You don't know what I got.īy the early 1960s, when Brian Wilson and Roger Christian penned Little Deuce Coupe, the 1932 Ford was already established as an icon of the hot-rod scene, perhaps the icon. Inherit a V-8 version when your uncle traded in his old car, and a mail-order catalogue and some skinned knuckles would have that side-valve eight sitting up and barking at the neighbors. The four-cylinder '32 Ford, the Model B, was cheap enough for high-school kids to afford, and you could strip the fenders off and fit some white-wall tires for the look. True mass escape came later, with the founding of Hot Rod magazine in 1948, and the rise of hot rod culture in general. Add in the four-cylinder versions, and Ford sold just under half-a-million of these cars.Īt first, the Deuce was the getaway car for the likes of John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. Out the door, a V-8 Ford roadster was $410, and a coupe $485. At launch, it was the epitome of democratized speed, as the optional 221ci V8 would cost you just 10 bucks. The Deuce, the 1932 Model 18, was a staple of the time. The kids of this time were born into an era blending rock n' roll and rumbling V-8s. If you could turn a wrench and afford to fix up some old Ford V8, you could go racing at Bonneville or cruising down Main Street, U.S.A. The real boom came in the post-war period, with returning G.I.s flush with cash and mechanical training. It was cheap speed, personified.Īmerican hot rod culture was born on the lakebeds of Southern California, interest building in the 1930s. You didn't have to pay much for a Deuce in 1973. Some quick chopping was done to get it to look like a proper Highboy, but it was already modified. That film's producers paid $1300 for the yellow '32 Ford that was one of the stars of Graffiti. Pure Boomer nostalgia, the neon-lit fantasies of George Lucas' American Graffiti. For the former, it's all Hawaiian shirts, Edelbrock bolt-ons, and paint so deep you could swim in it. Really, though, they are simply two sides of the same record. Hot-rodding and import culture seem as out of sync as Rockabilly and Eurobeat. ![]() ![]() There's the sense that something ubiquitous is coming to an end. Somebody brings up the 5,600 mile 2000 Honda Civic Si coupe that sold for $50,000 on Bring A Trailer two years ago. Owners still run these cars as high-mile daily-drivers, but atop the mountain, there are conversations about how hard it is to find a cheap Civic these days. People talked about friendships formed over wrenching side by side, of paycheque-by-paycheque incremental builds, of nostalgia for late nights cruising in a hand-me-down hatchback. When I reached out to the local Honda community for a few stories of Civic ownership, the response came in a flood. A mainstay of the local scene in the early 2000s, when engine swapped and turbocharged, the Civic laid down 10-second passes at the local dragstrip. Eli shows me pictures of the 1989 hatchback he inherited from his family when it was ten years old. A significant proportion of the owners are middle-aged, only semi-reformed from the hoonery of their teenage years.
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