read this many times as a young teenager and was always moved by this story, I think I read it again and again, hoping for a different ending, but always knowing what was going to occur on the final pages, This was my favorite of the "Hot Rodding" books by Henry Gregor Felsen, The first chapter of H, G. Felsen'snovel sets the lives of its characters on a collision course between rebellion and responsibility, With all the stock characters and moral weight of the Fifties Teen Exploitation genre and lots of real gone hot rod rebop! Street Rod reads like a pacesetter for the crazy Bflick style of Hot Rod Gang like Felsens novel, long out of print.
What it lacks in allusions to Rock n Roll it compensates with a crash n burn race, You might be left wondering just what the “moral” of this tale is, but if you like the campy side of Fifties Pop Culture and if you can find a copy of Felsens book, sit back, enjoy a Coke while spinning Joe Clays vintageRCA sides, and get real gone for about two hours with Street Rod! This book is set in the 's and has a lot of slang and phrases from the time period.
I think it was very relevant for that time and accurately depicts teens in the 's, The characters are interesting and I began to feel for both the teenagers and their parents, I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes cars because it describes a lot of car maintenance, Ricky Madison's parents were as square as the Cleavers or the Nelsons, Ricky's friends' were allowed to have their own rods, but would his parents let him in on the fun Heck no! So here he was, the only guy in Dellville without his own set of wheels, the town "car suck.
" His friend Link said he ought to threaten to leave home, That worked for Link he had his rod, But Ricky's parents weren't so easily bluffed, and though his father finally did decide that Ricky should be allowed to have a car, Ricky's mind was already made up, Before his Dad could tell him he'd had a change of heart, Ricky went and bought a beatupFord coupe from Merle, the somewhat shady town mechanic, with crazy dreams of souping it up to be the best street rod in town.
"The eyeopening novel about streetrodders the kids who build and drive the strippeddown, soupedup bombs on wheels!"
Now, I ask you, with a cheesy teaser comeon like that on the cover, how the hell could I resist I bought this thing.
. . hell, yeah!s hotrod pulp exploitation at its finest kids hopped up on wicked chocolate malts, peeling out and displacing loose gravel like hellions, . . lobbing firecrackers at the unwary squares of Dellville, Iowa, USA, daring the cops to stop 'em, . . comin' at ya like Vfueled speed demons out of the bowels of Hell!
Ward and June Cleaver didn't go through World War II to put up with this teenage rebel shit.
I have a Bantam paperback with the same illustration as above but with an orange border the edition above has a different teaser text My edition can be seen at the bottom of the review.
I wrote the above paragraphs prior to reading this book, and I've kept those initial impressions because, even though the book surprised me by its relative depth, I still wanted to convey why this book drew me in the first place.
Honestly, yes, I thought this might be fun trash at which to hurl snarky and unfair contemporary invective,
However, having read it, I actually respect the book, It's not great literature, and it's certainly very moralistic, but there's nothing inherently wrong in the message it conveys, and its author had genuine talent,
Henry Gregor Felsen was a prolific writer of short stories and pulp novels, but is probably best known among young readers of his generation as
the author of a series of books related to the hotrod car culture of thes ands.
Street Rod, it seems, was one of the more memorable efforts in his oeuvre, It has a bleak ending that caught young readers off guard, and, based on some reviews, seems to have stayed with those readers for more than half a century,
The story's main character is a high school senior, Ricky Madison, a kid who lives in a tiny, boring Iowa town, He has a keen fascination for soupedup cars and is an avid reader of car magazines, He even has an aptitude for car repair and customizing, as well as an active imagination for design ideas, Problem is, every kid in town has a hot rod except him, He's too poor to buy a decent starter car, and his parents are too timid to let him buy one due to safety concerns, He's tired of being a "car suck," having to bum rides everywhere, His humiliation erupts into anger at his parents, His lack of wheels also seems to be standing in the way of him being with his favorite gal, Sharon, who has now taken up with the bullying opinion leader among the teen hotrodders, Link.
Link becomes Ricky's main rival throughout the book, and it is that rivalry that proves to be Ricky's undoing,
Defiant, Ricky draws his entire savings,, from the bank and buys a junker from the local goodfornothing towndrunk mechanic, Merle, It doesn't take long for Ricky to have buyer's remorse, though, and the amount of work the car needs is way beyond his means, Everyone scolds him for paying for a heap of junk that was worth no more than, These ares dollars, folks, when gasoline was likecents a gallon,
Ricky's father, a reasonable man, tries to compromise with his recalcitrant son, trying to talk him through his options, Although Ricky's car is no hot rod, it does run, and one day he decides to race it against his friends' cars on the public roads, The town's sheriff and Ricky's father get wind of this and the boy gets a warning, Ricky's father devises a way that the boys can satisfy their need to race while doing so within a safely regulated framework, He advocates that the boys form a "timing association," a car club dedicated to safe and controlled drag racing, a concept that had been growing in the country at the time in the face of many hot rod deaths among the youth.
Arguing that boys will be boys, much with the same logic we understand today in the era of the drug war that drugs and users aren't going away, and efforts to criminalize them will only perpetuate the same nonconstructive situation, the timing association offers a regulated way to meet the needs of all sides in the debate.
Saving lives is ultimately its goal,
Trying to teach Ricky a lesson in civic engagement and in fighting for a goal in which he can take pride and ownership, his dad helps him draft a petition for the town council to set aside part of a road outside town one day a week for the drag races.
The reactionary council, much the way the antidrug forces think today, flatly refuse this solution, equating it with blackmail and disrespect for the law,
Angry at this result, Ricky and his friends wreak holy havoc on the roads, In reaction, the parents band together and forbid their daughters from riding with the boys, and the police forbid them driving questionably in the town limits, The boys tool off to Des Moines to do whatever they want, but the cops there are wise, and threaten the boys with jail if they cause trouble, They manage to get away with some roadway harassment before getting back to town,
The rest of the book details Ricky's change of heart, as he finally begins to realize the error of his ways, and pursues his dream of souping up his Buick coupe and entering it in the car show.
He even has interested buyers for it, the first step in his dream to open his own customizing shop after college, Ricky's dad has finally convinced him that an engineering degree will boost his skills and prospects,
But the rivalry with Link has never gone away, and, Ricky, seemingly with the world in his grasp, chafes at this final undone goal: to finally beat Link in a drag race.
Thus, the ending, which you can infer,
The strongest thing about this book is its insight into the inner frustrations of adolescent male youths, and about the poignant concerns of parents who want their children to be safe while affording them some measure of freedom and responsibility as they slowly cut the parental cord.
There are some lovely moments where the town cop talks about the sense of immortality and invicibility that young boys feel, the idea that death is too remote for them to grasp.
Also, he points out that Ricky's father and his peers were no better when they were adolescents they may not have had cars, but they acted out in their own ways.
The conversations between Ricky's parents do have a Leave it to Beaver vibe, but it's not a bad thing, and you wish more parents showed this much concern and accommodation for their children.
The book also has some "ah yes" moments of recognition, showing that road rage and reactive driver behavior has not changed at all sincewhen this book was first published:
"There's something about having another car go past that's like an insult.
"
"I've followed more than one man or woman who didn't go over forty until I tried to pass, And the minute I tried to go around, they sped up, "
The book is an interesting relic from the postwar industrials, when so many dreams were tied up into material goods, cars in particular, and when something like drag racing and firecrackerthrowing constituted heinous juvenile delinquency.
Of course, this is dated on a certain level, but the human concerns the book has aren't,
I will probably forget this book but I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected, and Felsen could write, No doubt about that.
krKy