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c h a p t e r f o u r THE฀CalIFORNIa฀฀ HOT฀ROD฀INDUSTRy,฀฀ 1945–1955 During the late 1940s and early 1950s, as hot rodding spread throughout the United States and grew increasingly diverse, so too did the high-performance automotive aftermarket. Going into the war, a couple of dozen tiny backyard Southern California businesses were the core of the industry; heading into 1946, the same was true. But by the end of the 1940s, there were nearly one hundred speed equipment manufacturers in greater Los Angeles alone, and by the early 1950s, the largest of these had grown to become multimillion-dollar-a-year operations with large production facilities and national distribution networks. Retail outlets known as speed shops and mail-order houses cropped up all across the country too, bringing manifolds by Edelbrock, heads by Weiand, and cams by Cannon to enthusiasts building hot rods in Miami, Denver, St. Louis, Chicago, and Boston. At the same time, dozens of entrepreneurs established new equipment manufacturing companies all across the United States. The result, by 1955, was that what had been a tiny, insular, and almost exclusively Southern Californian business ten years earlier had grown to become a booming national industry in nearly every respect. In fact, if we include in our conception of “the industry” the distribution centers, mail-order houses, speed shops, custom engine builders, and engine machine shops that catered to hot rodders, the share of the speed equipment business that belonged to Los Angeles companies dwindled from nearly 90 percent just before World War II to less than half—possibly as little as 10 to 15 percent—by 1955.1 Nevertheless, this was undeniably the era of the California hot rod industry. In distribution, sales, and end-use, the industry did indeed go national between 1945 and 1955, but in the actual design and manufacture of high-performance 86 t h e b u s i n e s s o f s p e e d 86 t h e b u s i n e s s o f s p e e d components, Southern California companies continued to dominate throughout the period in question and well beyond. Consider the numbers: by mid-1948, there were 94 speed equipment manufacturers in the state of California, 86 of which were located in the Los Angeles area; by comparison, only 11 were based in other states.2 Three years later, in mid-1951, there were 132 active manufacturers in the United States: 107 in California as a whole, 98 in the Los Angeles area, and approximately 25 in the rest of the country combined. Finally, by mid-1954, the ranks of the manufacturing end of the industry had swelled to 158, 122 of which were headquartered in the Golden State (111 in Los Angeles) and 36 elsewhere.3 Thus, percentage-wise, Southern California companies did lose a bit of ground during the period in question: their share of the industry stood at 82 percent in 1948 and 70 percent in 1954. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that after a decade’s worth of coast-to-coast growth and diversification within the hobby as a whole, seven out of ten aftermarket manufacturers still hailed from a single metropolitan area. More remarkable still is that, as late as 1954, Chicago—Los Angeles’s closest rival throughout the 1950s—was home to but 8 percent of American speed equipment companies. The story of production volume is similar. Almquist Engineering in Milford, Pennsylvania; Gotha in Harvey, Illinois; and Mallory in Detroit were high-volume firms by the mid-1950s, but they were by no means representative : Southern California companies like Weiand, Offenhauser, Iskenderian, Harman & Collins, Edelbrock, Fenton, Jahns, and McCulloch were actually responsible for the vast majority of the bolt-on, high-performance components sold in the late 1940s and early 1950s.4 Any way you look at it, therefore, postwar aftermarket manufacturing was a Southern California enterprise. manufacturers and manufacturing With very few exceptions, these postwar Southern California companies were either carryovers from the enthusiast-based backyard industry of the late 1930s, existing automotive parts manufacturers that diversified into the high-performance market as hot rodding began to boom, or altogether new companies founded by prewar enthusiasts upon their return from active military duty. Among the first group, the carryovers, Thickstun, Edelbrock, Weiand, Burns, Davies, Cannon, Weber, Belond, Hunt, and Spalding were the most prominent. These firms were the heart of the fledgling California high-performance...

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