Our sport has lost an important pioneer and one of the last living links to the birth of hot rodding with the passing of Alex Xydias as the mighty age of 102.

If you are not familiar with everything Alex achieved in his long life, check out the video above, as well as our interview with him back in 2008:

First published in Street Machine, September 2008

Alex Xydias was there, right at the beginning. Now a chipper 84, he’s one of a handful of living links back to the birth of that uniquely American automotive culture called hot rodding. Xydias was there when Vic Edelbrock became a hero on the lakes; when they discovered nitro and supercharging; when they ran Bonneville for the very first time; when Robert E ‘Pete’ Petersen founded Hot Rod and Motor Trend magazines.

After serving as an aircraft mechanic, B-17 engineer, and trainee gunner — “I never fired a round in anger” — during the war, Alex founded his famed So-Cal Speed Shop in 1946. And until the death of his friend Dave DeLangton in 1954, he campaigned a string of innovative, fast, and beautifully presented lakes racers — the Belly Tank, the Streamliner, and a radically chopped 1934 three-window Ford coupe. DeLangton was driving the coupe at Pomona drag strip when the clutch exploded, severing the fuel lines and enveloping him in burning gasoline. More than half a century later Dave’s death is still a raw wound and Alex, normally upbeat and affable, chokes and gets teary-eyed discussing it. He walked away from racing after that: “I was just so fed up with it.”

Inspired by the feel-good ski movies directed and produced by Warren Miller, he began filming motorsport events — everything from Sebring and Daytona to Pikes Peak, Elkhart Lake, Torrey Pines, Catalina, the first-ever national drags at Great Bend, Kansas, and, of course, the Indy 500. Budgets were tight: “At Indy, I’d give the guys two rolls of film and tell them to film the first three laps, then be selective,” he recalls. They had to be: two rolls was just six minutes.

Alex joined Petersen Publishing in the early 1960s, becoming editor of Car Craft. That job led to a publisher’s role on Petersen’s now-defunct Hot Rod Industry News, which in turn led to directing the original SEMA shows. “The first SEMA Show had 99 booths in Dodger Stadium,” he recalls. “Now it’s one of the biggest car shows in the world.”

After his SEMA experience, Alex spent 10 years working with Mickey Thompson on the SCORE off-road shows. A year after selling the SCORE show to a big company, Alex was about to have lunch with Mickey when he heard the famed racer and entrepreneur had been brutally gunned down, with his wife, Trudy, outside their LA home.

“A promoter gets a bad name,” Alex says. “They’re hustlers. But Mickey was a great friend and a very creative guy.”

By the end of the 1980s, Alex figured he ought to be in retirement. Then iconic rod collector Bruce Meyer restored the Belly Tank, and in the process Alex came to know master hot rod crafter Pete Chapouris. In 1997, Chapouris suggested tapping into rodding’s nostalgia kick by reviving the So-Cal Speed Shop name and its distinctive red-and-white brand identity, which had lain virtually dormant since the early 1960s.

“It’s been go-go-go ever since,” Alex says. And he’s clearly loving every minute of it.

Were you always into cars?

I wasn’t Chip Foose, drawing cars when I was seven, but you couldn’t go past a malt shop in Hollywood before the war without seeing these great roadsters and I was fascinated by the way the guys had done them. I took auto shop at Fairfax High School, and my first car was a ’29 Model A roadster — got it for 65 bucks off a used-car lot in Hollywood. From there my interest accelerated. I went from the Model A into a black three-window ’34 with solid hood-sides, which looked really cool, except of course it made the car boil all the time. Then I got a ’34 cabriolet.

Where did the idea for the So-Cal Speed Shop come from? 

During the war we were always talking about our cars and I just thought that’s what I wanted to do. I needed someplace where I could work on cars, and I wanted to race. Karl Orr had Karl Orr’s Speed Shop in Culver City. I thought: “My God, is that a name for a hot rod shop!” There were other ones, but they weren’t called speed shops. That said it all.

Was it tough in the early days?

Oh, boy! When you got out of the service, you had something they called 52/20, which guaranteed you 20 bucks a week for 52 weeks, even self-employed veterans, so if you didn’t make $100 a month, you could go and get the difference. A couple of months I didn’t make 100 bucks.

The So-Cal Belly Tank is world famous. How did you come to build it?

Bill Burke, who raced on the lakes in the 1930s, was the creator of the belly tank. Burke found a 165-gallon P-51 Mustang wing tank and built a front-engine car with the driver sitting way out of it. He saw how dangerous that was immediately, sold it, and found a bigger P-38 Lightning tank — 315 gallons — and came up with the rear-engine concept. He helped me with my first chassis, and we put an Edelbrock-built flathead in it. In those days anything with a pointed tail was a streamliner; the same car with a cut-off tail was a modified. 

How did you progress to the So-Cal Streamliner?

When we were going to Bonneville for that first meeting in 1949, I kept telling everyone we couldn’t just run that little belly tank. Dean Batchelor was a weird combination of sports-car guy and hot rodder and brought down this book that showed the streamlined cars Auto Union [now Audi] had built for record attempts. Basically they took their Grand Prix car and enclosed it, decreasing the drag coefficient by half. Nobody had understood that those wheels [on the belly tank] created that much turbulence. Someone had just broke 160mph at the lakes. We ended up going 193 at Bonneville. A year later we ran 210mph. The record had always gone up by a mile an hour or two.

Which of the lakes racers did you admire most?

Bob Rufi, because he was so far ahead of his time: he built a belly tank and enclosed the rear wheels. He took the fairings off because they got clogged with mud, but he could’ve gone a lot faster. Vic Edelbrock was the common man running a ’32 roadster and doing well with this flathead. I really looked up to him. When I’d come home on furlough during the war, I’d go by his place on Highland and see what he was doing. I got to know Vic just hanging around, and he was the first guy I went to when I opened my shop.

So how did hot rodding become a multi-million dollar industry?

The launch of Hot Rod in 1948 not only told people about us and what we were doing, but gave us a place to advertise our products. A lot of people say Pete [Petersen] took advantage of us to make all his millions. But he also made our products famous. Bonneville also played a tremendous part: it gave us something else to write about rather than just reporting the dry lakes races. There was street racing but you weren’t going to talk about that. Then there was this thing that came along to fill the void between Bonneville and every other Sunday — drag racing. It wasn’t every town in the country that had a five-mile salt lake. But they all had something that could be turned into a quarter-mile drag strip.

How bad was the street-racing problem?

It was huge, especially during the war. I came home on furlough one time, and one of my pre-war hot rod buddies said: “I want to show you something.” We went out to Sepulveda Dam, and there was a five-mile stretch of asphalt — it’s still there but it’s freeway now — dead straight along the dam. That whole thing was lined with kids with their cars parked, with their lights on, on both sides, and guys racing each other. It was huge; it looked like a day at the lakes. The old pink-slip thing I think was overblown; I can’t recall anybody ever giving up their car in a race. But I’m not saying it didn’t happen.

Did you ever think hot rodding would get this big?

We were just having fun and trying to make a buck. I don’t know when it reached the point where we thought it was going to be really big. Even when Hot Rod’s circulation got big — and it went straight up to half a million or something — I still don’t think we realised. The guys back East, they were buying the magazine but they still weren’t buying the stuff yet.

If you were going to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

I’d be a manufacturer, like Vic [Edelbrock]. I tried it but never quite got there. If I’d stuck with the speed shop, I might’ve manufactured something. That’s where I made my mistake.