Here's a short, 3 1/2 minute video, showing some of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, by David Hill Photography. This give you a quick, and well shot, look at some of what you can see there. I went there in the spring of 2000, and really loved it.
Back in 2000, I was a taxi driver, and heard on the radio about a book signing happening with Julia Butterfly Hill. She was the activist that lived in a redwood tree for over 2 years, from 1997-99, so they wouldn't cut it that huge tree down. She gained worldwide fame (and ire from many lumber industry people) for her stay in "Luna," as she named the tree. But the act, supported by many other activists, did save the tree from being cut down, and several others nearby. So I decided to go to her book signing in Santa Monica, and buy the book, The Legacy of Luna.*
By some weird quirk of fate, a guy I knew from the BMX industry years before, Frank Scura, was working with Julia and her group at the book signing, and he introduced me to her. I listened to her talk, bought the book, and read it in the next few days. While I had seen some "small" redwood trees in the mountains near Santa Cruz, while living in San Jose in 1985-86, I'd never made it way up to the big groves of redwoods in the northernmost part of Northern California. At the time, in 2000, I was living in my taxi, having become homeless, while learning the ropes of the taxi industry in late 1999. I decided to drop my cab off for a week, take my old Datsun 280ZX, and drive up the coast to the redwoods. There was no more thought into it than that. Taxi driving was a drag, and I needed a break. Back then, you could take time off as a taxi driver at any time. After reading Julia's book, I thought, "I need to see the redwoods sometime in my life, and now's the time." So that's what I did.
My week of wandering alone, in my car, up the long California coast, to the redwoods, and back, became one of the best weeks of my life. I shot video of the trip, and made a 20 minute video for my niece, then less than a year old. I started in Huntington Beach, and spent about 4 hours driving up congested Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), through the O.C. and L.A. traffic, and then picked up speed when I hit Malibu. I had no big plan, no itinerary, and a couple hundred bucks for motel rooms, gas, and food. I wound up seeing juvenile elephant seals near San Simeon, visited Hearst Castle, but the tour was closed for the evening.
I slept on a car turnout somewhere south of Big Sur the first night, waking up to one of the best ocean views of my life, and the smell of the pine forest. That was amazing. That second day, I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which where I had a great time. I wandered slowly through it, shooting video of fish, and other animals, in the various aquariums. I saw a few sea otters, from the deck outside, and one seal, swimming in the ocean, next to the aquarium. I love watching animals, I always have, since I was a kid. I got a lot of cool fish and video footage at the aquarium. I hit the Monterey Skatepark after that, then headed north, up though San Francisco, and over the Golden Gate Bridge.
A year later, I made a BMX video, and used a bunch of my footage from Monterey Bay Aquarium in it. You can check that out here. There's also footage of animals from the San Diego Zoo, the Santa Ana Zoo, and some wild critters, as well. Anyhow, I've never made it back up to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the 20 years since, but I plan to at some point. If you dig animals, it's a great place to spend an afternoon, while in NorCal. Here's their website, where you can find more info, directions, and order merchandise online. Here are several more, much more recent videos, and live feeds, from Monterey Bay Aquarium.
The first music video to show skateboarding on MTV, that made it into heavy rotation, was not some punk band. It was Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, good old American rock n'roll at its finest. I think 7691 Muholland is where the skate shoot took place. There's a house there now, but there's a scenic overlook turnout real close by to get a similar view.
In 1989, I had become the official cameraman for Unreel Productions the video production company owned by Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear clothes. All of our producers and tech guys were actually cameramen, and had more experience than me. But they shot footage only at a couple of large shoots, mostly in the early days of the company. In '89, I was the guy who traveled to all the 2-Hip King of Vert and Meet the Street contests with one of our $50,000, 35 pound, Sony Betacam, cameras. Shooting bike video all day was a workout back then. Someone else, Don Hoffman, I think, traveled to the NSA skate comps that year. Skateboarding was still riding high on the 1980's wave of popularity, and times were good at Vision, going into 1989.
I showed up to work one morning at our office in Costa Mesa, and someone said, "Oh, you're going to Tom Petty today." My reply was, "Huh?" Everyone seemed to know, but I didn't find out until that morning. Some Vision skaters were going to appear in a Tom Petty music video, and my job was to hang out all day, and just shoot behind the scenes footage for the Vision archives. I was given an address on Muholland Drive, way up in the Hollywood Hills (technically Studio City hills). I checked out a betacam to make sure it was in good shape, grabbed a couple of batteries, and took a little S-VHS camera, packed them in Unreel's trusty little Toyota van, and headed up to Hollywood.
By that time, I was one with the Thomas Guide map book, and I found the address easily, mostly because the Vision dually pick-up, and our trailer mounted mini-,were there already. Aptly named for the day, "Hollywood" Mike Miranda, the BMX team manager for Vision, was driving that rig. The address was a driveway right below another driveway, which led to one of those houses on the side of the hills.
For those who don't know, Muholland Drive, mentioned in the song "Freefallin'," it runs near the top of a ridge from the Cahuenga Pass, right above the Hollywood Bowl, to Bel Air, about 14 miles away. It's a long, twisty, mountain-like, two lane road, with lots of multi-million dollar mansions off of it. It's not a place you really want to take a dually pulling a 26 foot long halfpipe trailer. I followed Mike, walking down the driveway, checking it out, to make sure the trailer would make it, and to see if we could turn around at the end. The driveway was literally carved on the side of the hill, steep uphill on one side, huge drop downhill for 100 or more feet on the other. Much to our surprise, the skinny driveway led to a large, flat grassy area, probably half an acre in size. There was plenty of room to turn around. So Mike drove the rig down to the site, as I walked along, making sure the trailer wasn't going off the edge on the tight turns.
The lot was a really cool location, with views of Universal Studios below, and the San Fernando Valley spreading off the the left. Mike centered the trailer in the area, not far from the edge, in what seemed like a really good position. The 6 foot high, wooden, mini-ramp closed up like a clam shell for traveling. Then we started the process of lowering the sides, putting wood under the legs, and leveling the whole thing to make it stable and skateable. The first couple women from the actual video crew, two of the producers, showed up as we were doing that. In typical Hollywood fashion, we got the ramp all set up, and Mike pulled his bike out and rolled around it, to see how stable it felt. Just then the director, Julien Temple, showed up. He looked at the ramp, walked around it for about a minute, and then said, "Can you move the ramp a foot that way?" and pointed to his right. Mike wanted to kill him, and I thought, "This guy's a fuckin' idiot." So Mike Miranda and I spent the next half an hour closing the ramp part way, moving the whole thing a fucking foot, and setting it all back up again. As we were doing that, the grip trucks and other production people showed up, and filled in the lot around us.
This is the area where the skateboard shoot for "Freefallin'" took place, as seen from below, in 2021. I think the house on the left, near the top, is where that lot is. It's right in that area. I believe the address of that lot was 7691 Muholland. I just shot this photo from the Universal City bus/train station a couple of days ago. I remember seeing the house on stilts, here on the top right, across the canyon from where we were shooting, back in 1989. #steveemigphotos
After that sketchy start, things were pretty chill. I parked the Unreel van up on the side of Muholland Drive, where a long line of other worker vehicles were parked. Since I was supposed to be inconspicuous, I used the smaller, prosumer S-VHS camera, to wander around, and shoot behind the scenes footage all day. Mostly I just kept grabbing the free food from the Craft Service table, which is the free snack bar on any major TV or movie set.
The skaters found there way up there, and donned Vision Street Wear clothes. Heather, who designed the Vision women's clothes, played wardrobe woman, and decked out the models in as much "Vision Slut Wear (as us Vision people usually called it) as possible. That was part of the deal. The music video people got to use our ramp and skaters, and we (Vision) got a ton of "product placement," meaning Vision Skateboards and VSW clothes showing up in a major music video that millions of people would see.
At the time, skateboarding hardly every showed up on TV. At all. Unreel tried to sell ESPN on an action sports TV series of six shows, and the suits at ESPN in 1989 replied, "No one wants to watch skateboarding on TV, and what the hell is snowboarding?" Really, that's what they told my boss in. Unreel ended up syndicating the series, and it got really good ratings for an unknown series that year. Things at Vision went downhill fast in late 1989 and 1990, so there was no attempt to syndicate the next year. Obviously ESPN came around, six years later, and started the Extreme Games in 1995, changing the name to the X-Games in 1996.
But on that day in 1989, it was Vision skaters Kele Rosecrans, Joe Johnson, and Eric Nash, doing their thing on the mini ramp. Another thing, mini-ramps were a brand new type of ramp then. It was only a year or two earlier that Paul Schmitt, and some of his skaters, were forced by the city of Costa Mesa to cut down their 9 foot high, vert, backyard halfpipe, to a six foot, undervert ramp, due to city code violations. Known as the Town Street Ramp, and located a couple blocks from Vision HQ, that was the birth of the mini-ramp. They soon found that you could have a lot of fun on a smaller, undervert ramp, and backyard mini-ramps began to pop up nationwide soon after.
The star of the music video, the young blond woman, was named Devin, as I recall. She didn't skate, but was a good surfer. The skaters were more than happy to grab her hips and push her back and forth on the ramp, helping her learn to skate it. Within an hour, she could fakie nearly up to the top in both directions. She picked it up really quick, which surprised us all. She was actually really cool, and the skaters spent most of their day skating, and making friends with the models.
If you watch the video, you'll see a couple of shots, with another woman in a white top, on the deck of the ramp. That's Miki Keller, who was the Sims Snowboard assistant manager at the time. Miki was one of maybe two or three women who could actually skate a mini-ramp then. She did skate during the shoot, but the director left that footage out, which bummed out Miki of course. She went on to work at Morrow Snowboards for years, and later brought women's motocross back to life, starting a whole race series. Miki is an action sports legend in her own right, and Julien Temple missed out by not giving her a little screen time.
A couple hours into our day up on that set, Tom Petty showed up. He's the star, and didn't have to be there until everything was set up and ready to go. Now while TV and movies and music videos sound really cool and glamorous to most people, in reality, shooting film is really boring most of the time. The would set up the cameras at one angle, play the song over and over as Tom lip-synched for the film, and would do several takes of that shot. Then they'd set up the cameras for another shot, and do that several times. So film making is a whole lot of "hurry up and wait." Most of the time, most of the crew is just hanging out, waiting for the next time they're needed.
For me and Mike Miranda, it was a chill as could be. Mike just had to be there to take the ramp down, and I had to shoot some cool footage every 15-20 minutes, and try to not run out of camera batteries. So mostly we hung out, ate free food and soft drinks, and made fun of the director.
At one point, during the down time, Tom Petty was pushing his daughter back and forth on the camera dolly. The grips set down little train tracks, and the dolly is a rolling vehicle that can move the camera up and down, while being pushed back and forth along the tracks. I decided that would be a good time to get a shot of Tom just hanging out. I shot some footage for maybe 30 seconds, as Tom was just being a dad, pushing his daughter, who was 8 or 9, I think, back and forth. He saw me shooting, and looked over. With a smerk he said, "We want royalties on that video." He wasn't being mean, he didn't flip out, he just didn't know who I was, or why I was shooting video. He smiled, and I put the camera down. He nodded. That was about the coolest way to say, "Hey, do you mind not shooting this, I'm hanging out with my kid," as you could get on a film set. He smiled, and I wandered off to get another muffin from the Craft Service table.
In some of the funky hot dog stand shots in the video, you can see Casa de Cadillac in the background. The building looks much the same today. The hot dog stand, across Beverly Glen, is gone now, replaced by a Whole Foods market. #steveemigphotos
It was a beautiful, cloudless, California day, and that's how I spent the day on the skateboard shoot of the "Freefallin'" set. The other locations were the Sherman Oaks Galleria, for the mall shots, and the funky little hot dog stand was at the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Beverly Glen, in Sherman Oaks. The hot dog stand is gone, and there's a Whole Foods supermarket there now. I'm not sure where they shot the backyard scene.
It was early evening, with the sun heading down, as we left that day. I wound up giving Kele and Eric a ride home after the shoot. And while I made a lot of fun of Julien Temple, because he really did come across as an idiot on set, the finished video was cool. AND it put skateboarding all over MTV for a few weeks, at a time when skateboarding rarely got on TV. Julien directed hundreds of music videos, and I haven't, so whatever his method is it worked.
After hanging out that day, and sort of meeting Tom Petty, I started listening to a lot more of his music. Doing that, I realized how much of a genius he was at writing really solid, timeless songs. From "Refugee" in 1980, to "Saving Grace" in 2006, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers put out 40 years of great music, with hit songs spanning 26 years. Their older songs never seem to get dated, he wrote about timeless things, and they just made damn good rock n' roll. My personal favorite Tom Petty songs, besides "Freefallin'," are "Don't come around here no more,""Runnin' down a dream,""Into the great wide open," and "Stop draggin' my heart around" with Stevie Nicks.
As for the skaters, Eric Nash is still killing it on vert. Here he is shredding the Van's park Combi Pool in about 2011. You can see more of Joe Johnson in this 1989 video, at 5:43. He was Tony Hawk's roommate, at the Fallbrook house, at the time. You can see more of Kele Rosecrans skating, also in 1989, in this video, at 14:46. And you can see what happened when I asked Kele about a thorn tree. You can see a bit of Miki Keller in this video, interviews with legends of women's snowboarding.
When I started this blog a few months ago, I started looking around for weird and interesting stuff in California. I quickly found this couple and their Oddity Odysseys YouTube channel. I've shared a couple of their other videos. They check out a lot of the same kinds of places I find interesting, and make well produced videos. Since I'm not wandering around much at the moment checking out weird stuff, here's another one of their videos.
During the 1920's, alcohol was outlawed by the 18th Amendment here in the U.S., and the prohibition of alcohol became a battle between the law, all the people who still wanted to drink, and some mobsters, Like Al Capone. Speakeasies were the name for the underground bars that popped up in obscure places so people could keep partying during Prohibition. While we may think of these as a weird relics of 100 years ago, there are still some "underground" bars in business today in places.
When I was living in North Carolina a few years ago, guys in the hood told me about "Liquor Houses," which are people who have a working, for profit, bar in their house. One guy I knew at a homeless shelter would buy quality women's shoes at Goodwill or other discount stores, and wander around from one liquor house to another, reselling the expensive, but used, women's shoes to women in the local liquor houses during the day. There were a handful of them on the poor side of that city, and reportedly in other cities as well. I even heard stories of a former Liquor House where, like the speakeasies mentioned in the linked video above, local police officers would go after hours, and off duty, to have a few beers or some "corn liquor," the local term for moonshine.
So as crazy as it sounds, there still are speakeasies, or underground bars, of sorts, are still serving drinks today. These modern ones aren't trying to avoid the Prohibition lawmen, they're just avoiding taxes and permit fees, serving drinks as an old school side gig, you might say. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Off the west coast of an island, that most of the 23 million southern Californians don't even know exists, there's a wave, a huge wave, that can be surfed. Thousands of seals and sea lions are usually sitting onshore nearby, a all-you-can-eat buffet for the great white sharks cruising underwater nearby. This is the little known surf break called Shark Park, off the west coast of San Miguel Island, the farthest west of the eight Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California.
Although I lived for about 20 years in Huntington Beach, I never learned to surf. I was a diehard BMX freestyler most of those years, from 1987-2008, and a fat taxi driver for the last few. In the freestyle days, I knew that once I learned to surf, I'd never want to stop, so I never learned, and focused on BMX, with a little skateboarding mixed in. I did go boogie boarding now and then, so I did get out in the water, and caught some small waves that way.
For that big chunk of my life in Huntington Beach, although I didn't surf, I was surrounded by surfers. So I would hear about the surf every day, "It's overhead on the south side (of the pier) today," "Nice shoulder high A-frames at Tower 14," "It's flat, just little ankle slappers." "Fuck... black ball." So I got to know a bit about the waves, and surfing life.
When I lived on 15th Street, three blocks from the beach, in the late 90's, my neighbors and I would all watch Shark Week TV shows in the afternoons, then go surfing and body boarding at dusk, trying not to think about sharks. Over the best part of 20 years, I was hearing about the waves, the surf, and the surfing world, nearly every day. I even managed to get footage of "Boxcars" breaking once, (not my footage), a swell that breaks about 1/4 mile offshore, off the H.B. cliffs, about once every 10-15 years. Unfortunately, I lost that footage, with all my other video footage, in a move in 2008.
When it came to big waves, Hawaii was the place, particularly the North Shore in the 1980's when I first lived among surfers. We all knew about Pipeline and Waimea Bay. In 1988, working for a video company in Costa Mesa, I was sent down to shoot video of The Wedge, in Newport Beach, on a 15-20 foot day. So I learned about that one firsthand, and shot footage of another big day there in about 2006. In the 1990's, I remember everyone suddenly learning about this unknown, gigantic wave in Northern California, called Mavericks. The mega waves, off Half Moon Bay, surfed for 15 years by a few locals, finally became known to the rest of the surfing world.
Tow-in surfing had been happening in Hawaii for a while, and really big waves, like Jaws/ Peahi, in Hawaii, were believed to be about the biggest anywhere, at the time. But after Mavericks became widely known, it seemed surfers worldwide began seeking out new spots with gigantic waves. The annual XXL contest prize, for the biggest waves surfed, sparked a search for even bigger, surfable waves. Teahupoo, in Tahiti, Todos Santos in Baja California, Mexico, and the Cortes Banks, in the middle of the ocean, 80 or so miles off San Diego or Dana Point, became known. Years later, Nazare, in Portugal, rose to prominence with the biggest waves ever surfed. Here are a few more big waves, mostly without surfing in involved to remind you how crazy the ocean can get.
Life banished me to the Eastern Seaboard for a decade, so maybe I missed it. But I never, ever heard of Shark Park when I lived in Huntington Beach. Not until a couple of days ago, when I was looking up some videos about the archeology on the Channel Islands, something else I'm interested in. Arlington Springs Man, found on Santa Rosa island, is the oldest human remains found in North America, over 13,000 years old. The skeleton seems to pre-date the crazy Younger Dryas era, possibly the craziest period humans have lived through. You have to be a serious archeology geek to understand those last few sentences.
But as I was looking for those videos about California's Channel Islands archeology, over on the right I saw thumbnails of huge waves. The Shark Park videos popped up and I watched the one embedded above. But there were others. Like this one. And this one.
So as a friend of many surfers, I'm sharing this video for anyone who hasn't heard about this insane spot. One of the biggest, heaviest, gnarliest, most dangerous surfed waves in the world, is right here in Southern California, Shark Park. And it's not The Wedge. The west end of San Miguel Island, the westernmost of the northern Channel Islands, is about 45 miles southwest of Santa Barbara, and about 80 miles, almost straight west, of Santa Monica.
We all know the sport of surfing came from Hawaii, but it was the Southern California surf culture of the 1960's, about 55 years ago, that took the idea of surfing worldwide, through surf music and corny "beach blanket" movies. So it's cool to know that SoCal is now home to one of the biggest, heaviest, gnarliest surf spots anywhere, actually two, if you count Cortes Banks, which is due west of the California/Mexico border. Only a few surfers are experienced and crazy enough to give Shark Park a go, and that's just the way it should be. But for all the groms coming up out there, they'll know, out there, over the horizon from their local wave, there's one of the craziest surf spots on Earth. Maybe someday they'll have what it takes to give it a try.
Visible from the Long Beach and Orange County coast, depending on the weather, Santa Catalina Island is home to one town, Avalon, and a few dozen "buffalo", or American bison. Catalina has been exporting live bison to the Dakotas for 19 years, who knew?
In the 24 years I've lived in Southern California, I've made it out to Catalina Island one time. In 1997, I got hired to work on the stage crew of a John Tesh piano concert. While it was a cool trip, I worked 6 10 hour shifts in 4 days, so I didn't get much of a chance to wander the island. I did make it up to the Wrigley Mansion, now a hotel, on the top of a small mountain. John Tesh begins the PBS special show playing piano on the hotel's balcony. The view from up there is absolutely incredible.
As a SoCal main lander, I'd heard there were buffalo on Catalina for some reason, and that was confirmed by a man we worked with over there at the show. He was a descendant of the native tribe on the island, the Tongva, called Gabrielinos by the Spanish missionaries. He told us a bit about the island on breaks and at lunch. The Tongva go back at least 8,000 or more years, living on Catalina Island.
Until watching the clip above, I didn't realize the bison were brought over way back in 1924, for a movie, and have been living there since. I'd heard the movie they were used in was in the 1940's or 1950's, but that's not the case. So for close to 100 years now, American bison, which most of us call buffalo, have been living wild, but supervised, on Catalina. They are native to much of North America, but not to California, or Catalina or the other Channel Islands. With a trip to Catalina, you can take a buffalo tour to go see them. Safety tip: Don't take selfies with the "fluffy cows," they can really mess you up, they' huge and dangerous, even if they look really mellow.
As Southern Californians, we all know Catalina Island is out there, off shore, we've all seen it at some point, on a clear day. Many people forget, or don't know that there are actually eight islands off of the Southern California coast. At about 22 miles offshore, Santa Catalina is the closest, and can be reached by a couple of ferries from Long Beach, and by small planes or helicopters. It's one of the four southern Channel Islands, the other three are Santa Barbara, San Clemente, and San Nicolas Islands. San Clemente and San Nicolas are used by the military, and are off limits. Santa Barbara is tiny, and part of the national park with the northern islands.
So Santa Catalina, usually just called, Catalina, is the one we can all go visit. The native tribes used to travel to all of these islands in small canoes for thousands of years. A native woman named Juana Maria, was the last of the Nicoleno tribe on San Nicolas, and lived alone out there from 1835, until being removed in 1853.
The four northern Channel Islands are west of Malibu, and south of the city of Santa Barbara. Those four islands are named Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, San Miguel, and tiny Anacapa Island. The four northern islands, and Santa Barbara Island, are part of the Channel Islands National Park. You can learn a lot more about the islands, and take a virtual tour at the website on the link. The Chumash tribe, native to the mainland around the Malibu area, also lived on some of the northern islands. There is evidence of humans living on Santa Rosa Island as far back as 13,000 years ago, and 11,000 years ago on San Miguel. So at the end of the last Ice Age, there were people on at least those two islands.
Catalina is the one island with a small city, Avalon, and as I found out when we worked out there, it's really reasonable to stay there in the off season. You can check out the Catalina/Avalon website for more info. Catalina is also known for diving and fishing, and lots of SoCal boaters head out there for day or weekend trips. Not only is Catalina the only place to see a heard of wild bison in Southern California, there's a lot more to do as well. This post will give you links to get started to learn more about Catalina and the other Channel Islands. You can also learn more at the Channel Islands Wikipedia page.
This is a great video of 120 different Kobe Bryant murals in the Los Angeles area. I ride the bus by the two story mural on the VEM Exotic (car) Rentals building, at 11459 Ventura Blvd, in Studio City, every day. That's my favorite mural in this area. That one is at 1:23 in this video.
I was never a diehard basketball fan growing up. I lived in Ohio as a kid at a time when all of the pro sports teams pretty much sucked. The Cincinnati Reds were really good when I was about 4, and lived in that area. But after that, the Indians and the Browns sucked, the Cavaliers were mediocre, and so were the Reds as I grew up. My favorite basketball team as a kid was the Harlem Globetrotters. I never became a huge mainstream sports fan.
I got into BMX racing in freestyle while living in Boise, Idaho, when I was in high school, and it was BMX that brought me to Southern California, to work at two BMX magazines, in 1986. I was totally into BMX, riding every night and on weekends, and rarely watched football, and never watched baseball in my 20's. But the Lakers were a dynasty, and I'd catch a game on TV now and then.
Then in 1996, they got this 18-year-old kid in a trade from the Charlotte Hornets. Like most people, I thought, "Who does this kid think he is, skipping college and going straight to the pros?" Like all newcomers, he made some mistakes here and there, but it was obvious, this kid, Kobe Bryant, was the real deal. I started catching a lot more Lakers games as the 90's progressed into the Threepeat. Kobe became my favorite basketball player of all time. He was just a freaking amazing player, and legit guy, all around.
So today's location for this post of Crazy California 43 is the huge Kobe and Gigi mural at 11459 Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, my favorite Kobe mural, and the one I see daily. If you're a Kobe fan, the locations of 119 more Kobe murals are in the video above, go check some out in person.
Kobe Bryant, obviously, is known for primarily, basketball, but he's a guy who's also won an Oscar and done many other things. There are a few of my favorite Kobe Bryant videos I found while drawing a tribute picture of him, in my Sharpie Scribble Style. Where is that drawing now? I sold it to the guys as VEM Exotics, where my favorite mural is. I hope it's on one of their walls inside.
George Barris, the legendary car customizer, died in 2015. The Barris Kustoms shop, located at 10811 Riverside drive in North Hollywood, California, has closed down now. Here's a look at George Barris, and some of the crazy cars that came out of this shop.
Full disclosure, I'm not a diehard car guy. But I am the son of one. My dad was a draftsman and engineer from a small town in Ohio, who was a serious car guy and street racer in his younger years. He owned three classic Ford T-Birds, a couple of Chevy Corvairs, and about 35 other cars and several motorcycles, before he got married. I remember riding in my dad's last old car, a '55 Ford, when I was about 4 or 5 years old. I also rode in a parade in Wadsworth, Ohio, in a T-bucket roadster with dad and his best friend Wilson, who built the car. So like a lot of kids from the late Baby Boom and Gen X era, I grew up with my dad pointing and going, "Check out that car." That love for buying, selling, modifying, and racing cars came from the early pioneers of American car culture. One of the biggest names in that world is customizer George Barris.
Painting of the original Batmobile, on the window of Barris Kustoms. #steveemigphotos
George Barris was born in 1925, and was the son of Greek immigrants. He and his brother Sam, a year older, loved to build balsa wood models of cars, boats, and airplanes as kids, and entered them in local contests. In high school, George and Sam were given a hand-me-down Buick in rough shape, and they customized it themselves, at a time when nobody really thought of driving cars that weren't stock. The looks and reactions from kids at school, and the fun of creating something new out of an old car, got them believing they were on to something. A few years later, George hopped in his '35 Ford and headed down to Hollywood. George set up shop in the city of Bell, and later moved to Compton boulevard. Brother Sam joined him in 1945, after completing his military service.
The Beverly Hillbillies jalopy, my photo of their photo, on the front of the Barris Kustoms shop.
They customized cars for people in the hot rod and custom car world in the beginning. George also wrote tech articles and shot photos that appeared in many car magazines, particularly Petersen magazines. In 1961, his wife Shirley a new location in North Hollywood, just over the hill from Hollywood itself, but right in the middle of the Burbank, North Hollywood, and Studio City area of The Valley, where most movies and TV shows actually got made. Soon Hollywood actors and personalities, as well as the studios themselves came calling, asking for custom cars to be built.
Barris customized truck, photo on the front of their shop.
Perhaps the most famous car George is known for is the original Batmobile, built for the 1960's Batman TV show- Bam!-Klunk!-Kaplow! George's custom cars became legendary around the world, to thousands of hot rodders and street racers, and millions of kids watching Batman, and other shows like The Munsters. Barris Kustoms built the Munster Koach, and Grandpa's Dragula for The Munsters TV show. The Dragula was a casket turned into a dragster. Barris also designed an built the Beverly Hillbillies overloaded jalopy, James Dean's Porsche Spyder, a car for the Banana Splits kids' show, they modified cars for The Dukes of Hazard, and designed and built KITT from the Knight Rider TV show, along with many, many others.
A crazy six wheeled ATV, again my photo of a photo on the front of the Barris Kustoms shop.
George's wife Shirley passed away in 2001, and George himself got called by a higher power to customize some cars in the afterlife in 2015. The surviving family members kept the business going since then, keeping the huge legacy of George and Barris Kustoms alive through car shows, media, and other events. They haven't customized any more cars since George's death. So now the legendary location of the shop is up for sale. Several of George's cars were donated to the Petersen museum years ago, in Los Angeles, and are on display there. The thousands of photos, posters, die cast cars, and other mementos in the Barris collection will probably wind up on display in a new location at some point. No word on that yet. For the moment, as I write this, (Sept. 4, 2021) the Barris Kustoms shop still has photos of several cars on the front, and a mock-up Batmobile, and James Dean Spyder replica, and the Munster Koach are still visible through the shop windows. So that's today's interesting location here in Crazy California 43 blog, a shop that expanded everyone's ideas of what a car or truck can be, for well over 50 years.
Grandpa's casket turned dragster, the Dragula, from The Munsters TV show. My photo of the photo on the front of their shop.
All good things must come to an end. Around the corner from the Barris Kustoms shop is this mural of the Batmobile, painted on the concrete culvert wall. #steveemigphotos
