THE GOODGUYS' GOOD GUY; Gary Meadors keeps the hot rod flame burning.(News)(Interview)

Byline: PATRICK C. PATERNIE

You can tell a lot about a person by the car he drives. For our interview near the main gate of the Del Mar, California, fairgrounds, Gary Meadors pulled up behind the wheel of a swoopy, white-over-lipstick-red, Hemi-powered 1957 DeSoto Fireflite hardtop coupe. It is the perfect ride for Meadors, founder and president of the Goodguys Rod and Custom Association, who lives up to the name of his organization. He is a good guy, and, in contrast to the swarms of hyperbolic marketing and media types who have exploited racing and custom cars as fodder for reality-television scripts, Meadors conducts his events with the genuine hands-on knowledge and spontaneous love for vehicles of a real old-school car guy.

The closest comparison you can make between Meadors and the nouveau Hollywood hot rod set is that his teenage years do resemble a movie script, namely American Graffiti. The classic car movie was set in California's San Joaquin Valley, where Meadors grew up on a farm near the little town of Dinuba. Like the movie characters, Meadors spent his high school years drag racing on deserted farm roads and "cruising Main'' in a lowered 1947 Plymouth coupe. When he wasn't racing or cruising, Meadors was out behind his dad's barn giving his buddies' cars an altitude adjustment by slicing out sections of the coil springs.

Fifty years down the road and a few grandkids later, it is fun to watch him morph back into the "Dinuba Kid'' as he cruises up and down the aisles dedicated to hot rods (with a special row for home-built machines), custom cars, muscle cars and trucks. He's just another one of the guys as he stops to chat with the owners of a hot rod that captures his eye. He even good-naturedly backs up the aircraft-carrier-sized DeSoto when spectators admonish him for going the wrong way down a one-way aisle. It is easy to see why Meadors is the keeper of the torch of the original American hot-rodding spirit for the nearly 70,000 Goodguys members who attend the car shows he puts on around the country.

"I was too short for basketball and too small for football,'' he reminisces about how he got started in hot rodding at age 14. "I sure didn't want to be the equipment manager, so cars were the only other way you had to express yourself. Not that I was any big-time drag racer. You'd go out and race somebody for giggles, just two guys out on some lonely farm road burning rubber.''

Meadors met his wife, Marilyn (a.k.a. the Goodgal), while cruising past her high school in the nearby city of Reedley. They were married in 1961, and the slammed Plymouth coupe got traded in for a family-friendly Ford sedan-with a two-barrel, no less.

"It was the typical story,'' reports Meadors. "Get married, have kids [sons Marty and Marc], and the hot rods go away.''