell-O that persists yet, with its dripping teeth and veiny eyeballs?

Even Big Daddy was surprised by all the hubbub. “I’m just a welder,” he said when he first got the call from Stanford inviting him to the conference.

But then, this is also the same guy whom Tom Wolfe once called “the Salvador Dali of the (car-customizing) movement--a surrealist in his designs, a showman by temperament, a prankster.”

Big Daddy likes to say he was born the same day Henry Ford announced the genesis of his own baby, the memorable ’32 window coupe. He grew up in Bell, south of downtown Los Angeles.

Roth joined the Army in ’51 and found himself hanging with a group of guys from California who were as crazy about cars as he was. They were all like brothers under the hood, Californians who spoke only motor speak. “We had our own conversation in the barracks, and we’d talk about speeding, and everybody else was talking about girls, and they used to think we were crazy, and we used to think they were crazy. “

In ‘56, Big Daddy started making weird cars out of fiberglass. The fiberglass came into the picture after Roth saw a photograph of Henry Ford in Life magazine. Ford was standing next to a ’41 Ford with a sledgehammer in his hand looking as though he was going to beat on the thing. When Big Daddy saw that, he thought, “Nah, he wouldn’t do that on purpose,” until Big Daddy noticed the caption, which said the car was made of fiberglass.

“I didn’t know that fiberglass would bounce it back off. So I went down and bought me a gallon of fiberglass. It was hard to find, too, in those days. It was almost nonexistent. That was 1956. So I brought it home and I played with it.”

Big Daddy built his first T-bucket roadster in 1958 and named it after himself--”Outlaw.” Then, for a while in the ‘60s, Big Daddy did his customizing in a place that he liked to call his “studio.” Big Daddy liked to run around in a beatnik beard and a big tattoo on his left arm that said, “Roth.” He’d put it there to take care of all these guys who came up to him and asked him if he was Ed Roth.

Big Daddy liked to sleep in his car when he went to car shows, which did not sit well with Revel, the company that made models of his hot rods for kids. The company found out about it because a kid in Terre Haute, Ind., had seen Big Daddy sleeping in a cornfield with his feet sticking out the window, and had sent a photo to Revel with a note that said: “Dear Sirs: Here is a picture of the man you say on your boxes is the King of the Customizers.”

So when Revel complained about Big Daddy’s image not being spiffy enough, Big Daddy was only too happy to oblige. He bought a monocle, a top hat, tails--the works--and started showing up at car shows as a beatnik dressed like a penguin.

Big Daddy would also bring along the bizarre fiberglass contraptions he was building at the rate of one a year. He would make them in strange space-age shapes, with their engines poking the air. Or he’d stick a big surfboard on top of the chassis. One car that used to really upset the promoters looked kind of like a wedding carriage, except that it had a baby coffin attached to it.

That one was called the Druid Princess. Big Daddy used to put a lot of effort into his names because he figured people would remember the names sometimes longer than they would remember the designs. There was the Great Speckled Bird. There was the rat-shaped car, immortalized as the Rat Fink, and the Globe Hopper, which Big Daddy rode across Canada. And there was the Beatnik Bandit, named after an otherwise uncelebrated thief Big Daddy read about in Kansas City.

By the early ‘60s, Big Daddy was a celebrity of sorts, earning a couple of thousand dollars a pop for showing up at car shows with his fiberglass birds and princesses. When he first started going to the shows he would get bored, so he would aim his airbrush at the white T-shirts that used to be all over the place and paint car names on them.

“Boy, we had a field day for a lot of years painting all those T-shirts,” he said. “We started branching out. Instead of the car names, we’d put whatever they wanted on them, like ‘ ‘32s Are Forever.’ They’d come up with their own titles. Some of the favorite titles we’ve kept until today, like ‘Mother’s Worry,’ ‘Wild Child,’ ‘Irresistible Beast,’ ‘Eat My Dust.’ ”

Big Daddy liked to live up to his T-shirts. “If the Hells Angels were going to ‘Frisco, I’d go. Wherever those guys hung out, I’d go.”

Until 1970, when he saw the light, courtesy of a car dealer.

“This guy who was a car dealer handed me the Book of Mormon. When we had our drug parties, he never did swear or drink, and I said, ‘What do you get loaded on?’ And I thought he’d give me a great pill, but he brought over the Book of Mormon. When I read it, I knew there was some meaty things in there, and if they were true, I was in trouble.”

Big Daddy started cleaning up his life. He became a Mormon. He married a Mormon. And he started feeling guilty about his monsters, the Wild Children and the Irresistible Beasts. So he cleaned them up too.

Big Daddy worked as a sign painter at Knotts Berry Farm for a piece in the ‘80s, but he didn’t much like working for anyone else, which turned out to be the one strain of outlaw in him that wouldn’t quit. He’d thumbed his nose at Detroit when they came courting for much the same reason.

“I’m a free spirit,” he says. “I would rather dig ditches and not have a boss than to listen to some person who’s usually ripped on drugs or has liquid lunches expound his ideas. I do my own thing, and I don’t have to listen to anybody except my wife.”

Last year, Big Daddy left Los Angeles and moved his family to Manti, Utah, 100 miles south of Salt Lake City.

There Big Daddy--who through two marriages and seven children has truly lived up to his sobriquet--literally minds his own business. It’s a mail-order business featuring largely licensed products such as T-shirts and model racers, school supplies and stuffed toys, all based on his T-shirt cartoon characters, which somehow persist despite the fact that they weren’t spun off of a prime-time TV show.

And, yes, Big Daddy still tinkers with cars. He has an ’88 Chevy Sprint that’s got his name all over it. But that’s just his beater, a beater being “what you drive to work. You can spit on it. Girls can kiss the windows. You can kick it.”

But those who value their lives would be well advised to steer clear of Big Daddy’s hot rods. “I get a hot rod on the road and anybody touches it, they’re in trouble. I tell people, ‘You don’t lean on this.’ At car shows, there are signs that say, ‘Look, Don’t Touch Or I Break Your Face.’ It’s common knowledge that you’ve got a beater, you can take it anywhere and you hope they steal it so you can get the insurance money. But a hot rod, don’t get near it. You want it polished. You don’t want raindrops on it.’ ”

One of Big Daddy’s hot rods that is in the process of becoming is solar powered, Big Daddy’s second. The first he called the Pink Bazooka. He painted it pink, but the car was so heavy it took five miles to get up to 40 m.p.h. “People kept honking at me. I figured it was a mistake, and I sold it.” This one is called the Yankee Blitz, and, at the moment, it’s in Big Daddy’s back yard.

The other car is a stripped down ’88 Acura. Yes, a stripped-down Acura.

“My wife had a fit. My neighbors freaked out. Here’s a brand-new Honda with 70 miles I bought to get this beautiful engine. It’s the difference between a model T and a spaceship.”

It takes a different sort of guy to strip down an Acura, an outlaw kind of guy, but the kind of outlaw who could be appreciated by men who are now comfortably nestled in the pocket of middle age.

So when Big Daddy opened up the back of his Chevy Sprint at Stanford and pulled out cardboard boxes full of T-shirts with ugly old Rat Fink and Wild Child and Mother’s Worry, he ended up selling something like 80 of them. Jackson Nichols, a 39-year-old graphic designer from Fremont, even wanted his Rat Fink T-shirt autographed, which would seem to cut down on its wearing power.

“I’ll only wear it on special occasions,” he said.

Not bad for an outlaw.