I had known Dick Page for some time and whenever I ran into him at a show, or an exhibition, we always spent some time talking about hot rods and customs. Dick’s opinion is that you don’t customize unless it actually enhances the overall look and design., which I happen to agree with. He wrote an article about this in my first book “Hot Rod, An American Original”. Even back then his black suede ’32 Chopped Blown Tudor was a legend. Dick had over 130,000 miles on the car way back then. He drove it everywhere, which was always interesting when it rained as he ran slicks on the back. 

He was working on a custom ’51 Mercury for Denny Hall, that had some wonderful work done on it, chopped and smoothed with a sectioned hood to lower the front peak just enough to make the lines smooth…. But this is getting into a whole new conversation and the main thing is when you are with Dick, you could run into anyone. Today it was Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. He walked up and they started telling stories of earlier days of flat towing show cars from the Seattle Tacoma area all the way down to L.A. It was a regular thing and no one had the big fancy trailers and rigs back then. And they often slept in their cars to save money. The stories just made me kick back and listen. I did get a series of photographs of Ed doing his thing, and evidently it is hard to get a picture of Ed jus being Ed…. We got one as you can see and had a lot of fun with the others. Listening to these two guys talk about the early days was a treat. It was history and it was real. 

About that time Denny Hall showed up in his “A” Rdstr Pickup. His Merc was where all of this started when I ran into Dick. In the middle was 2 to 3 hours of stories from Dick and Ed about the older days. Anyway we decided to go over to Dicks garage and take a look at it. Most of the heavy work was finished and it was in primer, so we photographed it in the background with Dick’s ’32 Tudor and Denny’s Roadster Pickup out front. It was a beautiful night and the end of an interesting day. 

As an addendum to the story, I was the caretaker of the 15oz Fuel Coupe for a while and Ed had painted the doors on it back in the day. Manuel Reyes did all the striping on the car. The car had lots of interesting history. And these guys were part of it. That’s what it’s all about….

Words and Photos by Perter Vincent