When car culture ruled the West Coast
Impressive collection of club plaques is a sight to behold
LYNWOOD, Calif. — There is no denying that Southern California is the birthplace of hot rodding. Some of the roots lie in the harsh neighbourhoods of Southeast L.A. whose reputations, true or false, can be a cause for concern. Compton, Watts, South Gate, Lynwood — a mix of single-storey homes, low industrial buildings, pawn shops, cheap liquor stores and auto body garages.
It’s also a place of custom car culture dating back to before the Second World War, when the manufacturing of aircraft spawned hot rods and racing cars built by talented machinists and fabricators. It is here, on the concrete banks of the ditch called the Los Angeles River, that we found ourselves looking at an amazing collection of “kustom kulture” memorabilia — a collection of 13,000 car club plaques. How did we come to find this Aladdin’s Cave of cast aluminum coolness? Here’s the short version.
Liz, the photographer, and I drove to Los Angeles in our 1950 Chevy. We stayed with a friend near Irwindale Speedway, and decided to go to the weekly NHRA Thursday Night Thunder.
Among all the cars we spotted a quintessential 1955 Chevy gasser, one of the few real race cars at the strip. With its straight front axle and polished 6-71 supercharger, it made an impression on us. All night we tried to catch a decent photo of it with no luck. Oh well.
Two days later we drove to Marina Del Ray to check out a car show at a seafood restaurant. There are car cruises everywhere in L.A., and soon after arriving Liz introduced me to a fellow she had been chatting with by the name of Stan Chersky — the owner of the elusive blue Chevy gasser! Irwindale, Marina Del Ray and Southeast L.A. are not exactly close to each other in distance, nor economically, but there was this common thread of hot rodding that tied them to each other.
Car clubs were common in California in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s and plaques were a very common thing to hang on the rear bumper of your car to show off your membership. There were hundreds of clubs in Southern California and the trend quickly spread across the United States and Canada with thousands of names and logos — the Roadmasters, Cruisers, Shifters, Venturas, Rebel Rousers, Barons, Slo Poks and Piston Poppers. Many names were repeated in different cities but in a pre-Internet world, no one cared if there was a club called the Concords from Concord, Calif., and another from Concord, Mass.
We met up with the affable Chersky at his office/warehouse/ garage one evening and were treated to a tour of SoCal history. His company distributes aluminum alloy ingots to the few remaining foundries in the area for automotive and aeronautical parts. In the 1950s there were 400 foundries in the Los Angeles area, today maybe less than a dozen due to labour costs and environmental concerns. Chersky recalls delivering aluminum to Mickey Thompson when the racing legend was making his own brand of speed parts.
Chersky grew up in Van Nuys, Calif., in the 1950s and he recalls riding his bike as a kid to Bud Ekin’s cycle shop where he watched Von Dutch, the creator of modern pinstriping, lay lines on motorcycles and cars. The famed upholstery shop of Tony Nancy was nearby and Chersky would stop there to check out the neat customs and race cars.
“It started in high school, I took metal shop. A guy comes to me and asked if I could make a (club) plaque. I said yeah, if I could have one (to keep),” recalled Chersky. “My father saw two of them on my wall after I did this for a couple of clubs. He knew some auto wrecking guys and when he’d see a whole pile of them on the ground he said, ‘My son collects these,’ and he brought home a half-dozen. Years ago (the plaques) came in on cars for scrapping and the guys at the yard would take them off and keep them. I only discovered about 15 years ago that people collected them other than me.”
Once he found five milk crates full of plaques at Lewis Shell’s speed shop, left over from when cars were sold. They were a dollar each back then and Chersky now wishes he had bought them all. When Lindy’s Muffler Shop closed down he found one plaque left, nailed to a beam, and two others amid the paper and debris on the floor.
Chersky readily admits all his plaques are not originals. With his business connections in the aluminum casting industry, quite often he will borrow a plaque and use it as a pattern to cast one for himself, returning the original along with another to add to the owner’s collection.
“I was told of a guy who was also interested in plaques by the name of Dave Ellis,” said Chersky. “He collects everything imaginable like old garage displays, cars, parts … he built a huge barn for all his stuff.
“Anyway, he invited me to visit. He had like a hundred (plaques) so I thought I’d ask to borrow a few, leave him five that I had brought and leave him a deposit or something. He said I should take them all! So we loaded them in boxes and I came up with 100 other plaques to add to his collection. After that, whenever he found one, or bought one he’d call me, ‘Hey do you have this one?’ and we became good friends. All the people I have traded with have been real cool.”
For several hours we intently listened to Chersky’s tales of early hot rodding in Southern California. His crowded office has bookcases with all manner of memorabilia including cast aluminum models of Bonneville land speed cars. We stood in the darkened warehouse with his two Chevy gasser race cars, the walls covered with thousands of plaques, vintage race banners and even old race car fenders covered with lettering and stripes by the likes of the legendary Von Dutch and Dean Jefferies. The space held a surreal mix of eight-foot-high pallets of raw aluminum alloy ingots destined for foundries and rows upon rows of five-drawer filing cabinets, every one filled to capacity with plaques the walls could not display.
I was struck by the symbolic cycle of metal becoming art and how the merchant of aluminum was also the saviour of these marvellous little signs of clubs now mostly gone.
“I think I have over 13,000 plaques now.”