reprinted from August 2002, posted July 15, 2010 HAN is somewhat perplexing as I post this old column, and I'm not sure that I could embellish this and improve it much for the effort, so here goes:
A peek under the hood of Hot August Nights…
Happy Birthday Sweet 16
How far has Hot August Nights come since the first cruise in 1986? I’ll start a roundabout answer by stating that in 17 years, HAN has had 19 posters.
Why, you ask, were there two extra posters? Harry Parsons, HAN Director Emeritus and local CPA – Cruisin’ Public Accountant – explains: In the second year of the show, 1987, the show’s organizers fashioned a poster with a Mel’s Drive-In waitress on skates waiting on a James Dean-lookalike dude slouching in a hot-pink ’57 Chevy convertible. They took the poster back to Detroit, arrived on the steps of GM’s Chevrolet division and told the Chevy execs how lucky Chevrolet was to be chosen the prime sponsor of such a primo car show.
The
Chevy guys told them, through their security staff, for the local entrepreneurs
never made it past the lobby, how lucky they were to be able to just leave, take
their poster with them, and get back to the divorce capital of the world – that,
the view of our town held by most people east of Denver back then.
So how far have we come? This year, 2002, General Motors came to Hot August Nights, to ask if GM could unveil the all-new 50-Year Anniversary Corvette during the celebration. HAN Director David Saville, always the showman, met with the HAN committee, and after seven nanoseconds of consideration, said yes. And so it shall be done next week at the Hilton, Wednesday morning at 10 AM – under the watchful eye of the nation’s automotive press – what a feather in our area’s cap!
Several thoughts linger – why was there a second poster that year? Because our early organizers took the 1987 poster, reshot it with the same waitress serving James Dean, this version in a hot pink ’56 Thunderbird, and marched to Dearborn, where T-Birds are built, told the Ford folks how lucky they were that…well, you know the rest. Ford also had bouncers in their lobby, so the organizers again returned to Reno. (That’s one extra poster. The second extra poster, to round out the thought, was the ’92 edition, a ’58 Buick – they shot one clean poster and another with tire tracks and an oil drip across it – purposely.) The clean version was adopted, but a few of the dirty ones survived and are collected. I like the oil-stained edition – it’s cool.)
And I’ll pose a final question and some speculation: Chevrolet historically named their post-war cars after beach towns – Del Ray, Bel Air, Biscayne – where did they come up with “Corvette”, a smallish warship? No answer here; as I recall the working name of the American
dream roadster in the early 1950s was the “Laguna” or the “Cerro.” Nor do I know how Pontiac took “Catalina” away from Chevy, should you ask…
I dropped in on David in the Hot August Nights office on East Greg Street a few days ago – on the eve of the incredible HAN volunteer team welcoming a couple of hundred thousand guests to our valley and the show. I took more notes than I’ll ever get into one column, so I’m opting for the good ol’ Herb Caen three-dot journalism to conserve the verbiage:
From now until the time you read next week’s column the show will have brought 88 million dollars into our towns and the surrounding area…the HAN committee goes out of their way to avoid displacing the locals by tying up all the parks and facilities…the event is by some measure in its 37th year, inasmuch as it was a continuation of the wonderful old Harrah’s Auto Collection annual swap meets…HAN was originally an Easter Seal benefit; the event now benefits the Hot August Nights Children’s Charities Funds…the limit of 5,000 cars has been long-since registered and HAN expects to pre-register 2,000 cars for 2003 even prior to the end of this event…registration buys two tickets, with a package of goodies worth about double the registration fee, and extra passes are available, including kid passes (HAN stresses family participation)…the cars must be American or European built, 1972s or older (extended from the original 1968 to take in the end of the muscle-car era.)...
Some car owners are purists, and for example won’t put a modern radio into their dashboard, but opt to stay with the factory tube-set with the ConElRad triangles (I’ll explain all that to the younger set on a slower week)…to accommodate them, Dave ensures that AM as well as FM radio stations are kept in the loop broadcasting during the event…HAN 2002 President Dave Roundtree explains that this is the HAN “Sweet Sixteen” because it’s the seventeenth event, 1986’s being Year Zero... I mentioned the Big Bopper last week; two callers confused him with Wolfman Jack, the 1950s Southern California disk jockey who defined the Hot August Nights
ethos…those of us who lived in Reno and Sparks could only get the Wolfman’s Los Angeles AM station – XEAK Mighty Six Ninety – in the evening hours…Wolfman was prominent at some of the early Hot August Nights – what a voice! The Big Bopper died with Richie Valens and Buddy Holly when Miss American Pie – a twin Beech – crashed in February of 1959…Wolfman’s news intro of that event, spoken in an uncharacteristically sobered voice was “tonight the music died,” and inspired the title of Don McLean’s enduring and cryptic Bye, Bye Miss American Pie…you’ll hear it a lot this week.
Where did you go during the original hot August nights in the fifties? How about the Friday night dances at the American Legion Hall at South Tahoe? (Harrah’s hadn’t opened the South Shore Room then; it was still Sahati’s Stateline Club.) The fireworks on the Tahoe
Commons? Or the Limelighters or Peter, Paul & Mary at Blythe Arena in Squaw Valley after the Olympics – a great night out, two bucks admission, one end of the arena open to the stars.
One last note for this week is of David’s plans for a “teardrop” category in 2003 – before Airstreams crowded the Interstate, teardrop-shaped trailers, little more than a double bed with a streamlined aluminum bedspread, let the Highway 40 traveler avoid “motor courts” – motels. There’s a resurgence of these tiny trailers taking place, and some are beauties. We’re far from done writing about this party – have a good week, make our towns’ guests welcome, and God Bless America.
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Hot August Nights continues. And it should be said that following 17 Hot August Night celebrations, a solemn truth fell over me: We didn’t own the cars that evoke our long-gone hot August nights; our parents did. We were cool, cruisin’ the Big-Y in Jon Key’s robin’s egg-blue ’57 Chev, but in truth his mother Kay loaned it to us. The Beach Boys should write a song about that forgotten aspect of youth…
Last week I mentioned a ConElRad radio and received a spate of welcome “how-about this accessory” mail. I like nothing more than just assembling a column that readers write, so here we go:
Fuzzy dice need no introduction here, but I’m challenged to find anyone who ever had them in 1960; a churchkey was more prevalent, ‘cuz we were wild and crazy guys who could make a 4-pack of Colt 45 from the Ralston Market go all night. Air conditioning was a novelty in the ‘50s – a GM car with factory air had a little air intake bubble on each side behindthe rear doors. Windwings, by federal law, should be restored. All of ushad “4-40” air conditioning; four windows down, 40 miles an hour. Or, if it’s a really hot Friday night downtown, put one of the old swamp coolersin your back window and fill it with water, plug it in to your cigarette lighter, and be cool, even while looking like a complete nerd, or “square,” the pre-nerd term. (But, the evaporative coolers are still in the J.C.Whitney catalogue, and they worked like crazy – a salvation for our family on a 1952 summer ride across the nation in a ’50 Buick straight-8.)
Safety was not a big deal – look at some old show cars downtown today with chrome bullets on the steering wheel hub, knobs and dials that stick out everywhere on the dashboard, and door handles and hood ornaments to impale errant pedestrians (the spear on the front of the
aforementioned Buick could shish-kebab one average Homefinder reader or three second-graders.) Lincoln led the pack in the late ‘50s with aDolly Partonesque-doodad on either side of the radio that woulddisembowel both the driver and passenger long before the windshield
glass filleted them. Seat belts? “They’ll never last,” pooh-poohed Mechanix Illustrated auto writer Tom McCahill in about 1952. “The ‘Mer’can public will never accept ‘em.” Should we tell Tom about the Ziploc baggie that would snap out of the dashboard 30 years later and
plant him against the seat while the engine of the oncoming car he'd just gone grille-to-grille with was heading for his trunk? Nawww…
“I’ll never pay two hundred dollars for a gadget that does this, and this, and this,” I vividly remember a friend of my dad’s saying about 1950, moving his right hand in the pattern of low, second and high gears on the shift column. He later became a District Judge, and no doubt went to his reward in a stick shift, $200 the richer. Acceptance was slow, of Hydramatic, Dynaflow, FordoMatic, Fluid Drive and Powerglide – “slush,” we called them, or PNDLR. In fact the earlier units didn’t even have a Park gear. [In later years we’d pay a premium for four-on-the-floor. Go figure.]
Anyone who worked in a service station, emphasis on “service”, which was almost all of us, learned where to find hood latches and gas fill caps. If you’re downtown later today, have a proud owner of a ’57 Chev show you the gas fill door, or neater yet, a ’56 Chevy or the many
Cadillacs from ’49 on, where you twisted here or pushed the reflector to raise the taillight lens – sheer poetry in engineering. Ford and Chrysler leaned toward fills behind a spring-loaded license plate in the center, another feature that should be mandated by federal law. Handy as hell…
The beat goes on: Dashboard prisms to see the stoplight, when intersections only had one, directly over the center of the traffic lane. Dimmer switches on the floorboard, where they belong. An Incline Village reader e-mailed about push-button starter buttons and two-position day-night inside mirrors, a big deal when they came out (early 1950s); I have on e on my pickup; never switched it in 62,000 miles. Automatic headlight dimmers, first one I remember was on a neighbor’s ’51 Caddy. Didn’t work then, they still don’t in 2002.
Several of you wrote about what we really called Hot Pink cars (last week’s column). While we all know what my heart was writing, this is a family column and we simply can't write tittie pink. Ever. And the family aspect also precludes writing about chrome plating the glove box doors on ’49 through ’54 Chevys – ask your dad or hubby about that – he’ll know all about that. (The T-Bird and the Jimmy tow-truck pictured above are both about four inches long, shot in my front yard.)
• • •
Tomorrow [remember, this is an old column!] the cats and chicks take their cars home, Jan and Dean go back into the record album jacket for a year, and we’re back to business. Have a good week, go buy a house, and God Bless America.
• • •
[Loose ends]: “Some car owners are purists,” I wrote during Hot August Nights, “and for example won’t put a modern radio into their dashboards, but stay with the factory tube-sets with the ConElRad triangles (I’ll explain all that to the younger set on a slower week)”.
This is a slower week. “CONtrol of ELectronic RADiation”, it was, a cold war Civil Defense technique to get all of America to tune to just two radio frequencies, at 640 and 1240 megacycles – now megahertz – while the Russian bombers were approaching to nuke us, homing in on individual radio stations as localizers for their targets. Radios all had little triangles on their dials at 640 and 1240, and those, boys and girls, were the hallmark of a truly pure 1950s classic car’s dashboard. Now, I assume you all know what “dials” are…
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