1922 Ford T-Bucket - Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Clone

Grabowski was a young teenager himself when he got interested in hot rods. "When I was going to high school, there was a guy there with a '27 T roadster-no fenders and real low," he told us. "Then I got my dad to take me to a car show and after that I was hooked."

Grabowski was in his early twenties when he swapped the body of his '31 Model A for a cut-down T touring with an equally cut-down Model A pickup bed. He shortened the rear 'rails by 20 inches, and Z'd the frame to lower the stance. He stretched the front 'rails by 5 inches and relocated the front axle out in front of the crossmember. A 3-71 blown '52 Cadillac engine sat on the 'rails for all to see. Tony Nancy stitched a red tuck 'n' roll interior to contrast the black paint. That's what it looked like at the '55 Grand National Roadster Show and when it appeared on the cover of Hot Rod's Aug. '55 issue as the Lighnin' Bug.

A few years ago, Ron, still in love with the 1922 Ford T-Bucket, was searching eBay when he came across a '27 roadster pickup, with a hopped-up four-banger and mechanical brakes. The car was sold before he could place a bid, so Ron called the seller to see if other projects were available. It was Johnnie Overbay at Reno Rod & Custom Supply in Oklahoma City. During their conversation, Ron expressed his determination to someday build a clone of the Kookie car. Overbay asked, "Why don't we build that for you?" Overbay already had his hands on a '37 V-8/60 front axle, a rebuilt '39 top loader, and a '41 rearend-and had a lead on a 331 Cadillac engine.

The car mags were also paying attention, but it wasn't until a photo of the T appeared in a '57 Life magazine story on the hot rod lifestyle that society at large got its first look. It wasn't long before it got its second look. Grabowski was still connected to the studios when, in 1958, ABC premiered 77 Sunset Strip, a detective series featuring Edd Byrnes as a young parking lot attendant nicknamed Kookie, who spoke in hipster slang and drove a Model T hot rod, played by Grabowski's roadster.

When Ron and Overbay and the Reno Rod & Custom team decided that if they were going to recreate the Kookie Car they were determined to do it as accurately as possible. "We talked to Grabowski a lot, picking his brain as much as we could," Doug Burba told us. "Other than that, we had to rely on photos from magazines, as well as stills and even some of the old home movies used in [the recent video documentary] The Car That Ate My Brain."

The biggest challenge, according to Ron, "was finding enough clear and undistorted photos to build off of. It would have been much easier to stray from the original car, but we were determined to build an exact clone."

A bigger challenge came from the fact that the original car was a constant work in progress. What Ron and the crew at Reno found out from poring through hundreds of photos was that Grabowski never stopped modifying the car. "He told us that it changed weekly," explained Burba. "That car had its paint rubbed on so many times-we've got magazines where the pinstriping changes from photo to photo in the same article."

Choosing the Car Craft version of the car as the one to clone solved that problem, but ultimately caused others. Self-appointed experts, familiar with only one of the original's many looks, are quick to point out "mistakes" in the car. For example, one difference between Ron's car and Von Franco's famous replica is the tailpipes. On Von Franco's (and the TV) version, they rise straight up above the body. On Ron's, they turn rearward along the upper edge of the bed (as they do in the Car Craft and Life photos).

"It's got all the defects that were in the real car," Overbay said. "The interior is very crude by today's standards, but that's how the interior looked. And the painter wasn't happy because we wouldn't let him color sand and buff the paint. We wanted a little bit of orange peel, like you'd find on a teenager's street-driven car."

"It seemed to be an instant success," Ron recalled. "Everyone, from all of my good buddies to small children to pretty girls and all of the old gearheads, just adored this piece of hot rod history. And to top things off there was Grabowski signing autographs and entertaining everyone."

"Rolling into Cobo Hall, we were wondering if they were going to laugh us out of the place-but everybody got it," Overbay said. "In fact, even against all the super-slick, super-nice cars, this was the one with the crowd of people around it."

Blowing minds, as Grabowski would put it.