Batmobile creator George Barris, 89
The “Kustom City” of 1960s North Hollywood, Calif., housed a veritable gallery of cars, from Studebakers with restyled hoods to a car without a single straight line. They were all created and conceived by the era’s undisputed king of automobile customization: a spry Greek man who liked to replace his C’s with K’s.
This was, of course, the linguistic habit of the custom carhot rod culture of that time. But George Barris knew, ruled and in many ways defined that culture better than almost anyone else, starting with the first uses of the idiosyncratic letter K. The mecca of custom cars was “Barris Kustom City” — workspace of the seller of “Kandy Lac” paint, purveyor of “Kandy Kolors.” Then there was “Kustoms of Los Angeles,” and “Kustoms Car Club” before that.
The latter was a small commercial operation formed when Barris was still a high school student, after he and his older brother Sam restored and sold a 1926 Buick. Their first custom car was a profitable one — and a telling precursor to the original Batmobile, Munster’s Koach and other star-studded vehicles that Barris would come to design.
The creative legend died Thursday in his Encino, Calif. home. Barris Kustom spokesperson Edward Lozzi confirmed to the Associated Press that Barris had succumbed to a lengthy illness. He was 89.
Barris’ name was synonymous with cutting edge car customization and innovative design. His customers, apprentices and numerous admirers regarded his products as the highest art — and he as the most deft artist.
He was born George Salapatas on Nov. 20, 1925, to Greek immigrants in Chicago. After his mother died when he was 3 years old, his father sent him and his brother to be raised by relatives in Roseville, Calif. Their uncle, John Barakaris, Americanized the family’s name to Barris shortly after the boys’ arrival.
Writer Tom Wolfe, who made Barris a central character in his essay collection “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” described the narrative of his rise in familiar terms: “As the plot develops, you have the old story of the creative child, the break from the mold of the parents, the garret struggle, the bohemian life, the first success, the accolade of the esoteric following, and finally the money starts pouring in.”
This much was clear. Though Barris had been expected to enter the Greek restaurant business like everyone else in his family, his penchant for tinkering with cars was apparent early on. Kustom lore tells of a 7-yearold who made model cars and airplanes out of balsa wood; a 9-year-old who won prizes for construction and design; a 13-year-old who used knobs from his aunt’s dresser to customize the grille of his first car.
When Barris was 18, he moved to Los Angeles, where a dynamic teen car culture was beginning to emerge.
This was the difference between Barris’s story and that of every other enterprising rags-to-riches kid, according to Wolfe: his work was deeply entangled with — and contributed immensely to — the rich mythology of a particular time and place.
“We’re ... in the buried netherworld of teenage Californians,” Wolfe wrote, “and those objects, those cars, they have to do with the gods and the spirit and a lot of mystic stuff in the community.”
That’s when the money really started pouring in. World War II had made cars hard to come by, so teenagers made custom-built cars out of parts that they scavenged from junkyards into which few adults ventured. These vehicles were “mostly roadsters [open-top cars with two seats],” Wolfe recounted, but also “a lot of radical, hopped-up engines.”
Barris became ensconced with the hot rod crowd, groups of young men who met in drive-ins and showed off their custom cars by blaring their loud motors and driving them at illegally high speeds. Police officers caught and disciplined many of these drag racers before things really escalated.