Ed “Big Daddy” Roth

Before they began lining up to see him, he was just a simple man working out of a simple garage creating things with his bare hands. Using junkyard parts and fiberglass, a relatively new material then, he was building cars because they were the only thing he truly loved. The first one he called the “Outlaw.” Then came another creation called the “Beatnik Bandit.” Then there was “Rotar.” Then came the greatest move of his life. Or worst move. It depends who you ask.

Roth, a California hippie of sorts, nicknamed “Big Daddy” by his friends, needed cash to finance his car creations, so he began selling T-shirts out of a makeshift booth he set up at county fairs, drag strips or car shows. He personally airbrushed T-shirts with cartoon characters and pictures of cars. When he began drawing monsters driving cars, one in particular blew them all away. Rat Fink was an oversized, imaginative and, in some cases, grotesque character. By 1963, every teenager who cared about cars had a Rat Fink model kit in his basement and a Rat Fink T-shirt in his dresser drawer. Everyone wanted a Fink. He was the anti-Mickey Mouse. Roth’s garage in Lakewood, Calif., became his studio and he hired dozens of people to help create the Fink empire. An empire? Yes, but Roth couldn’t sustain it.

By the late 1960s, less than a decade after his first strike into the Fink goldmine, it was all gone. The kids began following something else. Roth hung out with biker gangs and his business fell apart. He went bankrupt, found religion and in 1974 became a Mormon sign painter in Utah. And then the echo came. Like all things in life, a new generation found Fink cool again. All of a sudden, Fink’s family began showing up in tattoo parlors, on record covers, comic books and in art galleries. Less than a decade later, Big Daddy was back. And, although his life substantially changed over the years, Roth never gave up on his dream. At the time of his death in April 2001 at age 69, he was still working on cars.