Cruise, They Said

By LYNN O’DELL

June 21, 2000 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

“I cruise 3rd Street. Maybe I’ll see you tonight.”

--Blond in T-bird (Suzanne Somers), “American Graffiti” (1973)

Hang out on Colorado Boulevard any Saturday night and you’re bound to see Mike Griffith and his orange ’32 Ford roadster roar by--along with 40 other Pasadena Cruisin’ regulars.

In Glendora, 74-year-old Frank Weeks cruises down to Bob’s Big Boy once a month and parks his candy-apple red, chopped, channeled and sectioned ’39 Ford.

For Kevin Lindsay of Garden Grove, it’s a family affair. The founder of the largest local Chevy Impala club in the country regularly loads his wife and two young daughters into their 1995 model for a club run, such as the annual Santa Barbara cruise, in which 100 Impalas form a line more than a mile long.

The gas crunch, worries about gang involvement and other factors nearly wiped out cruising in the ‘70s. But the fine art of actually driving is making a comeback as car clubs rediscover the joy of showing off a machine in motion. Fueled by the Internet, car clubs are growing--there are an estimated 10,000 of them nationwide for everything from AMC Pacers to Zimmers.

And car clubs themselves are changing.

The image of a bunch of guys standing around eyeballing one another’s engines is fading.

Today’s car club members are technically savvy men and women of all ages and all walks of life. Many are like David Langness, who uses his modified 1996 Impala SS with its two-tone flame paint job as a daily driver.

“We drive our cars. We don’t just park them and look at them,” said Langness, a member of Lindsay’s SoCalSS Impala Club.

These days, he said, just about every club--whether for import enthusiasts or hot rodders or lowriders--holds cruises so members can drive somewhere “rather than stand around and polish sheet metal at a static show.”

Pity the poor trailer queen.

“A spotless, perfect paint job used to be a badge of honor in most clubs. But now it’s road rash--proof that you drive the thing--that most clubs like to see,” said Langness, 50, who has been involved with car clubs for more than 20 years.

Even at the pinnacle of collector-dom, the invitation-only Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, cars are coming out of their trailers and hitting the road in a 50-mile tour held just before the Aug. 20 show. And participation in the tour, which started in 1998, is a tiebreaker when it comes to judging, said Valerie Hutcherson, public relations director.

Chances to collect dead bugs and get gravel chips abound: There are local, regional and even national cruises such as Hot Rod magazine’s annual Power Tour and Rod & Custom’s Americruise, in which thousands of cars start at different origination points and converge in one huge car show.

“You can go to a cruise every weekend; then there’s some during the week,” said Tim Hines of Torrance, who belongs to two car clubs and drives his 1941 Willys pickup every chance he gets. That includes two or three car events a month.

“ ‘If you’ve got it, drive it,’ is my philosophy,” said Hines, 59, who had children at an early age and got back into the car scene about 10 years ago, cheerfully announcing to his offspring that he is spending their inheritance.

There are long-standing cruises, such as West Coast Kustoms’ Cruisin Nationals, a 19-year-old event in the Central Coast town of Paso Robles. Street rods, customs and classic cars take over the main drag and people line the curb three-deep to watch.

That takes Frank Weeks back to the 1960s, when he cruised Van Nuys Boulevard.

“It’s ‘Look at me, Ma,’ and ‘Look at my car,’ ” he said.

“It’s fun to chat with the people on the curb. Cruising, like the young kids say, is ‘When your car’s in motion, when you’re stylin’ in your car and all the girls are looking at you,’ ” said Weeks, who joined his first car club in 1947 and has been a lifelong car collector. He is also the director of the Assn. of California Car Clubs.

Years ago, most car clubs were uni-racial and just one gender, Langness said. Some still are. But many, like the Impala club, are made up of whites, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, teenagers, middle-agers and grandparents.

Women such as Laurie Hart of Philomath, Ore., belong to car clubs. Hart, 29, built her own truck, a 1984 Toyota 4x4 with a 14-inch lift, hydraulics for truck “dancing,” a V-8 conversion, 39.5-inch tires and a name--No Boys Toy.

It has appeared in magazines, and teenage boys plaster pictures of it on their walls and send her worshipful e-mail. Hart hauls her three children around in the truck as a daily driver.

Peer Pressure, the car-and-truck club she belongs to, sponsors the Extreme Championship tour with four linked shows in Oregon and Northern California that groups of trucks roll into together.

“That’s our kind of cruising,” Hart said.

In the old-style clubs, members might have worn leather jackets that said “Cruisers” on the back, said Brian Caudill, Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist for the SEMA Action Network. The car club network is part of the Specialty Equipment Market Assn., a trade group based in Diamond Bar.

“Now, it might say ‘Bad Influence’ or ‘Lowered Impressionz’ in Day-Glo nylon,” said Caudill, who works with car clubs and describes today’s members as technically smart and Internet-oriented.

But cruising, he said, is still the same.

“It’s four wheels and internal combustion and what looks cool. That’s what a ’41 street rod is, and so is a lowered ’92 Honda,” he said.

Where old clubs used to have only a president, vice president and treasurer, today’s clubs need someone to head charity and youth events, manage the Web site, write the newsletter, organize cruises and get sponsorships for club events.

Nationwide, many of these slots are filled by women, Caudill said. “Women are the doers of the club.”

Once merely passengers, women are increasingly doing the driving, said Carla Boucher of the Tidewater Fourwheelers in Chesapeake, Va. Lately, more single women are involved with the club, she said. And when it comes to couples, she is seeing more and more women behind the wheel.

Her favorite cruise is a club trip to someplace like Cape Hatteras in North Carolina where, she said, “you can still drive on the beach in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, it’s beautiful, the fishing’s good and you can camp overnight.”

Boucher, now an attorney who represents the United Four Wheel Drive Assns., started four-wheeling on family vacations when she was about 12. She met her husband on a blind date through the four-wheel-drive club. They both had pickup trucks.

Which brings us to Barbara Beach, the Vista, Calif.-based publisher of Miata Magazine and a co-founder of what has become the Miata Club of America. Beach, a longtime car enthusiast, said it wasn’t pure appreciation for engines or styling that drew her to cars but something she picked up from her father.

“Girls who were interested in cars were around the guys,” said Beach, who learned to drive in her dad’s powerful Pontiac Grand Prix, a car that attracted engine-revving guys like magic.

When she and her first husband divorced, Beach bought a first-generation, two-seat, “completely impractical for someone with two children” Mazda RX-7. That led to her interest in the Japanese brand’s Miata roadster and her “Miata marriage” to her new husband, Phil Wolfson, who slipped a card under her windshield wiper that said, “My Mercedes would like to meet your Miata.” Now general manager of the magazine, he drives a Miata, too, as do both of Beach’s daughters.

The Miata Club--the largest single-marque club in the world, according to Beach--provides a common bond for people who are hungry to belong to something.

“So many of us are transplants and we moved to areas that aren’t necessarily neighborhoods. All of a sudden, we had a common interest in this purely fun, purely friendly car,” said Beach, adding that the Miata community is so strong that people who have sold their cars missed the camaraderie, bought another Miata and came back.

You don’t have to join a car club to go cruising. The Internet is full of sites such as Hemmings Motor News that list events, as do print publications such as Long Beach-based Miss Information’s Automotive Calendar of Events for California, Arizona and Nevada.

But non-joiners miss out on what Impala enthusiast Lindsay said is the best part--”the tremendous friendships I have with people I never would have come in contact with otherwise.”

Lindsay, a stockbroker, started his club with seven people he met through the Internet and built the group electronically to its current 350 members.

Langness, who works on his ’96 SS with his sons, said the Impala club has helped him connect with people who are experts in areas such as suspension, engines and paint and who are willing to bend over backward to be helpful simply “because you have a car like theirs,” he said.

If something goes wrong with the car, he said, he posts a note on the Internet and quickly gets as many as 20 responses from people who have had the same problem and can tell him the part number of the piece needed to fix it.

Langness has met out-of-state Impala enthusiasts online, then picked them up at the airport and put them up at his Torrance home when they are in the area.

“They always turn out to be nice folks,” said Langness, director of health science communications at UCLA Medical Center.

It’s the same with Miatas. Beach estimates that in 11 years, 500 out-of-town Miata couples have stayed at her north San Diego County home.

Across the country in North Carolina, the Internet has made all the difference for a lone lowrider. Allen Buchanan knew of only one other lowrider in the county when he bought his 1997 Chevy S-10. Now he has a year-old mini-truck club, Endless Attention, and has found a measure of fame as publisher of an online magazine. Buchanan, a 42-year-old graphic artist, runs the magazine with his brother Chris.

Both Buchanans have muscular dystrophy and use wheelchairs. In Allen’s case, the lowered truck is a necessity--but he was drawn to the look anyway, he said.

Cruising is illegal in Buchanan’s hometown of Bakersville but not in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., where car clubs at the Southern Mini Truckin’ Nationals rent motel rooms and cruise up and down the six-lane highway, he said.

In Pasadena, it took Mike Griffith, a former Episcopal priest known as “the hot rod priest,” to bring cruising back to Colorado Boulevard. Griffith, a Native American, underwent a major life transformation, left the church after 20 years and took up traditional sand-painting full time.

“I think I’m much more spiritual now,” said Griffith, 54, of La Canada Flintridge. A car collector since age 15, he currently has 18 cars and belongs to the Marauders Hot Rod Club for ‘32-’34 Fords built as hot rods before 1962.

Trying to get a car show started in 1998, Griffith passed out fliers and spent a lonely few months sitting with his hot rod outside a restaurant across from Pasadena City College. Finally, the idea caught on and Griffith moved his Saturday night show to Fuddrucker’s in Pasadena.

The lot is packed on cruise nights with collectible cars and trucks. Not everybody goes on the 11-mile cruise--which leaves the parking lot at 8 p.m. and, to stay legal, makes just one pass down each street--but Griffith is always there.

“It’s an important part of re-creating what we used to do,” he said. “We don’t go around picking up girls anymore, but we still cruise and we’re still having fun.”

His wife, Donna, sometimes accompanies him. Or she drives her white 1956 Ford Thunderbird, just like the one in “American Graffiti.”

Yep, she’s a blond. Her license plate? A homage to the movie: ICRZ3RD.

Maybe you’ll see her there.

Lynn O’Dell, a frequent contributor to The Times’ Orange County edition, can be reached at highway1@latimes.com.

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Resources

Assn. of California Car Clubs

https://www.acccdefender.org

Hemmings Motor News

https://www.hemmings.com.

Miata Magazine

https://www.miatamagazine.com