Free In-N-Out Burger by Stacy Perman Page B

patience for teenage angst in his parking lot. “If the kids got rowdy, Harry would make them behave or ask them to leave,” recalled Teagle. “If they got out of line or had too much to drink he ran them off. He was all law and order.” To prove his point, once, after the kids had gotten out of hand, Harry kicked everybody out and put a chain around the property and locked it up. The teens were allowed to return only after they promised Harry they would behave, which they did.
    As it happened, In-N-Out Burger came of age just as the new youth and car culture emerged. In Baldwin Park, the two met at the little stand on Garvey Avenue. During those prosperous postwar years, Detroit had produced a whole new generation of vehicles. With a glut of new model automobiles traveling down America’s roads, there was a huge surplus of the older cars just lying around. These abandoned autos offered the perfect occupation for the legions of Southern California’s car-obsessed youths who enthusiastically took their parents’ beat-up and outmoded Model T Fords, Chevrolets, Hudsons, and other vintage-tin bodies and recycled them. Inventive and daring, they removed flathead engines, stripped door handles, eliminated transmission casings, appropriated spare fenders, and repainted the vehicles in bold colors and designs, giving birth to the American hot rod. Once built, the only thing left for the kids to do was to show off their four-wheeled metal peacocks.
    All across Los Angeles, hot-rodders and car enthusiasts converged on the plentiful neon drive-in burger palaces with their brightly lit interiors, wild angles, and giant V-shaped car canopies. During its ten-year heyday until 1968, the famous Harvey’s Broiler (later renamed Johnie’s Broiler) in Downey regularly attracted a parade of five thousand cars on weekend nights. “It would take thirty minutes to get to Firestone Boulevard and another twenty minutes just to get through the parking lot,” remembered Analisa Hungerford, a Long Beach community college teacher who in 2007 helped spearhead a movement to save what remained of the site from demolition. “Thatplace was wow. It was the first place that people snuck out of their houses to go to; there were so many first dates that happened there. It was just the jewel of Downey.”
    Showcasing hot rods on a Saturday night soon gave way to drag racing. Much to the chagrin of the authorities, teens and young men in their inventively modified and souped-up dragsters hit the boulevards on the clear, dry evenings and weekends with but a single purpose: to own a quarter-mile of asphalt in the shortest time possible. In-N-Out Burger became a crucial stop on the colorful but illegal street racing circuit that materialized after the war. It didn’t take much for a race to begin. Usually two drivers met up and one popped the question to the other: “Do you want to drag?” That was it. Often, the losers lost more than just the race—many lost their cars, too.
    Building high-powered, mean machines that were chopped, flamed, and louvered evolved rapidly. It was a world that author Tom Wolfe brought to mainstream attention in his 1964 article for Esquire magazine titled “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” By then, of course, hot-rodding had caught on in the rest of the country. In Southern California, there seemed to be no shortage of cars or parts or for that matter young men with the desire to create their own hot rods.
    One of them, the legendary hot rod builder Pete Chapouris, got his start cruising the boulevards of the San Gabriel Valley with his friends. Chapouris, who would go on to establish the celebrated custom garage Pete & Jake’s Hot Rod Parts in Temple City (where he customized a 1934 Ford three-window coupe into the iconic cruiser featured in the movie The California Kid ), once recalled those early intoxicating days by mapping them out in a