Enthusiasts have long been an integral part of America’s car culture. Some followed the reliability runs and Vanderbilt Cup races at the dawn of the automobile age. Others modified Model- T and Model A Fords for better performance during the interwar years. Many watched the post-World War II sports-car races at Watkins Glen or Laguna Seca, while others cheered their stock car heroes in the Piedmont South. Some built hot rods and customs during the 1950s and 1960. Others, instead, made monthly payments on muscle cars. Today there are “Ford folks” and “Chevy folks”, “Honda folks” and “VW folks,” “Jaguar folks” and “Corvette folks,” hot rodders and restorers, drag racers and road racers, and the list goes on and on.

Common ground among these niches is scarce. On the business side, there is the automotive aftermarket, a multi billion dollar a year industry supplying the parts and equipment enthusiasts use to personalize and restore their cars. There is also the “buff book” business, another milion dollar a year industry generating scores of periodicals each month and books each year.

Cross-niche links among individual enthusiasts are less common, and rarely quite so broad. Some who build hot rods also restore high-end Packards, and some who rebuild factory correct Mustangs also follow Formula One racing. But apart from those whose interests happen to span the spectrum, and apart from the parts suppliers and publishing houses, what else is there that permits us to speak of “automobile enthusiasts” as a cohesive group? Put another way, what does it really mean to be a “gearhead”?

One way to address the question is to shift our focus from their gears to their heads. For although its many niches rarely mix any better than oil and water, certain attitudes and approaches do thread their way through most of the enthusiast community. There is, for example, a deeply held distrust of regulatory advocates. Not everyone who drives a classic American car or a vintage Volkswagen literally has a dartboard in the garage centered on a photograph of Ralph Nader, of course. But figuratively, many do. There is also an obsession with perfection, with getting their cars right and keeping them that way. Not every enthusiast actually owns a show-worthy car, but the pursuit of automotive perfection whatever “perfection” means within a particular niche’ is central. So, too, is an almost morbid obsession with out of service cars, the wrecked and rusting hulks that reside in junkyards, backyards, and rural settings Though it is not quite universal, this fascination with the mortal remains of yesterday’s vehicles is sufficiently widespread to warrant a closer look.

Enthusiast publications have run photographs and stories on out of service cars in various states of disrepair for many years. Typically, these have appeared in one of three contexts. First are the many feature articles about finished, show worthy cars emphasizing that the vehicles then restored. These normally include before- and after shots to emphasize the ragsto riches angle.’ Second are the magazines’ ubiquitous how-to technical articles. Covering everything from tune-ups and transmissions to basic bodywork, these often feature fully illustrated advice on how to locate junkyard parts.

Third, and most telling, are the regular sections in enthusiast periodicals which feature photographs and stories of derelict cars in junkyards, and other settings exactly as they are, wrecked, cut-up, and rusting away. This sort of coverage first appeared on a limited basis during the 1970s in the street-rod oriented Rod and Custom’s “Vintage Tin” section. Then it rapidly spread to other periodicals during the 1980s and 1990s. Today it is ubiquitous. For the classic-car crowd, there’s “Weathered Wheels” in Oul Cars Weekly. Hot rod and muscle car enthusiasts enjoy Hot Rod’s “Hidden Treasure of the Month.” Two publications ppublipublications cater to road-racing and sports-car fans Classic Motorsports’ “Ran When Parked” and Classic Sports Car’s “Reader Find of the Month.” For modern tuner car enthusiasts, there’s European Cars “Money Shot” for classic Volkswagen enthusiasts, the “Fertig” segment in VW Trends as well as occasional coverage in Hot VWs. For Gen-Xers in the mid-2000s, a magazine called MPH regularly covered totaled Porsches, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis in a section titled “Wrecked Exotics.” More mainstream reader could consult the “PS” page in Road and Track and the “Reader Sightings” feature in Car and Driver. The longest-running of these segments appeared in the restoriation restoration-oriented Cars and Parts for nearly thirty years it published deep and lavishly illustrated coverage of enthusiast-oriented salvage yards in every issue .’ Finally, those with more than a passing interest in junked cars can find prints of artists’ renderings, photographs of junkyards in web-based collections, numerous books, and calendars featuring full-color images of wrecked and abandoned vehicles in a variety of settings.

On the surface, the visual content of these presentations differs little from that produced by “urban explorers,” those who trek through the ruins of the Rust Belt (mostly contained in the northeastern, the midwestern, and some sections of the southeastern United States), video- or still-camera in hand, documenting urban blight and industrial decay and posting their “findings” on YouTube and other online forums. Unlike serious scholars of industrial archaeology, however, these explorers and their fans in cyber space are less interested in the material reality of the industrial past than they are in its present decay. (Mostly for aesthetic and content-creation purposes, without an in depth understanding of the environmental and historical factors involved). The same is true of many of the aforementioned derelict car features. Both convey a sense of resignation often mixed with an almost voyeuristic delight-as yet another piece of the industrial past slips away, whether a factory in Detroit or the remnants of an automobile assembled there.

But among enthusiasts, there is a vital twist to all of this. Hot Rod’s derelict-car feature, “Hidden Treasure of the Month,” is aptly titled, because many enthusiasts have long viewed junked or otherwise abandoned cars as treasure. In other words, the wrecks featured in their periodicals represent more than tragic reminders of what once was. They also represent potential-as sources of parts for the restoration and modification of project vehicles or as starting points for those projects. In fact, precisely because they actively seek to re-use these rusting relics, car enthusiasts sometimes call themselves America’s “first recyclers.” This is a fantasy, as those familiar with the history of recycling in the United States are well aware. Nevertheless, many present-day automobile enthusiasts do operate within a well-established mindset that values the re-use or repurposing of abandoned- or scrapped-car “treasure.”

This has not always been the case. The treasure metaphor itself did not appear until after World War II, and not until the late 1970s was it firmly established. But the behavior and the approach to the automobile that it represents has been developing since the 1910s. This essay examines the emergence of this culture of re-use, restoration, and re-purposing by looking at three critical periods. The first is the 1920s through the mid-1950s when high performance enthusiasts began to place a premium on parts from certain types of wrecked cars. The second is the 1950s when the mainstream antique and classic-car restoration hobby emerged along with the treasure-hunting mindset. The third is the 1960s through the 1980s when nostalgic high-performance enthusiasts known as street rodders began to re-purpose automotive scrap on a widespread scale, embracing their status as treasure hunters and “direct recyclers” along the way.

--David Lucsko