Our friend Geoff Hacker has been living it up in the Los Angeles area the last few days, in part to help celebrate Fiberglass Day at the Petersen Automotive Museum, an event that Geoff helped plan to showcase what creative gearheads were doing with fiberglass in the 1950s and 1960s. Though Fiberglass Day has passed, the Fantasies in Fiberglass special exhibit will remain at the Petersen through October 3 and the Introduction to Fiberglass Fabrication workshop will take place at the Petersen next month. Geoff writes:
I had a chance to visit the Friday night show at Big Boys on Riverside in Toluca Lake, California. This has been running for 20+ years (I’m told) and the big boy has been there since the 1950’s. You might recognized Merrill Powell from Victress standing next to the Big Boy figure. Victress actually did the original Big Boy back in the late 1950’s for the Toluca Lake location – and about 5 others. He said that the current figure is different from the original Victress did. Maybe you have a Hemmings reader who knows the history of the Big Boy figurines. (Merrill told me the work was done for a contractor who worked directly for the Big Boy Chain. Victress also did the Olympic Rings for Squaw Valley Winter Olympics, the Jantzen diving girl which was a staple sign in Los Angeles for many years.
I then visited my friend Erich Schultz and two of his Victress cars (S1A and S5) were recently found and acquired. One of about 30 S1A’s known to exist and the blue car is one of two S5 Victress cars – the only known vintage example.
I only had a chance to take pictures of a few cars at the Fiberglass Day Show at the Petersen Museum. These are not representative of the cars at the show, but you’ll see the recently discovered LeMans Coupe body.
