Customs and hot rods, circa 1951

If, after breathing in the mold accumulated on the pages of these musty magazines, there’s something to take away from collecting old issues of Mechanix Illustrated, it’s the insight into half-formed and unformed ideas that we take for granted today. For example, when we use the word “custom,” it usually means something George Barris or Dean Jeffries or Ed Roth built in the 1950s or 1960s. But before then, the word was applied to what we’d today call “coachbuilt” cars, as we can see from this four-page article from the January 1951 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. In it, no mention is made of frenching headlamps or kandy paint; instead, we see a Figoni et Falaschi Delahaye, Ol’ Chrome Dome on the cover with a Saoutchik Cadillac (which may be the one we saw earlier this year in Vegas), and a Brunn dual-cowl Duesenberg.

The notion of a hot rod, on the other hand, had formed, but the exact formula had yet to be hammered out. In fact, we see an incredible variety of rods, from the Pierson Brothers’ coupe, to the Schenck streamliner (the same picture we saw much earlier), to a J.A.P.-powered three-quarter midget.

And a bonus – the back cover had a full-page Studebaker ad. Likely because McCahill tested a Studebaker in that issue.