The wacky show rods of Carl Casper

By at 12:16 pm Friday, Sep 19

TrioCarl Casper.jpg

Left to right: Pinball Wizard, Beer Wagon and Peanut Machine Photo: Street Rodder

While George Barris and Ed "Big Daddy" Roth are household names, the comparatively unknown Carl Casper is my favorite designer of outrageous custom hot rods of the 1960s and 1970s. Such incongruous hot rod themes as mail truck and barbershop were common, but I prefer the straightforward corner tavern, hot peanut and pinball sensibility of Carl Casper. These no-go showboats were decked out with chrome superchargers and fuel injection but never hit the pavement as they were rolled out of trailers to the pink shag fake fur of the hot rod show floor. Carl is still slogging it with an annual Louisville car show and, since he has never sold a car he built, there is still an opportunity to see these beasts in their natural environment under the florescent lights. Naturally, I like cars that go, but these candy flake monsters were the stuff of my dreams when I was kid; I bought all the model kits and dutifully assembled plastic chrome engines in a Testors glue fog.

PopcornWagon.jpg
Popcorn Wagon, note the superfluous supercharger Photo: Street Rodder

Street Rodder Magazine on the 1970's Show Rods Carl Casper on the interdoodles

(Mister Jalopy is a guest blogger!)

misterjalopy

Mister Jalopy is proprietor of Coco's Variety, which primary business is bicycles. Additionally, we sell Japanese figural pencil erasers, used bike parts, old toolboxes, books worth owning, bike pumps, balsa wood gliders, vintage novelty French flags, metric measuring tapes, oilcloth, Park bicycle tools, wicker bike baskets and Dutch bicycle cargo bags for the carting of fresh produce, the transportation of books of French poetry and the rescuing of kittens. At this time, we sell neither pancakes nor parakeets.

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.