Rescued & Restored

ED “BIG DADDY” ROTH’S 1956 FORD F-100.

- Gary Witzenburg

Perhaps best known for creating the bizarre, oversized hot rod–driving caricature Rat Fink, famed artist, cartoonist, and car customizer Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was born in Beverly Hills, California, in 1932 and grew up in the nearby Los

Angeles suburb of Bell to become a major player in Southern California’s hot rod and “Kustom Kulture” of the late-1950s and 1960s. And in 1957, he bought a new ’56 Ford F-100 pickup truck.

It was Meadow Mist green as delivered, but he painted it white, covered it in bright red flames, and striped and lettered it to use as a rolling business card. But he didn’t keep it long.

By the end of that year, “Roth sold the truck to Oliver [O.Z.] Bradshaw, who eventually replaced the stock power plant with a Packard engine,” says Aaron Kahan of Los Angeles auto dealer Galpin Auto Sports (GAS), which owns Big Daddy’s truck today. “In the late-1960s, he sanded off the flames and painted it powder blue, followed by dark green. Then he moved to Paden, Oklahoma, in 1968, where it sat untouched until it was found in a barn almost 50 years later! Luckily, O.Z. stashed away the original Roth-painted grille, which ended up being the main piece to confirm the truck’s historic pedigree!”

But it was much more than the grille. “The taillights were there, and all the knobs on the dash that Roth had hand-painted when he did the artwork on the dash, over spray in areas from the original flame job, and where he had painted the inside of the truck except for the dash,” says Dave Shuten of Galpin Speed Shop, which restores and rebuilds the dealership’s collector vehicles. “I even found a dash plaque in the ashtray from the Renegade Car Show in Long Beach in 1957, and I have footage of Roth at that show.”