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Mormon Meteor III Mystery
In Barracuda issue 11, we told the story of Ab Jenkins, the son of the salt. He pioneered salt flat racing at Bonneville before World War II and set dozens of records with his cars, the Ab Jenkins Special, the Mormon Meteor, the Mormon Meteor II and the Mormon Meteor III. At one time, Jenkins held more records than any…
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Shag’s Thunderbird
Is it wrong to love a car? Not as far as we are concerned, and not as far as artist Shag is concerned. The article is written by Shag himself and tells the story of how he found his “Flairbird” and why he loves it so much. “The year of 1964 was a historic one for Ford Motorcars. The excesses…
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Barracuda Motorsports Racing
Barracuda Magazine Racing Team drivers Don Strouse and Bill English are ready to run! For this season, they are going to be driving mainly in the Outlaw Stock class, a new class of racing started at Bridgeport Speedway in Bridgeport, NJ. The Outlaw Stock class is a variation of the Enduro class, which was created to limit the amount of…
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Duke Kahanamoku: Patron Saint of Modern Surfing
Because of surfing’s boon in America during the post-war era, it is sometimes perceived as a “modern” sport. But it is actually a very old sport. Surfing is believed to have originated in the Pacific Ocean sometime between 1500 B.C. and 400 A.D. Polynesian culture is filled with ancient legends and traditions related to surfing. Hawaiian history contains tales of…
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Meet Jeff Wasserman
Jeff Wasserman was born in 1943 and grew up in Southern California. Like so many other youngsters of the late ’50s and early ’60s, Wasserman got bit by the car bug during his teenage years and set out to build a hot rod in the garage of his parents. In 1961, while still in high school, he started creating the…
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Thor Heyerdahl: Mr. Blue Sky
Norwegian explorer/scientist Thor Heyerdahl built an ancient-styled balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki and sailed it from Peru to Polynesia to prove that ancient South American Indians could have reached Polynesia. The voyage of his raft Kon-Tiki is just one of his many true-life adventures. Heyerdahl was also the first person to do an archaeological dig on Easter Island. He also sailed…
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Velvet Painter Eric Askew
In the early 1930s, New Zealand-born artist Eric Askew found himself unable to get work as a commercial artist because of the depression. So, he took up sign painting and pictorial art painting in New Zealand. Around this time, he began surfing and became a member of the Piha Surf Life Saving Club. Askew aspired to compete in Olympic weight…
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Elvis’s Honeymoon Hideaway
Palm Springs has received a lot of attention lately for its wealth of modern and post-modern architecture. One architecture firm was largely responsible for a changing the face of Palm Springs from a sleepy desert town into a jet-setting community of the future. The firm was the Alexander Construction Company, founded by Robert Alexander and his father George. The Alexander…
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Edgar Leeteg: The Father of Modern Velvet Painting
Edgar Leeteg was in his 20s when he first visited Tahiti. While working as a billboard painter for an advertising agency in Sacramento, he had decided to take a six-week vacation to Tahiti 1930. He chose the Tahitian vacation simply because it was the only one he could afford out of the travel brochures he was presented with. His initial…
