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Build the Perfect Beast
The Quest to Design the Coolest Car Ever Made
By Mark Christensen St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2001 Mark Christensen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-12555-2
CHAPTER 1
At First
Under stars, at dusk, cars fell from the sky. Junkers, jalopies trailing strings of flame and smoke, their doors flapped open like failed wings, beaters, old humpbacked Fords and Chevys and Dodges and Mercs, tumbled down the face of the cliff, ticking and bouncing off the rocks until they crashed on the dirt and rock floor of the Hyster proving ground.
I was younger than my son is now, a thin, hot-tempered eight-year-old standing with my grandfather at the graveled lip of his wide driveway. We'd been watching I Led Three Lives on TV and had left Philbrick's chill, gray purgatory of traitors and Communist cells for this fiery sight. My grandparents lived across Marine Drive from Rocky Butte, an inland Gibraltar stabbing to the East Portland sky. Rocky Butte was also the site of the Multnomah county jail, handsome, stone and castlelike, tucked in a hollow 100 yards down from my grandparents' house and the asphalt paved grounds of my granddad's construction company, United Contracting.
During the day, inmates dynamited the jagged rock face of the monster cliff, charges going off hundreds of feet up while below — away from the falling debris — orange Hyster construction equipment wheeled around next to the boulder-tossed field, where the prisoners hammered up rocks.
It was the Fourth of July, 1956. A hot rod club was setting these old machines on fire and pushing them off the Butte for some good cause and a crowd was within the fence surrounding the proving ground, paying a dollar or so for the privilege. But I didn't like it. Watching the old cars twisting and flaming and popping off the cliff on their way to smithereens I wanted to yell, "Save one! Give it to me, so I can fix it up!"
They continued to fall and crash, fire swirling from hoods and doors. When it was over, dark, and people were leaving, I asked my granddad if we could walk over and check out the place where the cars hit, maybe there at ground zero of the beater apocalypse there might be a survivor, like a live baby found beneath a collapsed skyscraper after an earthquake. Maybe one of the cars could be salvaged. It would need work. Three hundred feet was, after all, three hundred feet. But get a crowbar and some body putty. Why not? Didn't my grandfather have a huge machine shop at his service not a hundred feet from his front door?
No, my granddad said, standing in his twill slacks, a toothpick in one corner of his mouth; that was "pritnear impossible."
Odd, given his powers. Powers that said: Machinery runs life. My granddad ran a lot of machinery. We'd just gotten back from one of his jobs. Beneath a huge blue sky beside the Columbia River, he had let me hold TNT. A red cylinder that looked as it did in Roadrunner cartoons. A mile or so away the stuff had gone off, blasts like an artillery barrage making way for United Contracting's construction equipment.
Eisenhower was president and roads were needed everywhere. My grandfather was field supervisor for United and his crew carved lines through fir trees with tall, yellow earth movers and graders, laying long floors of gravel which were then carpeted by squat, smelly, boxshaped machines that oozed wide ribbons of fresh asphalt behind their rear wheels. I rode on bulldozers with steel blades bright as ice and taller than I was as they ripped sheets of clay from the ground, laying a path for car civilization through the Oregon and Washington woods. My granddad's dynamite made hills pop apart, then the blades would slice away long curls of earth and busted rocks. Sometimes I'd have to watch from the timekeeper's trailer — not allowed to walk around alone because of rattlesnakes.
A trim, informal man, Roscoe Kellogg had been a gold miner and a logger. He had a moustache and a gray crew cut. At night I'd sit on his lap and — with an aquarium of whiskey, lemon, water and ice perched on the arm of his chair — he'd read me Robert W. Service poems:
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up
in the Malamute Saloon ...
The morning after the fall of the jalopies I followed my granddad past a rock crusher as big as a house, down the winding dust roads of the Hyster proving ground to the foot of Rocky Butte where, among dry scrub grass that came to my chest, the wrecks were arrayed like the aftermath of an automotive battle of Tobruk. A humpbacked four-door Mercury, its paint oxidized to a dusty blue, sat listing to one side, its fenders smashed in on themselves and its seats black from fire. An old Ford rested on its back, like an upended turtle. I gazed at the X of its frame and the rusted tangle of its exhaust. I told my granddad we could fix it. That only the top was squashed. In my eight-year-old heart I saw the Ford unsmashed, unrusted, un-just-dropped from a three-hundred-foot cliff. No, my grandad repeated, that would be "pritnear impossible." Really? We walked back up to the house among grasshoppers popping out of the scrub, me still thinking about the cars. I wanted one bad. To fix up and make perfect.
My grandparents lived in a white, stately shack. A black iron coal-burning stove, corrugated metal siding crawling with plants and spattered with flowers, a tar roof and linoleum floors. In the cellar was a white beer keg of a washing machine, rollers on top. Wet laundry was squeezed between them, flattened to soft plates my grandmother hung from the clothesline in back.
The house was at the edge of a patched-up, tarred-up old asphalt lake. Bulldozers, their blades rashed with clods of dirt, sat in bays a pebble toss away from the front porch. My grandfather was the boss of men who rolled their cigarettes and had fingers, some of them, that stopped at knuckles. The ones who worked in the deep shade of the machine shop seemed like big trolls in their black grease-painted overalls, old, sunless men who lived among the big basics of machinery, machinery with spoked gears and shafts and belts that, for all I knew, had been born, like maybe even the men themselves, straight out of the earth.
My grandmother gave me paper, on which I drew pipe-barreled revolvers and cars designed like airplanes. A tall, thin, iron ghost of a woman with a strange, strong will, she was among the first women to graduate from Oregon State. Her high forehead, pale skin and fine features allowed her to look aristocratic in a house dress. My job on occasional afternoons was to stand above her with tweezers while she sat on a chair, find gray hairs and pluck them from her head. She and my grandfather despised each other, but I didn't know that yet.
Here I'd sit in United Contracting's fine old trucks, trucks stored in open garages below my grandparents' huge cherry and plum tree garden. There sat the 1920s and thirties open-fendered Fords and GMCs that would be worth good money today, more had I not "customized" them by taking pliers and yanking out — twisting out, breaking out — their grilles. I wanted to change these machines as I had seen machines changed wildly in the pages of Hot Rod and Rod & Custom. I would somehow conjure otherworldly "custom dump trucks" because old dump trucks were all I had and the pliers were my only tool.
I'd sit in the cabs on split leather seats spilling horsehair stuffing, gaze at the old clocklike gauges and yank at rigid shift levers that sprouted from their transmissions and daydream of taking the trucks apart to host new V-8 engines. Their rusted bodies would be made magically new in metallic reds and greens. Many parts could be chromed, the body nosed and decked. Meanwhile, I could pull and pry and peel off all the hood ornaments and insignias, dreaming of a machine light-years beyond my grasp.
* * *
One night in my parents' kitchen, on the little Formica-topped kitchen table, my father drew:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Though it may have looked like something on a caveman's wall, this was a glimpse of the internal order of the world. This was the crankshaft, he said. On top of each section of the crankshaft was a piston. Each time a piston descended to the bottom of the compression chamber a valve would open, gas would squirt in, be compressed by the piston as it rose, be ignited by a spark plug, blow up, drive the piston down, another valve would open, the exploded fuel — exhaust — would be released, the piston would begin to rise again and the whole thing would repeat itself.
Did I understand? Good. Because this was the ballet that powered the world: cars, trucks, planes, ships all used this fundamental blueprint for the engines that drove them.
My father's lessons were basic. There is no God. Frank Sinatra is a thug. Never lie. Great cars are art. The year after I was born my father bought my mother a new 1949 Cadillac. The son of a saw sharpener in a saw mill, he was, so to speak, new himself. Tall, slender, a handsome, quietly charismatic young eye surgeon fresh out of Columbia University. He had already been a developer of microsurgery and, by the early 1950s, had some money. My mother's gift was a Series 62 fastback — the roof and trunk were a single swoop — and it was a car that started an automotive revolution.
"You'll learn from the very first mile," Cadillac ads read, "why we say from victory on the battlefield to victory on the highway." The great prewar American luxury sports cars — Auburn, Cord, Duesenburg, Marmon and Pierce-Arrow — were gone, and Packard was going. But Cadillac had just sold its millionth car and was not shy about promoting its product.
Cadillac declared the Series '62 coupe "the world's most beautiful and distinguished motor car" — and it proved to be the first of a twenty-year series of extravagantly designed American high-performance automobiles. Sleek, the first car with tail fins, the first car with a curved glass windshield, a car as solid as a wedding ring, the Series 62 was equipped with the new four-speed Hydra-matic automatic transmission, power steering and, according to Cadillac, "the greatest automobile engine ever built," a 160-horsepower, 331-cubic-inch overhead-valve V-8 that would ignite Detroit's two-decade-long horsepower race, the first production "high-compression" engine. With the intake and exhaust valves on the top of the compression chamber instead of at the side, the entry and exit of the air-gas mix was faster than before. The Cadillac compression chambers had been redesigned to create more pressure within, so that when the sparkplug fired, an even more furious and powerful explosion occurred, driving the piston down with much greater thrust. These new motors would make America a force at Le Mans and on the European racing circuit for the first time ever.
My father's 1953 Oldsmobile 88 was even more powerful. Lighter than the Cadillac and parent to the muscle cars of the 1960s, the Olds 88 had recently racked up five hundred National Stock Car Racing Association (NASCAR) victories, and inspired the first rock 'n' roll song, "Rocket 88," sung by Ike Turner and produced by Sam Phillips, who would soon give the world Elvis Presley.
My father bought the car in Detroit and drove it across the country to Portland with stops for just food and gas. But the Olds's V-8 vibrated like crazy and by the time he got home the car had nearly shaken itself apart, and within months he traded it in for an even more powerful new Hudson Hornet. The Hudson insignia was a chrome rocket bomb and Hudsons were the new kings of the rapidly expanding NASCAR racing circuit. They were forcing Oldsmobile out of competition, having gone on what would later be described as "a racing rampage" that had made the Hudson "invincible." Despite the fact that the Hudsons weighed thirty-five hundred pounds and employed a six-cylinder flathead motor, they beat the best of Detroit's new overhead valve V-8s, largely because Hudsons handled so well due to the car's "step down" construction that put the center of gravity low over the wheels.
Instead of sitting above the frame, the Hudson's body was draped over it, the passenger compartment sunk within the car's frame rails. This was a tremendous advance in automobile design, my father explained, and it gave the Hudson an advantage on circular race tracks. In one race 150 miles long, Dick Rathman finished six miles ahead of the number two car, also a Hudson, which, in turn, finished five miles ahead of the rest of the eighteen-car pack.
Cars already provided me the power, steel and flash for a technicolor fantasy life. We lived above a creek in a wooded hollow in the hills above Portland, where by second grade I was convinced life was an illusion, that every night when I went to sleep I woke up somebody else. Thank God for TV. My hook to reality. I realized, for example, one reason for hot cars was to melt the heart of Annette Funicello. Spin and Marty, the teenage stars of the Mickey Mouse Club's Spin and Marty Show, planned to win this moon-faced nymph by way of a Ford Model A that might appear, to the untrained eye, to be a Three Stooges flivver stripped by orangutans. But already I knew better. Spin told Annette the jalopy was a hot rod. Naked. No fenders. No hood. Everything on display. It was as if you were God and you'd built a transparent human so everybody could just look at the pancreas and see what an almighty genius you were in rigging it up.
Already, barely eight, I was a boy possessed.
* * *
A $100,000 bolt from the blue to build the car of my dreams. This offer came from my friend and emergency room physician, Gideon Bosker. Gideon is also a screenwriter and author or coauthor of books on food, pharmaceuticals and design. While still in his twenties, he was one of the first journalists to recognize that AIDS was more than the latest doom du jour by the dust ruffle set.
He is unusual: even in a suit he looks, as my adolescent daughter Katie says, "like somebody in a band" and one of the last times I saw him was when he threw a party in a Portland art gallery. On display, Gideon's collection of medieval psychomachia. Ancient dioramas hung on cathedral walls like stations of the cross. Each scene depicted a lively cruelty. Humility stabbing Pride. Truth tearing the tongue from Falsehood's mouth. The gluttonous being force-fed toads and rats. In the middle of the room was a pile of babbling plastic. Portland's municipal bureaucracy was getting a new telephone system, and Gideon had all the old phones trucked to the gallery, plugged in and squawking. Excellent wine, excellent noise, the best party ever.
Now, seated in a chic Hollywood bar next to a Smothers brother, he asks me: "What would you do if you could do anything you wanted?" And I reply: "Build the greatest car in the world."
He says, "Let's do it."
How this greatest car in the world was going to materialize was hardly an issue, Gideon only wanted to know: "If I put up a hundred thousand dollars, will that cover it?"
Of course.
I feel what Leopold must have felt when he met Loeb and felt also, as I did when I was eight: All things are possible.
If I could tell that boy of my faraway past of my friend Gideon Bosker's offer — a chance to build a car of my dreams — the boy would have been delighted. Though, in telling the tale I'd have to tell this boy other things about that future that would have delighted him less.
CHAPTER 2
The Winter Nationals, 1989
The night after he felt the machine that made him the quickest man alive leave the ground at 250 miles per hour and begin to flip, bust and rip apart while he sat strapped inside there in his "office" in front of a 4,800-horsepower engine, Eddie Hill had a dream. In it the accidents that had nearly killed him during almost forty years in racing appeared in sequence, from the time the engine in his 1950s dragster fire-balled and the flaming gas cooked his face to when Eddie, the only man to ever hold — simultaneously — both water and land speed world records, hit the surface of Lake Foxfire face first at 217 miles per hour. Water was driven, behind his eyes with such force that his eyes popped from his skull. The dream was not precise, because Eddie could remember little of the reality: Only starting the race and then seeing a light on the roof of the ambulance as paramedics raced him to the hospital.
Americans have always excelled at creating horsepower at $1.99 a pound and, Dr. Bosker's promise of $100,000 burning a hole in my pocket, I figured: If you want power, go to the powerful. To the Ferrari/Fangio Car and Driver crowd, drag racing is greaseball stuff, but drag racers like Eddie Hill developed computer powered management systems that have made them among the technological leaders of motor racing.
I want to keep my dream car's mission simple: A) Start; B) Hit the horizon. I'd create as much power as sanely or — forget sanity — mechanically possible, construct a Chevrolet 454 big block Rat motor, cousin to the engines used in Pomona. Lovely in the theater of my brain pan but difficult to actually do.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Build the Perfect Beast by Mark Christensen. Copyright © 2001 Mark Christensen. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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