Kennedy: When hot rods were king

Tom Hunt figures he has owned about 95 cars over his lifetime.

“One of the greatest pleasures in the world for men is trading cars,” says Hunt, 84, who walks with a cane and has hung up his car keys because of vision problems.

Hunt telephoned me recently after I mentioned in a column that one of my sons is interested in auto mechanics. Hunt, you see, is of the generation of American men who came of age in the middle of the 20th century and considered building fast cars — aka hot rods — to be their gateway to manhood.

While he was still at Chattanooga High School in the late 1940s, Hunt built a hot rod from a modified 1934 Ford coach he bought for $75, money he had saved from birthday gifts from his aunts and uncles.

Hot rodding, which involves re-sculpting car bodies and swapping out engines, started as a post-Great Depression phenomenon. Returning World War II servicemen accelerated the trend in the 1940s, when chopped and lowered roadsters spawned a whole new automotive culture. The trend’s epicenter was California, and Hot Rod magazine was its bible.

As a boy, Hunt befriended the late Charley Card, a Chattanooga businessman who owned a downtown restaurant. The eatery, located near the Read House, was known as a model of efficiency, with fast-paced waiters serving a U-shaped lunch counter with machinelike precision.

Card was a car enthusiast of the first order. He was a leader of the Chattanooga Racing Association, one of the original sponsors of NASCAR and what was then called the Daytona Beach Stock Car Classic.

In 1948, Hunt traveled to the first NASCAR-sponsored Daytona Race and Card took him under his wing. Hunt remembers selling Hot Rod magazines out of the back of Card’s car to the Daytona race crowd and collecting names for a new mail-order speed shop business that Card intended to start back in Chattanooga — the first of its kind in the world.

Later, when Card opened his speed shop called “Honest Charley” on McCallie Avenue, Hunt wrangled an after-school job there helping fill mail orders. The mail-order business flourished from the start, and even expanded to include a chain of retail speed stores. (The business still exists today on Chestnut Street under the ownership of the Coker Group, Chattanooga’s first family of vintage automobiles.)

Meanwhile, back in the 1940s, Hunt and Honest Charley Card became friends, traveling to stock car races around the South.

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