I remember Ronnie Paugh (of Paughco fame) telling me one time when he (Ron) was a young guy, he and his family would stop at Norm's parents house in The Valley, and buy eggs from them, from a little roadside stand they had. That's the Grabowski chicken ranch property where the famous photo of Norm laying under the "Kookie T", with that huge wooden A-frame engine hoist behind it, was taken.....
Just about every link you'd want on Norm Grabowski:
Norm on his red metalflaked Pan chopper with the jugs and heads painted white, at the drags. Check out the sissy bar - it's a combination beer can holder/"church key" beer can opener....too fucking much! Now everybody will have one by Born Free 5.....
Norm's monster, The Corvair-powered "Six Pack". Neil East (another rodding icon), owned AutoBooks in Burbank, CA, and Colorado Carbooks here in Denver told me that Norm used to come to L.A. Roadster club meetings on the Six Pack, and he said Norm had no problem kick starting this bike, when it was time to leave. It had no electric starter!
2/5/33 - 11/12/12
Crap, gives me a kinda a' pissed off feeling every time one of these guys moves on. Thanks for the post. The world needs these cool people and it sucks getting old and thinking about all the fun might stop someday.
ReplyDeleteThis was one of the guys you influenced me
ReplyDeleteSorry to here about this. About the picture of him on his pan. You probably know it's from a series of pics taken at Lions drags strip in 1964 for Hot Rod magazine. When I first saw it, I thought what an interesting dude and bike, it took me awhile to realize it was Norm!
ReplyDeleteSee, this was what was cool about Frank Kaisler, when he was editor of Hot Rod Bikes/Bikeworks. He'd go down and knew exactly where to pull all this stuff out of the old Peterson archives, and then he'd re-run it in HRB as a flashback story. He did just that, with that Lions article, for example. That's how it wound up on their website, too.
ReplyDeleteWhen I'd be out in L.A., I'd spend a couple days up in Burbank, and we'd go over to Frank's, and he'd say "Hey, look at this stuff I found, I'm gonna run it in the next couple issues". And, he'd have all this incredible photography from the Peterson archives, some of it was never run at the time, just filed away. Why Frank isn't the editor of a magazine right now, I can never understand.
A huge loss, but some great info from you guys, I've seen anyone write anything remotely bad about Frank K, sounds like one helluva bloke.
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