A Fine Line, Part 2: Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth

By Rich Ostrander

Much has been written about Ed Roth and his contributios to the 'kustom kulture'*, as it's been labeled by more recent admirers of that era's custom vehicle artists and builders.  Ed's motorcycle phase only lasted about five years, but he never stopped constructing trikes. Ed's involvement with custom cars lasted longer; about ten years.  His artistic talent revealed itself when Ed was at high school; after he graduated he joined the air force, then after being discharged he started pinstriping cars.

A famous photo from the mid-1960s with Ed Roth on one of his choppers, flashing a peace sign. [The Vintagent Archive]
Around 1958, he teamed up with the Baron and his grandson Tom Kelley to start a shop called the 'Crazy Painters' on Atlantic Blvd in Lynwood, LA.  Ad opened his own shop the following year on Slauson in Maywood, calling it 'Roth Studios'. Early on, Ed realized that to succeed in this new art form of custom paint and modified cars he needed to develop products that could be mass-marketed.  He was one of the first to understand this - and that there was money to be made doing it.

Roth Studios on Slauson Blvd in Maywood, circa 1969. [The Vintagent Archive]
Kenny Howard made one of the first 'crazy shirts' with a weird character on it around 1955.  Ed produced his own shirts once Roth Studios opened; he started one of the first mail-order setups and young kids all over America now had access to his shirts, which were in great demand.  When he closed his shop ten years later, at the end of the Sixties, he'd made a fortune from the thousands of shirts he'd printed.

Ed Roth with the Beatnik Bandit, a sea change in the custom scene, as it was a totally new car built from the ground up with a fiberglass body, not a modified car. [Roth Family Archive]
In the early '60s he constructed one of the first of many fiberglass bodied hot rod/custom cars; the Outlaw, followed by the Beatnik Bandit.  These captured the imagination of adolescents everywhere [Roth had a particular knack for a flavor of obnoxious that young teens adore - ed.]. Revell model company was quick to see the potential and signed Roth to a very lucrative contract. More money flowed into the coffers. Then around 1965, Ed decided the custom car craze had about run its course, so he hung a 180, turning his back on cars and immersing himself in the custom motorcycle scene. He brought Ed 'Newt' Newton on board to do artwork and oversee shirt production; around this time, Roth Studios started silk-screening the shirts to keep up with demand.

A Roth Studio's waterslide transfer, likely drawn up by Robert Williams. [Rich Ostrander]
Ed also employed Don 'Monty' Monteverde, a young Indian bob-job riding local artist and pinstriper who would develop the Rat Fink character (though Ed copyrighted it 'Roth Studios').  Next on staff was ex-motorcycle rider Robert Williams - only 22 and showing great artistic promise - whom he brought in as art director to do Ed's magazine ads.

Roth's turn to motorcycles led to his publishing era, when he sold parts for choppers from a catalog, and produced 'how to' magazines that proved popular in 1966/67, like this one, and 'California Chopper', and 'How To Make a Sissy Bar'. He soon turned to producing the first magazine about choppers, Choppers Magazine, from 1968-70. [Rich Ostrander]
Ed's real turn to the 'dark side' began with his purchase of five ex-LA police Harley-Davidson Panheads at auction.  He soon chopped one and sold off the other four; a year later he started Choppers Magazine in a small digest format.   He became friendly with several original members of the Berdoo hells Angels.  He also added more employees to the roster at Roth Studios [including the teenage Mike 'Fass Mikey' Vils, who helped build the Druid Princess at this time - ed].

The Chug trike pulling the Candy Wagon, which proved problematic on parades - Robert Wilson said the kids running to grab candy scared the horses. [Roth Family Archive]
Ed then started building his famous 'Candy Wagon' outfit: a cool Harley-Davidson 45ci flathead-powered trike featuring a fiberglass body incorporating a creature's head as a gas tank.  It pulled a custom wagon on which people could sit and throw candy to kids during parades etc. Next up was his equally famous C-cab trike powered by a Crossley four cylinder motor he named the 'Mailbox'.  I saw both these machines at various car shows back in the late '60s; to my great surprise they popped up again at the AMCA swapmeet in Rhinebeck, NY, a couple of years ago.  Tedd of V-Twin bought them to display at his Motorcyclepedia museum in Newburgh, NY. Another project he embarked on at this time was constructing fiberglass bodies to cover the V-8 powered trike chassis and drivetrains that Dick Allen and Leon Daily were building at Dick's shop.

While Revell cancelled its contract with Roth due to his association with the Hells Angels, model company MPC took up the slack, selling model kits of his trikes like the Mail Box. [MPC]
All kinds of people would show up at Roth Studios, like Tom Wolfe, author of 'The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby' [read the original essay here], one of the first books to reveal to a fascinated public what the youth of the day was into: motorcycles, hot rods, custom cars, groovy music, clothes.  Tom McMullen would show up in his famous flamed '32 Ford highboy roadster.  He dug Ed's bike scene so much he went and opened his own sho - AEE Choppers - and started his own magazine, Street Chopper.

One of Ed Roth's most popular posters of Hells Angels, made in the late 1960s: Beautiful Buzzard, an original Berdoo Angel. [Roth Family Archive]
Mike Vils told me that some Fridays, to get the weekend started, Dougie Poo, Beautiful Buzzard, and a few other Berdoo Hells Angels would ride down to the shop and gather up Mike, Dick Allen, and whoever else was up for a ride.  Once they rode to Las Vegas just to drink a beer and smoke a joint, then rode back. No short trip, that.

Choppers Magazine was different from every imitator that followed after, as it included all sorts of chopper rider/builders, Black and white and Hispanic, men and women. It was truly inclusive, which reflects Roth's generosity of spirit. This is the January 1970 issue, featuring 'Al's Soul Machine' on the cover. It would be many years before another chopper magazine would feature a Black rider on its cover. [The Vintagent Archive]
Late in 1969, Ed's motorcycle venture came to a screeching halt.  He'd been advertising his products in mainstream publications like Hot Rod and Car Craft; they didn't like the outlaw bikers slant [Roth was selling posters of various Hells Angels members - ed.], thinking it was a bad influence on the kids, so they started refusing his ads.  Then Revell cancelled his model contract.  Finally the Hells Angels didn't think they were being fairly compensated for the sales of their posters through Ed's mail order business, so it got 'real heavy' and Ed shut the Studio's doors, burned the remaining products out back of the shop, and quit the business. [Rumors about the 'heavy' situation include stories of Kenny Howard atop the roof of Roth Studios with a machine gun, prepared to defend the life of Roth and his team when warned of an impending Hells Angels visit/attack to extract cash and product from Roth Studios - ed.]

Also from the January 1970 Choppers Magazine; 'Dingy Diane' and her trike. It would be decades before another chopper magazine would feature a woman rider. [The Vintagent Archive]
He went to work as a sign painter at Knott's Berry Farm, but after a few years was lured away by Jim Brucker to build displays for his Cars of the Stars and Planes of Fame Museum.  Later Ed Roth returned to his Mormon roots, and moved to Utah [it's a little known fact that quite a few founders of the Kustom Kulture scene were Mormons - usually 'jack' Mormons who smoked and drank and did not attend church.  These included Kenny Howard, Ed Roth, and Jeff Decker's father Allen, an OG custom guy running in the same LA circles as Roth and Howard - ed.]

Roth's 'Chug', using a Harley-Davidson flathead 45ci motor, which was compared to an AEE trike with a VW motor, and found equally good. [The Vintagent Archive]
Later in life Roth would still build a new trike now and again, make a few shirts and pinstripe a little.  In the mid-1980s he enjoyed renewed fame as one of the architects of Kustom Kulture, attending exhibitions of his, Kenny Howard, and Robert Williams' work.  Ed passed in 2001 at the age of 69, but the impact of his groundbreaking, highly imaginative work continues to make itself felt today.

Ed Roth with the Chug. [Roth Family Archive]
*The phrase Kustom Kulture was popularized in recent years first in Burt Ball's 1985 exhibit 'Western Exterminator' at the Zero One gallery in LA.  A bigger exhibit on the same theme was held at the Laguna Art Museum in 1993: 'Kustom Kulture', with its associated catalog, which is a decent overview of the genre.  The use of the 'K' for Kustom is credited to customizer George Barris' high school car club, the Kustoms Car Club, ca.1942.

The catalog for the Kustom Kulture exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum in 1993. [The Vintagent Archive]
Rich Ostrander, better known as 'Dr Sprocket', is a lifelong motorcycle enthusiast, sculptor, and custom motorcycle historian. Read more about Rich here.

by Rich Ostrander

A Fine Line, Part 1: Von Dutch

By Rich Ostrander

In the early 1960s, I went to high school in SoCal, on the corner of Atlantic Blvd (south to north) and Artesia Blvd (east to west).  That was the dividing line between Long Beach and Compton, to the north.  Beyond Compton was Lynwood, then Southgate, Bell and last, Maywood.  One block up from me on Atlantic (at Alondra), Dale's Donuts was famous for its giant donut sign on the roof, which was featured in a lot of TV shows and movies.  If you drew a line around the area one mile east to west from there, going ten miles north to Slauson Blvd and Maywood, that zone would contain most of the artisans and shops that became icons of the 'Kustom Kulture' scene, as it was labeled in the mid-1980s [though the 'Kustom' tag was coined by George Barris while still in High School, ca.1941 - ed.]. Between 1950 and 1970 this area was the hotbed of vehicle customization in southern California, and by extension the whole nation, and the world.

Dale's Donuts with its famous giant donut sign, meant to attract drivers; an iconic 1950s attraction of the type LA was famous for, as the ultimate driving city. [Web]

So: George Cerny's shop was near Alondra and Long Beach Blvd in Compton, George Barris' shop was on Atlantic in Lynwood, Dean Jeffries' shop was next door to Barris, 'Big Daddy' Ed Roth's workshops were on Slauson in Maywood. Motorcycle-related shops included CB Clausen's shop in Southgate, which later moved down to Florence Blvd in Compton, not far from Jungle Jim's shop and Al Titus's in Lynwood, both on Atlantic.  Most of the big names were within blocks of each other, if not actual neighbors.

'Big Daddy' Ed Roth Studios in the early 1970s, with two of Roth's trikes outside. [The Vintagent Archive]

For a teenager just getting his first car (a 1948 Ford) and starting high school in 1963, what more could you ask for? Most of these shops were just trying to make a living with their craft and talent, in the fairly new medium of car and motorcycle modification. Torch welding, lead-filling, speciality painting and aftermarket parts development kept them in business, and made their names known. Many of these shops became very successful, or even world famous in the case of Barris' Batmobile and Roth's Revell models.  But I think those guys would have been puzzled by the 'hero' status given to them down the road, by folks who weren't there at the time.

A young Kenny Howard (17yo) in 1946, aboard his personal bob-job Indian Scout. This machine is an evolution of the Cut Downs of the 1930s, and shows Howard's inventive touch, with its chromed Matchless tank (with an 'H' for Howard), handlebars made extra tall with Flanders risers, and an older set of Indian leaf-spring forks that gave a spindly 'look' to the front end. The kicked-up dual exhaust pipes will be familiar to any fan of 1950s bob-jobs and early choppers. To my eye, this is the first machine of its type, the ur-chopper, and stylistically different from every custom before it. The start of a new era. [Von Dutch Archive]

Let's go back to yesterday and follow one of these characters through his rise to fame, even though he never wanted the reputation assigned to him by others, and was never interested in monetary gain. Kenny Howard initially learned the craft of signwriting when he was just ten years of age (1939), from his father Wally, who was a very accomplished sign painter and pinstriper. While he became an accomplished painter himself, Kenny always considered himself a mechanic and machinist first and foremost, and when he was 15 he went to work at George Beerup's motorcycle shop. The earliest photo of Kenny on a motorcycle was taken in 1946, with him perched on his magneto-fired Indian Scout, complete with Flanders handlebar risers, high 'bars, dual pipes, a chromed English tank, and an earlier Scout leaf spring fork.

Kenny 'Von Dutch' Howard with one of the custom-painted tee-shirts he sold at shows, in this case for Al's Cycle Shop, at the height of the late 1950s/early 1960s tee shirt craze. The 'flying eyeball' was one of his signature images. [Von Dutch Archive]

In 1947, the year after that photo was taken, Howard started painting signs; he started earning money from pinstriping around 1950.  He style was, of course, influenced by his father Wally, but his main inspiration was Tommy 'The Greek' Hrones from NorCal Bay Area.  Like Kenny Howard, Tommy was a bike nut, and had various Harleys, Indians, and Triumphs.  He's started pinstriping in the late 1920s, and closed his last shop in the mid-nineties.  He was the originator of 'spits', or teardrops, on custom paint jobs.

Kenny Howard's Crocker OHV converted Indian Scout - an extremely rare machine. [Von Dutch Archive]
It's no surprise that by 1952 Kenny was working out of CB Clausen's shop, painting and striping motorcycles.  Look for Kenny's work on early fifties photos of CB's 'The Brute' salt flat racing Knucklehead.  While at CB's he built himself another Indian Scout with a rare Crocker OHV conversion. In the early fifties, he helped Dean Jeffries start his pinstriping career; he also did work for George Barris and George Cerny.  Sources say he moved to the Hollywood area in the mid-fifties, until he went to work for Bud Ekins around 1960. Kenny would stripe cars to earn a buck, but his real joy came from motorcycles.

Out on the California / Arizona border in the 1940s. Have a gander at the custom bikes ridden: two post-war Indian parallel twin bob-jobs, wildly painted, and one pre-war Indian Scout with telescopic forks and a reversed front fender for a rear fender - stylish. [Von Dutch Archive]
Bud Ekins, as you probably know, was an off-road scrambles and desert racer of much accomplishment, a motorcycle dealer, a great Hollywood stunt man and a priominent collector of earyAmerican motorcycles. His shop stood on the corner of Van Nuys Blvd and Ventura Blvd. Kenny worked for Bud throughout the sixties, helping him restore his huge bike collection.  Whilst working there he also built several unique machines for himself.  One was the XAVW that was sold to Randy Smith of Custom Cyclce Engineering and was then sold on to Tom bBurke of B&O Cycles in Long Beach.  It now resides in Iowa having been purchased by Mike Wolfe of 'American Pickers' TV fame.

From the Steve McQueen estate auction; one of the Triumph desert sleds built by Von Dutch for Steve McQueen. [The Vintagent Archive]
Another of Kenny's creations was a VW powered C-cab trike, and later owned by Tom Burke.  After Tom's shop closed in the early '70s, it disappeared; I have it on good authority that it is still stashed in SoCal, yet to be found by the monied and crazed collectors of all things 'Von Dutch'.

The Von Dutch XAVW, with a VW motor stuffed in a Harley-Davidson XA shaft-drive chassis, and a Honda CB450 fuel tank with VW logo. Taken at the National Motorcycle Museum in Anamosa Iowa. [Paul d'Orléans]
After being asked to leave Bud's employment, Kenny moved around in his famous bus equipped with small machine shop and living quarters.  In the mid-1970s he ended up working for Jim Brucker who owned the 'Cars of the Stars and Planes of Fame Museum'' Kenny's ob was to keep the varied collection of vehicles in good repair. Ed Roth was also working for Jim Brucker at this time, building display sets and sign painting.  Jim had bought most of Ed's cars when his Roth Studios closed down in 1970.  In 1979 Jim closed down the museum, he allowed Kenny to move his bus out to a ranch he owned, where Kenny spent the remaining 13 years of his life doing a little pinstriping and hand-crafting knives and pistols.  All highly valued today.  He died just after his 63rd birthday.

Kenny Howard in his studio workshop in the 1950s, its walls covered by spooky murals he airbrushed during his quiet hours. He was a true Bohemian artist. [Von Dutch Archive]
There was a time in the early fifties to early sixties where Kenny led a very colorful life; what I like to call his Bohemian, avant-garde, Beatnik days.  He was the dictionary definition of 'artist' and his reputation was created by the upright, buttoned-down society of that time. Some of his ideas and beliefs were also the product of the times and wouldn't fly when viewed in the light of today, by most.

Von Dutch painted Münch Mammut as seen in the First International Motorcycle Art Show in 1973. [Phoenix Art Museum]
A friend of mine told me that Kenny told him that he striped those elaborate designs originally on the trunks and hoods of cars because some painters covered over grinding marks where customizers had removed emblems, and it was a good way to disguise them. Who knew! Kenny was a hepcat and too cool for school before cool was in fashion; I wonder what he'd say about the wealthy hipsters making money off his work today?

Stay tuned for Part 2 of 'A Fine Line'; next time I'll look into Ed Roth's motorsickle days.

Rich Ostrander, better known as 'Dr Sprocket', is a lifelong motorcycle enthusiast, sculptor, and custom motorcycle historian. Read more about Rich here.

by Rich Ostrander