The Krazy Kreations Car Club
present... "Body Builders" from the
Rocky Mountain News article.
| USASTREETRODS.com The Krazy Kreations Car Club present... "Body Builders" from the Rocky Mountain News article. |
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Custom Painting
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Rocky Mountain News March 8th, 2003 "Body
builders" Automotive works of art are rolling off a different kind of assembly line By Steve Knopper,
Special To The News Rick Murray's Westminster
workshop looks like the place where cars come to die.
In one corner is the frame of a 1994 Caprice
police car, which no longer resembles a police car. Toward the back, under
a huge James Dean poster, is a set of wheels and axles with no auto body
on top. In the center is a 1938 Hudson - the kind mobsters might have used
to speed away from a hit - containing an engine but no seats.
You might expect ghosts to fly out of the
windows, but look closer. Many of these vehicles have huge silver stitches
between the windows and the doors. The Caprice frame is cross-bred with
the greenish, hollowed-out body of a 1951 Mercury. A half-dozen men mill
around, buffing the hoods, crouching where the seats should be, talking
about what these cars will look like when they're through. Maybe, if
they're lucky, they'll resemble Murray's 1939 Chevrolet, a Popsicle-red,
yellow-flamed, Batmobile-like sedan parked out front.
Before long you realize Murray is a sort of
custom-car Dr. Frankenstein, bringing these shells to life in thrilling,
unexpected ways. The other day he sized up the '51 Mercury (hauled from a
junkyard on South Federal Boulevard) and had a flash of inspiration. He
brought over the rear windshield from a '65 Chevy, and by some miracle, it
fit.
"I go home and I just freak out," says
Murray, who has owned Krazy Kreations, what he calls a "friend
shop," for four years at 7101 Julian St. "I go, 'I got an idea!'
That's why I've got so many projects going on."
Murray, 40, is a Denver native who grew up loving
old cars. You can find him at Krazy Kreations almost any time of day or
night, wearing a faded Harley-Davidson T-shirt and loping his skinny body
from low-rider to rat-rodder, adding a flame here, a $700 transmission
there.
Cruising right along
It's still too cold for the street rods to come
out on Federal Boulevard. But they will, especially on days like Cinco de
Mayo, when people pack the streets to watch the honking parades and car
contests. And on certain nights, informal car clubs meet at a Sonic
Drive-In in Westminster, a cruising spot at Federal and West Alameda
Avenue and the Jumbo Car Wash on South Federal - and the communities grow
by word of mouth. Shops like Murray's are at the heart of this loosely
organized car culture.
"You've got to have your own flavor. It's
not something you can go out and buy," says Lee Trevino, a Greeley
truck driver whose El Vago Productions puts on car shows regularly in
Denver. "Rick's got that vision. He's a master welder - he can take a
top of a car and put it on another one. He can build stuff that nobody
else can see."
Murray runs his shop like an artists' collective
or, as one of his son's friends calls it, an "internship." Kids
show up, work on the cars all day and leave. Murray gives many of the
finished results away, keeps some (like his own souped-up '39 Chevy) to
drive his son to school and sells others.
The Murray brothers say they aren't in it for the
money. "There's no money in customizing," says Randy Murray.
"It's a hobby, and you have to have a passion for it." But Rick
Murray recently spotted a 1938 Hudson on the street and bought it - for
$3,500 - from a young woman who'd inherited it from her dead father. A few
weeks of work and $500 worth of parts later, Murray received a $10,500
offer for it. "I turned it down," he says. "I wanted to
drive it around. I didn't want to sell it. It's no fun unless you can
drive it."
Living their dream
The nontraditional Krazy Kreations, where Murray
refuses to speak of his customers as "clients," isn't the only
car-customization shop in Denver, of course. On the opposite side of the
city, at 3159 S. Zuni St., Neal Hogsett has since 1977 turned Datsuns,
Chevrolets and even a large fish - a prize from a friend, hanging on his
office wall - into jacked-up hot rods more suitable for Bandimere Speedway
than Interstate 25.
But Hogsett's customers tend to drive their
creations around town, rather than "trailer-queening" them from
car show to car show. Along with Ron Lind, another body-and-paint
specialist who rents space at N-H Custom Creations, Hogsett works on
clients' long-term projects. He recently helped a Denver businesswoman
turn her beat-up, dead-green Chevelle into a silver street rod. The
transformation took three months, and all Lind had to do was remove the
hood, doors and fenders and replace the upholstery and the top.
"We just try to live their dream," says
Lind, who did insurance work at a Subaru body shop for years. Frustrated
with boilerplate, deadline repairs, he moved in with Hogsett six years
ago. "The nice part is, if it's people's dreams, they don't need them
to get to work."
'Cruella de Vil's car'
Lind customer Ron Rossetter doesn't need his 1982
Excalibur Roadster to drive from his mountain home to his office at
Evergreen Glass. The 49-year-old businessman is the first to admit he
looks like he doesn't belong in a car like this. There are only about 60
such models in existence, according to legend, and celebrities such as
Phyllis Diller and Robert Wagner are said to have owned them.
Rossetter has a huge handlebar mustache and
beard, wears his hair to his shoulders and munches on pizza and sips
Mountain Dew as he talks about the Roadster.
"I'm a motorhead," he says.
He bought it in 1994 for $17,000 from a rich old
guy in Arkansas, where his wife happened to be traveling when she spotted
the for-sale ad. The owner, apparently, just wanted to get rid of it.
Since then, Rossetter - with help from Lind - has
put $40,000 worth of work and parts into it. The Roadster is incredible.
All sleek curves, dark purple paint, elaborately ribbed silver hubcaps and
leather interior, it looks like something Thurston Howell III would have
driven around Beverly Hills before he became stranded on Gilligan's
Island. It drives milkshake smooth.
"My wife describes it as 'Cruella de Vil's
car,' " says Rossetter, referring to the evil dog-napper in Disney's
101 Dalmations. "We're normal folk. Me and my wife are normal people.
Not in this."
From the moment the couple drove the Roadster
from Arkansas back to Evergreen, people started honking. It was so obvious
that Rossetter worried something was wrong with the car. But it was just
the mystique - and to this day, they'll drive it to Vegas or a LoDo
steakhouse and always get preferential treatment .
"For God's sake, man! The people!"
Rossetter says. "No matter where you go, you meet all these people!
And they're happy! But it's an illusion. I keep telling everybody, 'It's
not what you're thinking.' "
The custom-car movement isn't just a
male-oriented hobby.
"As a man, I never would have picked a car
like this," Rossetter says of his Roadster. "It takes a woman to
pick it out and a man to put the testosterone under the hood."
"There are a lot of women into hot rods
now," says Tom Albano, longtime owner of Denver Specialty Center,
which sells custom-car parts to body shops. "A lot of women have
their own cars. A lot of husbands build cars for their wives; the wives
tell them what they want."
A real head-turner
Back on Denver's north side, Rick Murray has
experienced the same gawking phenomenon. After buying the skeleton of his
1938 Chevy for $8,000, spending $2,500 on parts and working feverishly for
two months with an eight-man crew, the car regularly wins Cinco de Mayo
contests. (It also sells for $65,000 on the Krazy Kreations Web site.) It
also causes a stir wherever Murray goes.
"Some people - if I'm at a restaurant or
something and I'm in it, they'll actually run to 7-Eleven and buy
disposable cameras to take pictures," he says. "Sometimes it
gets a little hectic. If you have a day that you don't want anybody to
talk to you - you don't want to drive that car.
"It'll actually stop people in their tracks.
These kinds of cars - they literally cause accidents. I feel bad because
of the wrecks. But it's pretty wild, a totally different feeling."
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