Fifty years ago, the Renegades car club threw one of the city’s earliest, glitziest indoor car shows ever

For all their moving parts, car shows are not complicated mechanisms. It’s only in the doing that things get twisted, as they did for the Renegades of Long Beach—voted 1958’s car club of the year by the readers of Car Craft magazine. (It says something about Long Beach that the Main Library still has years of 1950s-era Car Craft preserved on microfilm.)

By 1961, plagued by—of all bugaboos—the IRS, the Renegades had disbanded, and the club whose yearly Rod & Custom Motoramas at the Municipal Auditorium were the local car shows of the late 1950s was permanently up on blocks.

Ex-members later formed the Sultans, which still exists—and the Renegades themselves resurfaced a bit during the 1970s. Today, of course, we have a plethora of fine car shows locally—including the Belmont Shore and Bixby Knolls car shows, the Grand Prix; and, farther afield, the L.A. Roadsters’ Father’s Day show and the Early Times picnic. Sultans members roam freely, at will. (Full disclosure: I’ve been asked to be a judge at this year’s Bixby Knolls car show.)

But for those who were there, the Motoramas of the late ’50s were just plain it.

“The first big show I ever went to was in July of 1959, and that was the Rod & Custom Motorama,” says Greg Sharp, curator of the National Hot Rod Association Motorsports Museum in Pomona. He was 13, and Long Beach city officials were about to undertake in earnest the remaking of downtown—but it seemed like an enchanted place to him.

“It was pretty—I’m not sure when the Municipal Auditorium was built, but it was just bare light bulbs for lighting,” Sharp says. “And it seemed like the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen—all those great cars. Norm Grabowski’s car, which was know as the ‘Kookie Kar,’ from 77 Sunset Strip; there were several Larry Watson paintjobs; there was a little T-roadster which was known as Tweedy Pie and later owned by Ed [“Big Daddy”] Roth, but it was owned by a guy from Orange County; there were several cars from the LA Roadsters club—they were still pretty new then, a year or so old. And also the Prowlers.”

Tweedy Pie and the Kookie Kar are two of the most famous Ford hot rod T-buckets of all time; the Kookie, in fact, is so famous that it’s been cloned twice by the same man, hot rod artist Von Franco.

Painter Larry Watson opened one of his first shops in Long Beach and just kept moving north, through the Downey and Bellflower areas—a kustom hotbed—before going somewhat Hollywood and focusing on acting for a number of years. His inventions include the panel paintjob and the webbed paintjob.

Roth took a critical beating in ’66, when Time magazine overreached and pronounced him “the 275-pound supply sergeant for the Hell’s Angels,” but by then he’d already been stocking much of America’s youth with dream cars, model kits, monster T-shirts and Rat Fink-iana for the better part of 10 years.

In ’59, the nation’s kustom kar scene was midfull bloom, right here in Long Beach.

“Those were all cars you saw in magazines, and you never had much hope of seeing them in person,” Sharp says. “To see a car that was in a magazine was really a big deal. There it was—it came to life.”

You almost have to consult color photos of the period to see how gray and square the world was then; and how the chopped, candied Mercs and raced-out little hot rods turned style on its ear. It all seems easy now. But for the club putting on the show—the Renegades, doing its second indoor car show ever in ’59—this was no small feat.

The group worked hard—even members who, through no fault of their own, lacked a show-worthy custom.

“My car had been destroyed by that time, in the fire at Barris’ shop,” says former Renegades member Ron Guidry of Anaheim, who was born in ’35, went to Wilson High and lived on Spaulding Avenue near Junipero Avenue.

I reach for Volume One of the [George] Barris Kustom Techniques of the ’50s by George Barris, and there it is on pages 18-19—Ron Guidry’s first show car, a ’36 Ford five-window coupe he named “Renegade.”

Visiting Barris’ Lynwood shop for a Dean Jeffries’ paintjob, it burned along with 13 other cars on the night of Dec. 7, 1957, when Barris’ shop caught fire. It’s a famous tragedy in custom car culture—but Guidry and others were out of luck; the insurance company, says Barris, “claimed ‘an act of God.’ ” A member of the U.S. Navy by then, Guidry was a busy man, and this would be his only Renegades car. He remained in the club but didn’t build another car for about a decade.

As a bit of consolation in ’59, a year when car shows were just beginning to leave the parking lots and high school athletic fields that had been their first homes, the club tapped him for a unique job at the show.

“I had the distinction of being the announcer at the car show, and I had my own booth,” says Guidry. “That was pretty neat.” The Renegades were moving into uncharted waters with the group’s Motorama—but not without good reason.

“Well, to make money,” Guidry says with a laugh. “We had an eye on a piece of property in Signal Hill. We were going to buy that property and build a regular clubhouse, because at that time we had been [using] someone’s house over in Lakewood.”

Sounds like an idea for a Leave It to Beaver episode (a “Lumpy” one), but it never happened.

“Evidently the IRS investigated us and found we hadn’t gone through the proper paperwork to become a nonprofit foundation,” Guidry says—still rueful after all these years. The club lawyered up, but to no avail.

“We ended up having to pay a horrific amount of taxes and penalties. The members of the club were just stricken,” Guidry says. “We just decided the heck with it. We’d spent years trying to retrieve our money and we’d just busted our rears.”

That was largely that, until the first-ever Renegades reunion last year (a sequel this year is still under discussion). Guidry has a photo album packed with pictures of his two kustoms and a slew of memories of some of the state’s first indoor car shows.

“The good thing about it is, there still are people getting together and forming car clubs,” he says—and he’s right about that.

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