Larry and Mike Alexander - Alexanders the Great

Tragic events give us pause to reflect on a person, to understand the significance of their contributions and their place in our lives. Only it's impossible to appreciate Larry Alexander without including the person who achieved greatness alongside him, his brother Mike.

The Alexander brothers didn't merely work with each other to build cars; they inspired each other to create works of industrial art. "They fabricated and painted and even worked ideas together," trimmer Ray Kulakowski observed. "It was quite a team." Within a dozen years they went from restyling cars for friends to restyling cars for the manufacturers. That the companies who built the cars hired them to show what could be done with them justifies the notion that the Alexander brothers left an indelible mark on production automobile design.

We owe what follows partly to a series of interviews that Larry and Mike granted for their entry in the Darryl Starbird Hall of Fame column in STREET RODDER magazine. Only this time we have lots more space and lots more input from Mike. In fact, we included a number of stories from their closest colleagues and friends.

Building an Empire

"When I discharged I could go to school under the GI bill," Larry recalled. "So I enrolled in the autobody program at Wolverine (a trade school in Detroit) in 1952." Mike also enrolled at Wolverine when he discharged in 1954, albeit he chose a different course. "I was always into cars but I was leaning more toward the mechanical side of it," he said. "But Larry told me I had to take the body school too" he said. "I ended up taking that first because I knew if I took the mechanical end first I'd say 'to hell with the bodywork.'

"Well, you could bring in one of your cars and paint it," he recalled. "I had a Model A that Larry and I did some work on. All they did was wash 'em down in enamel but I convinced the instructor to let us shoot it in lacquer."

Though it wasn't built to do so, the coupe earned the brothers a bit of credibility and a few small jobs. "It had to be 1955 because we were doing mild custom and repair work after hours in our parents' one-bay garage," Mike recalled. "In 1956 Larry bought a house with a two-car garage. It had a cement floor too so we moved ur work there.

"We got our first commercial shop on Northwestern Highway near Evergreen Road," Larry remembered. "He bought this old truck," Mike added. "We needed a shop truck and we thought we'd show people the work we do so we built it up."

What was the Alexander brothers' first business project turned into the "Grasshopper." Flathead-powered and the color of '52 Oldsmobile Glade Green Poly, the Model A pickup generated considerable buzz. "Then a guy named Sy Gregorich brought us this '55 Ford Crown Victoria," Mike remembered. Ultimately reshaped with Studebaker chin pans and endowed with a '59 Chevy bumper as a grille, Gregorich's Ford fit the image of a proper custom car. "We titled the car 'Victorian' and we redid it three times," Mike noted. "Sy's (Gregorich) was probably the one who did the most for us because it hit at the right time. People started getting a little more interested.

"It was right about then that Bill Hines ended up with a bunch of cars that someone else had started," Mike said. "He told us, 'I'll teach you how to paint candy if you come over at night and work on my cars.' That would've been about 1958 or 1959. Bob Larivee Sr. called and said he had some people he'd like us to meet," he continued. It was George Barris.