1932 Ford Five-Window Highboy Coupe - Have You Seen Me?

Searching For A Lost Soul-Fred Allen's Personal Satan

By Chris Shelton

Photography by Randy Lorentzen

Pretend for a moment that you're holding a milk carton, not a magazine. Now imagine you're facing the panel opposite the logo, the one with the age-enhanced photos and descriptions of lost or missing people. It's not much of a stretch, really; it's what you're looking at right now.

Actually, what you're looking at are photos and a story of Jim Jard's latest, a Deuce coupe rendered to look like one an East Coast drag racer named Fred Allen built and campaigned between about 1957 to the very early 1960s. Dubbed Satan by its license-plate filler, the car appeared in Rod Builder & Customizer in 1957 and Rod & Custom in 1960.

Despite exposure during the tail end of what we now recognize as the hot rod's Golden Age, there's little information about Pennsylvania's Fred Allen and his dubiously themed coupe. This much we know: The car's gone. Whether it went up in a poof of acrid smoke to pursue its calling in the underworld or suffered a worse fate, that of reappearing in teal green with a fuel-injected Chevy and oversized billet wheels, nobody's seen-or at least has admitted to seeing-Satan in the last four or so decades.

But there's an interesting fold to this story. While Fred's car itself never gained widespread popularity, you probably know something about it simply for the fact that Monogram rendered a roadster version of the car in styrene in 1959. Ask any Boomer with hot rod inclinations if they know about it, and they're likely to whip out a dusty box top or half-finished kit. Affectionately referred to as "Devil Deuce" by the model-building generation, likely as a result of the 1957 article, the scaled-down and topless version of Fred Allen's race car was probably just as responsible for setting kids' souls ablaze as any magazine was.

We know this partially because Jim Jard just so happened to be one of those kids. He's not alone either; "Steve Wertheimer (Austin, Texas' Continental Club) has the model, I had the model as a kid, and Tony Thacker (NHRA Motorsports Museum) not only had the model, he paid somebody to make a mural of it.

"We'd talked about what had happened to the car a bunch of times," Jim reflected. "So when Mark Morton (Hop Up magazine) and I were at the Ty-Rods convention one year, I took an old magazine with the car in it and started asking around. All the old guys got excited, but nobody knew where it went. I called around to all the Allens in the Philadelphia area, but nobody there remembered it.

"So a few of us were sittin' around talking about what it would take to find it. We eventually decided it'd be really cool to get some ink on it, but how do you get a magazine article?" Simple-by recreating it, they concluded.

Wandering In The Desert
OK, so if you're anything like the rest of the bench-racing fraternity, you know that most pipe dreams concocted in cigar-stoked parlors among rounds of single-malt scotch go unfulfilled. In fact, this very field would've gone fallow had it not been for Joe and Jason Kennedy, namesakes of Pomona's Kennedy Brothers Bomb Factory.

Growing up in a car clan and studying magazines far older than they are, the Kennedys have cultivated an innate sense of right and wrong as it pertains to old hot rods. A number of years ago, their path crossed that of Jim Jard's. Their work is compelling; Jim recognizes talent. As a result, Jim has a number of the Brothers' creative-no, make that re-creative-works.

By virtue of a poster of Fred Allen's car on the wall of the Brothers' shop, however, a sort of seed took root. "We always loved that car," Joe mused. "It's sort of punk, you know," Jason added, a reference to the demonic elements that must've amounted to a serious act of defiance to a nation not yet divorced from its relative innocence.

More than just complicit in the car's recreation, the Brothers actually leaned on Jim. "We told him, 'Hey, we should copy that car,'" Joe recalled. In Jim, however, they found a more-than-willing participant; they found a sponsor of sorts. Actually, depending on who you talk to, it was that person's idea to build the car in the first place. Hey, everybody must love Satan, right?

Reviving Satan's Soul
The one thing you must understand about this car is that it's not a clone; it's a replica. And, as such, the Brothers deviated from the devil in such a way as to make it tenable in today's world. Then again, you'd hardly know it unless you had the old magazines in hand. Actually, the car is pretty much beyond just bitchin', so let's just get to it.

The basis for this car is a genuine Deuce frame. The Kennedys replaced the rear crossmember with a Model A piece, but they retained the original front unit. While Fred's original car featured a stock K-member, the Brothers used a tubular assembly, much like the ones under SO-CAL Speed Shop's chassis. Here's why: The fully synchronized Borg-Warner T-15 three-speed that they wanted to use wouldn't fit the old K. While it doesn't perfectly represent Satan's intended era, it's considerably stronger than the inspiration car's '39 gearbox-a tranny made rare and expensive simply for the fact that racers like Fred Allen broke them with alarming frequency in the first place. By using a transmission top from the similar Tremec T-15 found in '70s Jeeps, the Brothers converted this top-loader to a true top-shifter.

To accommodate the open-drive transmission, the Brothers elected an F-1 banjo. Flanking it is a pair of '35/36 bells and attendant radius rods, both split and linked to the framerails by way of Model A/B tie-rod ends. For the same reasons the Brothers chose the stronger Borg-Warner three-speed, they loaded the axlehousings with stronger semi-floating axles, much like those in the Ford 8- and 9-inch units. Aside from matching the crossmember, the Model A's high-arched spring leaves the fully chromed rear axle exposed and opens the door to a future quick-change centersection-a component Fred's car boasted of for a period of its life.

The front suspension consists of a stretched '33-36 axle pinned to '33-34 wishbones, the latter split in the same fashion as the ones at the rear. Also like the rear, the front features tube shocks, non-servo Ford brakes, and judicious chrome plating. In true early hot rod fashion, the Brothers used two more perennial favorites from the F-1 parts pile: the pickup's steering box and upper shock mounts.

The Brothers' ability to unwearyingly peck and file old tin into shape is not only legendary, it's illustrated by this car's dead-straight, dark-blue skin. Among other things, they chopped the top 3 inches and shaved the cowl lights; however, in a bid to reflect the original race car's form-follows-function personality, they retained the door and trunk handles. Like the original car, this one has Brit-car buckets, a chromed dash, a rack of Stewart Warner gauges, and a white-and-yellow gut.

You should know by now that Jim's latter-day Satan is more than a reproduction; it's bait. "Hopefully by seeing the car people will start talking about what happened to the original car," he reasoned. And what compelling bait it is; it's a raucous hot rod that can hit the road for any reason or burn the tires at will-hence the concessions to strength.

So will the real Satan one day appear in a flourish of brimstone? Who knows? In a way, who cares? I'm sure Jim Jard still wants the original to restore. Just for the reason that he went to all the effort to copy it, he's probably the one who should steward the original; however, at the same time, I bet he thinks that hell can wait just a little bit longer.