Polished Chrome Reflects Customized Car Craze
The candy-apple-red, sky-blue and sea-green paint jobs shone brightly in the sun, out-shimmered only by polished chrome.
There were more than 120 of the shining specimens Sunday, with their internal-combustion, fossil-fuel-burning engines spectacularly clean, their whitewall tires whiter than sugar and nary a spot on their upholstery.
That’s because these cars aren’t about driving so much as they are about showing off and evoking memories.
“Checking these cars out reminds me of cruising in the ‘60s when gas was cheap and we just rode around, stopping every now and then for burgers and fries,” said Gilbert Sanchez, one of about 1,000 car enthusiasts who came to the 10th annual Ventura County Car Show Sunday afternoon at the Ventura County Government Center.
But no one enjoys car shows as much as the owners themselves.
Phil Carpenter has been crazed about things with four wheels since he was a 14-year-old living on an Idaho ranch.
“It’s about freedom,” said the pompadoured 55-year-old Ventura resident as he sat in a beach chair on the asphalt beside his 1958 bright red Chevy Impala convertible. It’s also about his memories of dating as a young man in the 1950s.
Carpenter’s Impala has a large engine with three two-barrel carburetors, one-piece chrome bumpers, flipper hubcaps, fender skirts and dual antennas. It also features a “necking knob” on the steering wheel.
“That way you can steer with one hand and put the other around your girl,” Carpenter said.
They’re junkyard warriors, all of them, twisting metal into fenders, leather into upholstery--in the name of individuality and bravado.
“Girls like them,” said Bill Czerwinski, 42, pointing to the jacked-up 20-inch-wide real wheels on his customized 1960 Morris Minor. “But my wife didn’t. Guess that’s why she divorced me.”
Jim Holaday said he is a different, younger man when he tools around in his impractical, bathtub-shaped 1923 T Bucket Roadster with its window display of rubber hot dogs, hamburgers and bottle of pop resting on a drive-in dinner tray.
“It gets my charisma going,” the 49-year-old truck driver from Oxnard said. “Girls and cars, girls and cars. That’s all I really cared about growing up.”
A dozen mirrored panes rest on the asphalt beneath the engine of his T Bucket. Everything about the engine is exposed and polished.
“You can’t properly appreciate the motor unless it’s displayed right,” Holaday said.
The car owners can talk for hours about paint jobs, exhaust manifolds and the drive-ins of old. And yet they insist that customizing cars is all about being different:
Holaday’s T Bucket has a heart-shaped gas pedal. Czerwinski’s Morris Minor has tires almost two feet wide. Carpenter’s Impala has steel fender skirts.
“A car can’t be like it is when you buy it,” Carpenter said. “It has to have a personal imprint.”
That’s what Alain Dion digs about customizing too.
“Why be a sheep when you can be a wolf?” the 26-year-old Lompoc resident said, pointing to someone driving a new Ford Bronco. “Why would anyone drive it like that when they could customize it?”
A self-described muscle-car fanatic, Dion still prefers lowriders. He pointed to his friend’s Mazda pickup, with Looney Tune paint job and lowered nearly to the pavement.
“If it ain’t two inches from the ground with hydraulics on front and rear and a booming, girl-turning bass thump, well. . . . it don’t interest me as much,” he said.
