By
Dave Cruikshank July 30, 2018As a seasoned editor at Power Automedia, I’ve made fantastic friends and met all sorts of car guys (and gals) at our mothership in Murrieta, California over the years. With different strains of automotive afflictions, the diversity of passion from my colleagues has been exiting and educational.Alas, in a sea of auto geeks, I always felt like I was the black sheep of the PAM family. I like hot rods, fiberglass sports cars, big American sleds from the ’70s, atomic coffee shops, Sam Cooke and Los Angeles noir.You can imagine my surprise when I came to work one day and see a Willys Aero Ace in the parking lot. “Who the heck owns that, I thought to myself. It turns out, it belonged to Dimitri Lazaris, our recently hired boy wonder video guy.
When he answered “Yes” to my inquiry “Do you own the Willys?” we were off to the races and never looked back. I knew that aside from my mentor/guru Bobby Kimbrough, I had another “brother from a different mother” onsite.We fluently traded stories of Hollywood, mid-century modern architecture and old cars. He also shared his parent’s obsession with collecting Hollywood props and artifacts.
A visit to his family homestead was amazing. In the living room hanging from the ceiling, was a paper mache’ replica of Fred McMurray’s Model T from the movie “
The Nutty Professor.” They had acquired it at an auction and it joins an incredible collection of treasures and artifacts from Hollywood’s golden era.
When we went into the garage, I was greeted by not one but two dragsters! One complete and one a project in progress. There was wall-to-wall, petrol memorabilia and carefully curated racing artifacts from a bygone era of racing in all its glory. Dimitri recounts the fantastic fateful story of these two dragsters and how he and his Dad acquired them. Let’s jump into our time machine and set the dials back to late 1958.Racers Ronnie Scrima, Mort Smith, and Gene Adams were campaigning a dragster called the Engle Special. For a short period in early 1958 it rode on a homebuilt chassis built by Ronnie Scrima, but as soon as Chassis Research came out with their TE-440 (Top Eliminator,440 yards) they adopted the new underpinnings.