Word: rods
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Southern Californians in their teens and twenties had taken to jalopies and hot rods. The thing to do was to buy an old car, preferably a '32 or '33 Ford and strip it down to the essentials. With a flair for mechanics and enough money ($1,000 to $2,000), a kid could go on from there, transform his jalopy into a well-engineered hot rod, complete with extra carburetors, lightened flywheel, supercharger and five to ten coats of glistening lacquer...
...rod buffs, known as "hop-ups," strip the bodies from junkyard cars, replace them with low-slung, homemade roadster bodies. On the engine they install a high-compression cylinder head, a dual manifold and a special camshaft. After months of work and $800 to $1,200 spent for parts, they have a racer that will turn up 140 h.p., capable of speeds over 100 miles per hour. They have been clocked at better than 140 m.p.h. at the Southern California Timing Association's Muroc Dry Lake track, a center of U.S. "hot-rod" racing...
Last week, Cincinnati's Powel Crosley Jr. became the first postwar U.S. auto manufacturer to make a deliberate play for the hot-rod market. He introduced a two-seater "Hotshot" Crosley roadster, looking like a dime-store version of the once-famed Stutz Bearcat (see cut). Although Crosley estimates that not more than one out of 100 owners will use the Hotshot as a racer, he has made it easy for them to do so. Windshield, lights, bumpers and top can be stripped off in a few minutes, readying the car for road or track racing. Its overhead-valve...
...throttle in "Wild Bill" Cantrell's boat went out of whack. The 1,710 horses in his mahogany-hulled boat relaxed; My Sweetie came almost to a stop. Wild Bill, a veteran of Indianapolis' 500-mile auto race, quickly reached under his dashboard for the gasoline-control rod, finished the heat with one hand on the wheel and the other on the throttle rod. After that, the last two heats were easy. After repairs, Wild Bill and My Sweetie not only won the race but set a new record (78.6 m.p.h.) in the third heat...
...spiritual gifts. That is to say, I am incapable of religious experience, in any true sense ... I dislike any man who is pious, and all such men that I know dislike me." The Chrestomathy is liberally sprinkled with his truculent gibes at all faiths, but none feel his unsparing rod more often than the Methodists and Baptists ("As for the Methodists, the Baptists and other such mudsills of the Lord . . ."). As for his own soul: "I go on believing dismally that when the bells ring and the cannon are fired, and people go rushing about frantic with grief...