HOP ALONG BACK TO THE GOOD OLD DAYS
Longtime Calgary hotrod builder finishes tribute to car from his teenage years
At the edge of the field where Wesley McRadu played littleleague baseball in the early 1960s was a parking lot.
Often, when the game was over and with glove tucked under his arm, the then 12-year-old McRadu would race over to see if his favourite hotrod was parked there.
“If it was, I’d crawl all around that car,” McRadu recalls.
That auto was a Model T touring car, custom built by John Cassidy of Calgary. Cassidy was 18 when he put the hotrod together, and he was a part of the North Hill Rod Shop crowd. Cassidy would park the car in the William Aberhart High School lot and walk across the street to visit his girlfriend.
“The Cassidy car left a mark on me,” McRadu explains. “I simply fell in love with it.”
McRadu grew up in the Bridgeland and Renfrew neighbourhoods. Immersing himself early in the local hotrod scene, he’d pedal his bicycle around to local garages where teenagers, a few years older than he was, were putting together their own hotrods. At the Top Notch Café on the corner of Edmonton Trail and 16th Avenue, he’d hang around the North Hill Rod Shop crowd and cars — and it always told him not to get too close to the hotrods.
When he turned 16, McRadu bought a 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible for $600 from Lorne Cook, one of the fellows in the North Hill car crowd.
“It had a 327 in it and a four speed,” McRadu remembers, and adds, “Away I went.”
In high school McRadu continued to dream of being a hotrod builder — and a surfer. He managed to do both, he laughs, but was a better car builder than a surfer. After a trip to Santa Cruz, Calif., McRadu says he never could get up and stay on the surfboard. When funds ran out on his failed Endless Summer pursuit he returned to Calgary. McRadu then became a serious sheet metal worker, spending his career involved in the auto body trade.
Some 50 years later, and after a lifetime of building more than 50 of his own hotrods, McRadu was still haunted by the Cassidy car. The ghost has now been exorcised, though, as he has just finished constructing what he calls a Cassidy tribute car. It’s not an exact replica, but many of the details are spot on.
This all got started when McRadu’s friend won a hotrod chassis in a local car club raffle. He didn’t need the rolling chassis, so McRadu swapped him a 2007 Harley-Davidson Sportster for it. McRadu stored the chassis, and didn’t have plans for it until he was given a Model T touring body by the late-Calgary hotrod legend Don Siewert.
“I knew exactly what I could do with that touring body, and wanted to build a tribute Cassidy car,” McRadu says.
Helping him along was Gord Cook, a good friend who provided a couple of snapshots of the Cassidy Model T.
“I was able to see some of the little details that made it unique,” McRadu says. “Things like the tail lights, the design of the upholstery and the way the car sat. I didn’t want to build an exact replica or a clone, but a tribute.”
Using his sheet metal and welding skills, McRadu had to channel the body over the chassis and move it towards the rear of the frame. The firewall was cut and modified, and McRadu constructed the grille shell while metal artist Bob Pike made the grille insert. At some point, the rear doors of the Model T touring car had been welded shut — McRadu left them alone.
A signature feature of the original Cassidy car were Adlake brass buggy lamps modified as tail lights, and McRadu located a pair for his car.
“The front and rear suspension is pretty straightforward hot-rod stuff. What I remembered about the Cassidy car is a lot of those parts were painted red, so I did that, too.”
Powering the rod is a Ken Gilmour-built small block 283 backed up by a two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission.
After McRadu had all of the body panels straight the car was delivered to Keith Bell for paint and David Dunbar laid down the pinstripes. Front bucket seats from a vintage Mini Cooper and the rest of the interior were covered in white and silver leather trimmed with blue piping by Steve Ottens at Old Iron Kustoms in Strathmore.
After all of this work, McRadu finally got to meet the legendary Cassidy when he came over to see the finished tribute car that he’s nicknamed Hop Along.
“For as many times as I’d seen the car, I’d never met John until just this past August,” McRadu says. “He told me I’d done a great job, and that made me very happy.”
I quickly checked in with Cassidy after he’d seen McRadu’s tribute, and of the work he says, “I think it’s just fantastic, and love that he called it Hop Along. Seeing his finished car brought back a lot of memories for me.
“I drove my original hotrod all the time and all over the place, down to Spokane and many times to Medicine Hat, it handled good and I was a bit of hooligan with that car, I think.”
With perhaps a little less hooliganism, McRadu plans to drive Hop Along, but he’s waiting to put it on the road until after the 2018 edition of the World of Wheels — he wants to keep it clean until its debut at the big indoor show.