Before he drove a customized ‘36 Ford around town, Renegades car club member Ron Guidry was a highly decorated Press-Telegram paper boy

Renegades car club member Ron Guidry talked to us last week about how it was being the announcer for the club’s second Rod & Custom Motorama, in the summer of ’59 at the good old Municipal Auditorium.

Custom cars cost a lot of money even then, and Guidry had sunk a lot of dough into his, a 1936 Ford five-window coupe he named “Renegade.” Fortunately, he says, mom and dad Marion and George Guidry had raised him right, in a little house on Spaulding Avenue near Junipero Avenue.

“We pronounced it ‘Hoon-ip-ero,’ ” Guidry said in a conversation from his longtime home in Anaheim–and I pointed out that I’ve always said it ‘Wan-ipero.’ (Neither is actually correct.) Then, Guidry explained how he could afford to buy that first car.

As a teen-ager, Guidry said he made a fair amount of car money delivering the good old Press-Telegram–and he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

”During that time, Lakewood was blowing up,” Guidry said–meaning that not too long after the war, settlers were buying brand-new houses in the new city of Lakewood (longtime motto: “Tomorrow’s City Today”) just as fast as they could.

“My mom would drive me up there and let me out and I would get as many as 20 subscriptions in one night.” After that, it was all gravy.

Guidry indoctrinated so many Lakewood-ites in the way of the Press-Telegram that the P-T circulation folks assigned him the mysterious rank of “Fifth Diamond Master.” It came with neither a fez, a big see-gar, nor a secret handshake–but there were definitely perks.

Namely–a big ole ring with a dimanond chip in it. He doesn’t remember how many subscriptions he had to ink to become a Fifth Diamond Master–but Guidry says that after winning it a few times, and getting the ring, his bosses were at a loss.

“Finally they came to me, and they said ‘We don’t know what to give you now,’ and I said ‘A bigger diamond,’ ” Guidry remembered. “They just made the diamond bigger. Plus all the trips we went on.”

That’s right: in those boomtown days, when the P-T helped run the city, its top-selling paperboys got to go on weekend trips–with a fifth wheel, of course.

“I went to Yosemite for a weekend–this was when they would just drop you off for the weekend. We stayed at Camp Curry and more or less had the run of the place,” he said. Another time, it was Frisco.

“Amazingly–here we are, we’re 14- 15-year-old kids and they sent us to San Francisco for the weekend,” said Guidry, who was born in ’35.

“We’d all get up in the morning and [the chaperone] would say ‘Here’s some things you might want to go to–here’s the pool, the zoo, the roller coaster. I just want your’–and this was the word he used–’I just want your butts back here by 10 o’clock.’

“And everybody was,” Guidry marveled. “Those were different times.”

Yes, they were. I wonder how many Fifth Diamond Masters the P-T bosses minted over the years.

Tags: California, Fifth Diamond Master, lakewood, Long Beach, paper boy, press telegram, Renegades car club, Ron Guidry, San Francisco, Southern California, The District Weekly, Theo Douglas, Yosemite