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Much has been written about Boyd Coddington, and viewers might infer even more from watching Boyd's television show, American Hot Rod. Everyone wants to know what makes this guy tick, but few come close. One thing that can be said with some certainty is that this postwar baby-boomer has no use for a pilot light. His mental and physical burners have been on full-bore from Day One, cooking up an endless stream of ideas in vehicles, wheels, and much more. Along with the dreams and visions, Boyd grew up in a time and place where everyone was expected to pull their own weight, and when something broke around the place, you didn't buy a new one, you fixed what you had. Pretty soon you started making your own stuff you needed from steel or wood you had on hand. This kind of adaptation and ingenuity was a tailor-made resume for entering the post-war hot rod movement.
That Boyd Coddington is a household name is no stretch. Recognition of any kind would be something special for a car-loving kid who grew up rural Idaho, but from his hot rod "shop" beginnings in his home garage in Cypress, California in the late Sixties, Boyd set a standard for his workmanship, creativity and thinking from which he's never deviated. Hot rod afficionados who saw some of those first cars he produced many not have recognized the stocky guy with the Hawaiian shirt at that time, but they noticed that all his cars shared the same look and level of detail. Smooth, integrated, no hiccups, nothing extraneous; they were surgery-room clean in form and function.
He and contemporary Li'l John Buttera, who had made his fame building drag-racing funny cars before he got into street rods, were both master machinists and had developed a new aesthetic for rods, something that doesn't happen everyday in a largely tradition-minded hobby. Rather than buy a reproduction of a vintage Ford rearview mirror as a restorer might do, they would take a block of aluminum and with lathe and mill "carve away everything that didn't look like a mirror." It was the beginning of the billet phenomenon. Many shops got on the bandwagon eventually, but they missed the point by writing a CNC program to produced billet parts in quantity, and soon everyone had the same mirrors, or gas caps or other billet parts. Boyd's take on using his machine shop was never to mass-produce anything, it was a way to create a unique and different part every time, to actually build things as one-offs, and of course he became famous in the car community by even building a set of four unique billet wheels for many of his eager customer's cars. This was genuine customizing in the modern world, as different artistically from the norm as the old-time customizers like Westergard, Sam Barris and Gene Winfield were in their day compared to those who just dechromed cars and changed grilles.
Those high standards Boyd set for himself and the cars he produced led to lots of magazine coverage, which in turn led to enough fame that wealthy customers from other states made the pilgrimage to Boyd's for a car that often made a statement akin to a one-off fine watch or Tiffany jewelry. Some of those cars, like Vern Luce's so-red '33 coupe and Jamie Musselman's roadster became touring hits in the show circuit, further spreading the appreciation of "the Coddington touch" among an ever-widening audience. The popularity of that sought-after special red so identified with Boyd's cars prompted Dupont to offer "Boyd Red" as a production paint.
In an area of the automotive world where stance is considered critical, the Boyd hot rods sat exactly right and were thankfully free of the loud paint "graphics" that were popular down the sides of otherwise tasteful street rods in the Eighties. At almost any previous decade in street rodding since the Forties, an early Ford car with perfect metalwork, the right wheels and a fine paint job was anyone's dream and probably a show-winner. Boyd and others who followed his new aesthetic carried this much further, personalizing each car to be different without being odd. The flawless metalwork and paint would be a given, but when Boyd saw a line in the body that didn't suit his overall vision, that line was changed, not like adding an appendage such a fin as customizers might have done in the Fifties, but by adding, removing or reshaping the metal. Changing the contours subtly does not cause a viewer to even notice the change, only that the overall vehicle has something special about it. Many, many hours, weeks and months of expert work go into these kinds of redesigns.
In today's hot rod and custom-car world, there are designers and builders, but Boyd Coddington has always been one of those men who smoothly merged both these specialties plus other talents. Lots of people know how to use machine-shop tools, but rarely does someone whittling hot rod parts out on a Bridgeport have enough "eye" while the machine is running to say "Just another 90-thou from here and this edge will taper just right."
Besides his own prodigious talents, Boyd has worked on special projects with some of the top designers in the automotive aftermarket. Chip Foose and Jessie James both worked in the Boyd Coddington hot rod shop for several years and now each have their own cable TV shows. Other well-known designers such as Thom Taylor, Larry Wood (Hot Wheels designer), Todd Emmons, Chris Ito (Peterbilt) and Eric Brockmeyer happily collaborated with Boyd as well. Larry Erickson, currently with Ford Motor Company (Chief Designer, Mustang), worked with Boyd in the late Eighties to develop the enormously popular Cadzzilla, a radical custom based on a Fifties Cadillac for Rocker Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. Some would say that this is one of the finest custom-cars of all time in design and execution. Boyd's cars have won the prestigious "America's Most Beautiful Roadster" an unprecedented seven times, the Daimler-Chrysler Design Excellence Award twice, and he's been inducted into the SEMA Hall of Fame, the Grand National Roadster Show Hall of Fame, the National Rod & Custom Museum Hall of Fame, the Route 66 Wall of Fame, the Street Rod Marketing Alliance Hall of Fame, and was voted "Man of the Year" in 1988 by Hot Rod Magazine.
An unusual honor for Boyd was to have the only hot rod ever displayed on the cover of the Smithsonian Magazine, when his '33 coupe was part of a 1993 exhibit titled "Sculpture on Wheels." Cars from the Coddington shop have also won the Ridler Award and the Al Slonaker Award.
Anyone with drive and talent on the scale of Boyd Coddington reaches considerable success in their chosen field, but for Boyd the chart went where he "couldn't have imagined it in a million years." He was a legendary figure in the hot rod world long before the TV show, but now there are millions of people outside the car hobby who also admire his work. Demand for a Boyd car is high. Where he once produced one car at a time at home during the day while doing machine work at Disneyland on the graveyard shift, his present shop in La Habra, California has some 26 talented employees working in a 30,000 square-foot facility with in-house body and paint shop. Of course, you've seen them all on the show. Demand for his one-off billet wheels spawned a huge facility making new wheels that is one of the biggest names in the custom wheel industry.
What you perhaps don't know is the man himself. He's intense - always thinking, always caring about something. He may seem deadly serious, but in the back of his unvoiced thoughts he's still got a teenager's passion for cars. He generally keeps the whirring content of his active mind to himself, but he has a softer side that he lets show in his works for charity. Whether it's creating a set of custom Boyd '32 Ford pedal cars for charity, employing challenged people in his shop, helping a Make-A-Wish Foundation client build his dream car and auctioning the resultant show-winner off for charity, to the Boyd Coddington Foundation founded by Boyd and his wife Jo. This and more is evidence enough that the bear has a heart bigger than his roar.
Big is a description for Boyd Coddington that describes his many aspects, from the physical to his talent, from his design eye to his altruism and the colorful, outsized personality.
GR ROB
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