It was a striking coincidence for me that the two leading
obituaries in this morning’s NY Times were
for two people who played very different
roles in my young life.
The first was Dean Jeffries.
In the ‘50’s and ‘60’s he and Von Dutch were the premier hot rod pinstripers.
Pinstriping goes back to the early years of the
automobile. A fine straight line in a
contrasting color follows a major fender contour and finishes with a design
flourish. In the fifties, the Golden Age
of the hot rod, pin striping became the finishing detail of choice, and Von
Dutch and Jeffries were the California gods.
I tried a little pin striping myself. I did my buddy Skip’s 1951 Pontiac dashboard. Not bad, but no Jeffries-level work. The challenge of pin striping was the center
point in the middle of the rear deck or the nose of the hood where the
striping on the two sides of the car came together. Those center
flourishes had to be symmetrical. No
stencils, this was all done freehand. It’s
really tough to get the swoops and teardrops to exactly mirror each other.
I find myself still doodling pinstripes during meetings,
trying to get the arcs and curves on each side of a centerline to match.
The second was Herbert Blau.
He was the director at ACT in San Francisco when I attended SF State
College in, let’s see, must have been 1962.
He also taught at the college, and filled in one day for Mark Harris (Bang the Drum Slowly) in the creative writing
class I was taking. He commented on a
story I had submitted. I can’t recall
exactly what he said, but it mattered that he took what I wrote seriously
enough to think about it.
Blau was the driving intellect behind the appearance of Waiting for Godot and the works of
Beckett and other avant garde playwrights on major American stages. I was surprised to find that he passed away
in Seattle, and had last taught at the UW.
If I’d known I might have looked him up and said thanks for a word of
encouragement fifty years ago.
Does anyone not as old as I am find any of this interesting?
