CCPA history
FROM SUMMER ROMANCE TO SERIOUS BUSINESS: A SHORT HISTORY OF THE CUSTOM CAR PHOTO ARCHIVE IN FOUR CHAPTERS
PART 1 : My passion for Custom Cars started for me when I was 13 or 14 years old.
We went on our summer vacation to Sweden. Besides being a wonderful country with nice summer weather and beautiful scenery. Sweden was also a car loving country, that I had already found out in the few previous years we had visited the country. But what I discovered that summer was that Sweden also was a country for Custom Car enthusiasts.
I did not know what a customs car was back then, but what I knew what I saw that year was something I really liked.
One day we drove around to do some sight seeing and out of the corner of my eye I spotted a jacked up late 60’s early 70’s El Camino. Black paint with bright yellow and orange flames. I only saw it very briefly, but that made such a huge impact on me. When we returned home I started to recreate what I had seen using the small scale die cast model cars I had. I was already a fanatic model car builder and had a huge collection of model cars, trucks and bikes. But after this vacations I knew what I really liked…. custom cars. Only I did not know it was called that. The attached photo (01)shows my first two models that I built based on what I saw. I did not have a model of the El Camino, so I created my own from an VW Golf model and II figured I could jack up everything and paint it black with flames. The model cars and style I built then is afar from what I now prefer. But it really all started like this.
The next summer we went to Scandinavia again, and now I was really looking for custom car
And I came across a few Volvo Amazon’s with chopped tops, crazy paint, and also my first magazine that featured custom cars (Swedish Wheels magazine) and I was hooked for ever. It would still take me a couple of years before I finally found my first US magazines with Custom Cars featured. And very slowly I was able to find out something more about the history of custom cars. I lived in a very small town and American car magazines where not imported that much in the Netherlands and let alone in the area I lived in, so it was not easy to find historic material on US custom cars back then.
PART 2: My passion for Custom Cars was first mostly related to Custom Model Cars since I was an avid model car builder.
The lack of Custom Car parts made me create my own line of Custom Car aftermarket model car parts that is still being produced and sold in the US. Parts I created can still be seen on many Custom Car and Hot Rod models world wide.
Slowly my passion for Custom Cars made me want to understand more about the past, its history. Why the cars where customized and who where the builders and owners. I started collecting old magazines and books. (I found my first R&C magazines from the early 1950’s at a Dutch car swap meet. The vendor was happy to sell them to me since he was tired of bringing them to all the meets. He had never sold one, until he met me. Obviously I bought his whole collection (15 magazines) I started to recognize cars and names, and started to make photo copies of the cars to create an album helping me to time frame the period and the builders etc.
It would take about ten years after that before I found out about Fotki.com and saw its potential to create an online photo album to collect all the images I had found. I started the online Custom Car Photo Archive.
At first I created this mainly for myself, but after I received some very positive comments from some of the friends I had shared it with I decided to open it for the public in 2004.
The site now consist of over 100.000 photos (70GB) of Custom Cars only. I think it is the largest collection of Custom Car photos online. People from around the world are visiting it daily to study Custom Cars, get inspired or look up information. Through this site I have come in contact with a lot of of Custom Car enthusiast all over the globe. Some have shared fantastic stories and fantastic photos with me on my site and ever since it started it has grown bigger and bigger.
My goal is to collect (I’m not really a collector… I read my magazines over and over again) every Custom Car magazine title ever produced.
Ebay is a great help with this. I have a lot (never counted them) but I also still need a lot.
My most special magazine/books are the early 1950’s Hop Up and Rod & Custom magazines, and the Dan Post late 1940’s publications. The cars in these publications are so pure, simple, and original. The early magazines are also very nicely done from a graphic artist point of view.[/one_half_last]
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VISIT THE ARCHIVE ->
PART 3: Because of my collection on my site I have made several discoveries. One is an 1938 Chevy that was built by Harry Westergard.
I started with a photo that somebody took of tombstone. The owner of the car died at a young age, and his 38 Chevy Convertible Custom photo was added to his grave. Years later I found two more photos of this car, and doing some more digging on the owners name I discovered he was from North California. After asking around some more I was told Harry Westergard had built this and a few other cars for the owner. Its really a great feeling if I discover things like this. And I think collecting all the photos in one place on my website often helps with this.
I also love to look in the back ground of photos and see what is going on there. In a lot of the photos taken at the Barris shop in the early 1950’s you can see a lot of other cars being worked on. Sometimes photos like this can give you a date when a certain car was built or finished. Info that might not have been available yet.
I love to share my knowledge of Custom Cars. I love Custom Cars and its history and I basically want to show everybody how beautiful these cars and its history is. I do that using my sites, Facebook, Digital customizing to help people built their dream cars. And many magazine articles. This has result in the fact that my site is a standard in the world of Custom Cars, and if people need to know anything about Custom Cars they go to my site, or contact me.[/one_half]
PART 4: This has also resulted in the fact that I was asked to help organize two very special Custom Car shows in the US.
In 2009 I helped organize and put together the Mercury Gathering at the Sacramento Autorama show. And in 2011 I did a great deal to make the Customs Then & Now show a huge success. For this show we had 80 historic important custom cars from all over the US gathered in one building.
The magazine article I have created (I mostly prefer complete lay-out text articles to insure the best possible photo text relation, and I usually can spend more time on the layout etc as the magazine people can) are for Kustoms Illustrated, The Rodder’s Journal, Gasoline magazine (Sweden) and KR8 cruising magazine (Dutch) plus several other publications in which I contributed material.I’m currently working on my first (of hopefully many) books.
My most special Custom Car moments where when me and my friend Palle Johansen (who is from Denmark) went on a research trip to the US to find out as much as we could on the Jack Stewart 1941 Ford. Palle had bought that car recently, after I had found it on ebay for a very good buy it now price. We visited Jim Street (second owner of this car and owner of the Golden Sahara), Bob Drake the fourth owner of the Ford, and the guy who restored it, and in LA Jack Stewart who had the car built at the Ayala and Barris show in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. We hear so many fantastic Custom Car related stories, and saw such fantastic photo collection. It was a fantastic time. On this trip we where also able to see some of the treasures at the Barris shop, which was an incredible experience all in it self.