Description
A terrific little archive from the formative years of American hot-rodding and drag racing, found together and kept together. The August 1957 Hot Rod Magazine captures the culture at full boil: drag racing, the Grant 200 MPH Club, the NHRA National Championship Drags, the Rambler Rebel and Tommy Ivo’s now-iconic Buick-powered T-bucket. Accompanying it is an unusual three-page Los Angeles City School Districts document laying out the rules for the 1957 Plymouth Trouble Shooting Contest, in which teams of high-school and junior-college students diagnosed deliberately disabled automobiles, made the necessary repairs and then drove the cars before judges—a wonderful artifact of the period when automotive mechanics was very much part of American vocational education.
But the stars of the group may be the two original photographs: beautiful action shots of a rail dragster lettered CHIZZLER, its exposed engine roaring and rear tires disappearing into smoke before a packed crowd. The versos are blank and neither driver nor track is identified. A celebrated dragster bearing the Chizzler name was built by Chris “The Greek” Karamesines in 1958, but without further evidence we make no attribution of the car pictured here to Karamesines. What we can say is better than speculation: these are two striking original period drag-racing photographs surviving alongside contemporary Hot Rod and Los Angeles automotive material—a small, wonderfully evocative snapshot of American speed culture when the sport was still young.
Three very different pieces of the same world—build it, fix it, race it—and a great little archive of 1950s American hot-rod culture.
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