Old Home Day; The Motor City's hot rodders celebrate Autorama's 50th anniversary.(Detroit, Michigan)(Brief Article)

In Southern California, you'll find people who believe the hot rod was invented there. Of course, these same people are likely to believe that unless it's a hi boy on deuce rails, black, with '39 taillights and a three-piece hood, it's not a hot rod. You have your formalists and your strict dogmatists everywhere.

Really it's just a matter of where you draw the line. So let's draw it here: On Christmas Eve in 1893, Henry Ford started his first gasoline engine over Mrs. Henry Ford's sink. When it sputtered to life, no doubt scorching the wallpaper and lining the kitchen with soot, at that moment hot rodding was born. Ever since, Detroit has been a hotbed for people messing around with cars. The men and women who transformed Detroit into the Motor City, from engineers to assembly line rivetheads, and now their sons and daughters, have proven incapable of leaving automobiles alone. Let them near a car, any car-it doesn't have to be a Ford roadster-and they'll make it lower, faster, neater, cooler. It's in their blood.

The social hub for Detroiters who can't stop fooling around with cars even after the workday is over is called Autorama, the annual rod and custom car show at Cobo Hall each February. Hard to believe the 50th Autorama took place this year-it's barely younger than the Oakland Roadster Show those Californians all admire.

To honor the occasion, event promoters brought in a staggering collection of vehicles from the Autorama's rich past. They got Chuck Miller's Red Baron, two Batmobiles and lots of other California crowd-pleasers; they even made room for modern import-based rods.

For the serious car people, though, at the top of memory lane were the two prize winners from the very first show in 1953: Frank Mack's Model T roadster and Tommy Foster's baby blue '32 Ford. What is striking about these two Detroit-built rods is first, how little they follow West Coast period style. Mack's car is singular among early hot rods, with knockoff wheels and unique accessory headlamps; the sheetmetal is a mixture of compound shapes scrounged from junkyards that somehow all come together perfectly. Mack's jewel, now owned by hot rod collector Bruce Meyer, is normally on display at the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles, to show 'em how it was done back east.

Foster's Cadillac-powered Deuce roadster is channeled; that is, the body has been dropped down over the frame for a lower profile. In the California school that simply wasn't the done thing, and in hot rodding today it's at least unorthodox. But it sure looks good on Foster's sweet blue '32. The other eye-popping aspect of these two cars is their engineering and workmanship. You'd never know they were built in backyards with a few hand tools. When we sat down before the show to ...