Though you can look around any rod run nowadays and see a lot of new faces, the street rodding hobby came about more than three decades ago based on family-oriented concepts. By family-oriented we mean both the true father-son relationship of working on the family hot rod as well as the "extended family" scenario, where you and your buddies hang out and work on all the cars over many years.
In the time (pre-1970) before street rodding became popular, there were a handful of hot rodders out there who hadn't forsaken their old cars for the new, shiny showroom vehicles Detroit was trying to sell to them. These old-time rodders were still interested in making their old cars look cool and go fast (and vice versa, more often than not).
But that didn't mean some of these rodders weren't somehow involved with what was happening with the Big Three in the early '60s. Take Wayne Fietzer. A loyal employee of Dearborn Steel Tubing (DST, or "the Tube" as it was sometimes called), Wayne worked on building the high-performance cars for the Ford Motor Company-cars like the Thunderbolt, A/FX Comets, and other custom show cars. As an OEM supplier to Ford, there were always a lot of cool parts lying around the shop too.
Wayne liked his own cars as well, and he was particularly fond of his '63 Super Stock Dodge, which he would drive to work on a regular basis. Management wasn't too keen on seeing non-Ford products outside in the employee parking lot, and let Wayne know it. He wisely decided to park the Dodge at home, and began working on an all-Ford T-bucket project. Plus, having access to his work facility, he was able to assemble his T during his lunchtime and after hours.
Gratiot Auto Supply was a well-known Detroit-based parts supply house for anyone interested in performance vehicles and parts, and it was there Wayne would purchase a Kellison 'glass T body. Getting the body back to the shop, Wayne discovered he would need to add a relief to the bottom section of the cowl in order to be able to spin the engine's oil filter on and off, but it wasn't a big deal. The motor is a five-bolt 289 unit Wayne had bought from Paul Evans, and it came with a low-rise dual-quad carb setup. (Early 289s, from '63 and '64, used a five-bolt bellhousing, while later versions used a six-bolt setup).
Now keep in mind this is in a time frame where the look of a Fad T-the overblown, cartoon-type of T-bucket-hadn't really caught on. This was still in the era when most folks used Tommy Ivo's subtle and stylish T-bucket as a template for what a cool-looking T-bucket should look like, and as such was set up on a 93-inch wheelbase. The rearend is a 9-inch unit that came from a '64 Fairlane and the transmission is a Falcon V-8 Sprint unit.
One day at the shop, Wayne remarked to his co-worker, Andy Hotten, that he'd like to run a Weber IDA carb combo for his car and, after returning from lunch, found a complete Weber four-carb induction system on his workbench. At the Tube, it wasn't hard to find more parts he could use-the rear slicks on the T had come off Donny Westerdale's twin-engine Double Trouble dragster! By 1968, Wayne had painted the car Fruehauf truck orange with nitrocellulose lacquer, and soon he would be cruising all over Detroit.
As Wayne's son Dwayne recalls, all of his dad's friends drove Ts too, partially due to the fact that Wayne had pulled a mold off his T before it was painted and supplied them with a body. Dwayne may have only been in elementary school, but he knew what his dad had was special. He fondly remembers riding with his dad on cool nights, when the Webers seemed to perform their best, and checking out the cool pattern the front wheel spokes would cast on the ground as the headlights were mounted near the spindles.
But Dwayne only had a few short years with his dad's T, as Wayne would get divorced and be forced to sell all of his assets. On the day his dad sold the car, he picked up Dwayne from his sixth grade class for one last ride and drove out to DST, where the car was loaded up on a truck, destined for Palm Springs, California. Wayne was a friend of the new owner, Doug Treece, who also worked for DST, but Dwayne still didn't want the car to go.
Over the ensuing years, Dwayne would check to see if the T was for sale, but the answer was always no. In 1985, Dwayne started working at DST (he's a prototype parts fabricator) and, in 1988, traveled to Palm Springs for the company. There in the back of the shop was his dad's old T, dirty and with what looked like hair growing off the magnesium 12-spoke wheels. One set of Webers had been taken off the motor and was lying in the seat. The left batwing was broken (apparently due to some wheel-standing performed by Doug) and the slicks were pulled apart with threads hanging out. It had been 10 years seen he'd last seen the car, but a lot of childhood memories made the car look good in Dwayne's eyes, and it was like seeing a long lost relative for the first time in a long time!
Over the next few years, Dwayne tried to buy the car from Doug, and after a time, Doug gave in and sold it to Dwayne, even though he probably could have gotten a better price on the open market. One of Dwayne's most memorable experiences since owning the car was when he was able to bring it back to his home in Dexter, Michigan, and show it to his father. Since then, he has spent time restoring the car, getting the carbs to work together, and even located some '90s-era slicks (some 10.00/16 rubber that was still round) that went on the car. And even though Dwayne feels the trailer taillights aren't the best looking, as far as he is concerned, he won't see them much while driving, so it's not high on the list of things to change on the car.
Nowadays, Dwayne's 6-year-old son, Devon, gets taken to school in his old man's car (he loves riding in it-what 6-year-old wouldn't?) and the father-son duo can often be found out cruising to the local Dairy Queen. At 64, Wayne just recently retired from DST (after 43 years!), and 34-year-old Dwayne is working at the Ford Design Center in product development, so it would be safe to say the acorn hasn't fallen far from the tree. Dwayne and his wife, Deanna, have three children in all, and Dwayne strongly believes his dad started a tradition a long time ago that he is happy to continue, hopefully for generations to come.