Ed Iskenderian Spotlight - Hiya, Pal!

But great cams are merely the tip of the Isky iceberg. What he really made was a legacy. He brought branding, marketing, and publicity to bear on the industry. Only, a bunch of kids playing with cars on the dry lakes didn't pass for an industry at the time; that came later, when he helped create the industry's first commercial alliance: SEMA. His legacy is that he made power accessible to the masses (we owe the Henry Ford reference to Smokey Yunick). That you can even buy parts to build a hot rod-that you're reading this very magazine-is due in part to this legacy that he helped create.

It takes more than one man to make a legacy. Among the tools Isky had at his disposal was an immense pool of talent. To hear him tell it, he also owes more than a little bit of his success to dumb luck. But we know better than that; as the philosopher Seneca said, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." And in 1948 Ed Iskenderian was prepared to take on the world.

His choice was far from accidental. Growing up in L.A. even during the Great Depression exposed kids to things most adults wouldn't see in a lifetime. Among them, Isky and his pal, John Athan, discovered hot rods. "We'd see gow jobs go by," he explains. "They were stripped-down Model T's hopped up a little. Boy that looked like fun.

"I started with junky stuff," he continues. "The first thing we'd do is buy a Model T for $5 or $10 and drag it home and learn by working on it. There were no magazines at that time so we had to learn from older guys."

Isky swapped a V-8 into his car and ultimately hopped it up with a pair of exceptionally rare Maxi overhead conversion heads. "I knew that I should have a cam that had snappy action for the intake and soft action for the rocker arms on the exhaust," he says. His quest for that cam took him to Ed Winfield.

"He was the old master with the first cam grinder," Isky notes. "I was lucky enough that he showed me how he built his machine. I was fascinated by how it worked. You had to build your own cam grinder in those days. In 1948, I bought a Norton cylindrical grinder for $700 and I built my own rocking-bar attachment on there.

Though he says he intended to throw away his first pattern attempts, Isky ground a cam from one. Due to the absence of the clearance ramps, "you could hear it coming from a block away," he admits, chuckling.

It paid off. "Well my cams passed cars through the midrange," Isky says. "It was because there was no tappet clearance; it slapped the valves open, you might say. My cams had strong midrange and a top end was just as good as the super cams that Winfield and Harman and Collins were making."

Only Isky found few converts. "When you made your first cam, why, no one would buy it because you had no reputation," he laments. Making matters worse, his were noisy. What he needed was an audience who didn't know Isky's lack of experience-preferably an audience who couldn't hear well.