This piece of history was recently shared by former Car Craft Editor Jon Asher. Enjoy!

I actually attended the first Nationals in Tennessee back in the very early Seventies. At the time I was way into drag racing, as I am now, but Popular Hot Rodding Magazine convinced me to go by offering good money. I was glad I attended.

The cars and people were great and I was disappointed that after a one-off the National Street Rod Association took over the management. I started at Car Craft on January 1, 1973, just as the gas crunch hit. Detroit abandoned racing and performance cars and I found myself attending Van events, which were kind of depressing because I never met a single van owner who had even thought about doing anything to the powerplant in his always shag carpeted interior. Oh, yeah, the graphics on the outside were dynamite — but were never applied by the owner.

These were truly commercially built custom vehicles. But the people were fun to be around, the music was good and so was the weed — and it was plentiful, too. From there we began to do Street Machines and I found myself attending and covering events everywhere from Iowa to Oklahoma. It was apparent to anyone who paid attention that the NSRA guys only saw the Street Machine people as a revenue source.

Even the little things, like hanging a “Street Machine” sign atop their regular Street Rod Nationals banners. It was cheap and degrading to the Street Machine people, particularly when the NSRA guys all drove their rods. I never saw one of them in a Street Machine.

Everything they did was kind of off hand and haphazard because they really only cared about the entry money. That spurred the proposal from Bruce Caldwell and myself to upper management at Petersen Publishing about rekindling our own event. We had the active cooperation of Ron and Maxine Fulp and their car club, and that made all the difference. I was amazed that management went along with what I proposed, but they did.

We had 2,500 cars at our first event and every one after that reached the 5,000 car cutoff within a month or so of us announcing the dates. Yeah, we had burnout problems on the street, but so what? Because almost no one camped out those events actually did bring in significant money to every city we had an event in.

We gave away cars and goodies by the truckload. Our pal Harry Hibler, the former manager of San Fernando Dragway in California, treated the Street Machine Nationals the same way he did the race track, and believe me, I know it, ‘cause I saw and helped pack the bulging shopping bags full of cash into the back of his rental car!

We filled our pages with features we shot at those events, and guys like John Baechtel played a significant role in our editorial hit parade because unlike me, John “knows” cars and was thus able to help spot the ones that might not have been the flashiest in appearance, but had the kind of ultra-cool mechanicals that he knew our readers would relate to. Me? I only recently figured out what a carburetor is…

Jeff Smith was the same way. You couldn’t fool him with trash talk about your car because he’d built enough of ‘em himself that he’d seen and heard every BS car building story ever told. He saved us editorially too many times to mention merely by reading a story before it went to the printer and saying, “Wait a sec. That is NOT a 1956 Phefton valve grafted to a ’74 body. Hell, that’s not even a real Phefton valve. It’s one of those cheap knock-offs from Bangladesh!”

As the years passed there was an unspoken change in our collective attitudes towards Street Machines. While we were still dazzled by the true outrageousness of some of the so-called “Pro Street” rides, we began to seek out cars that could actually be street-driven on a daily basis. The more streetable a car was, the more likely we were to shoot a feature on it.

We understood angle parking in hotel lots (a moot point if EVERYONE is angle parking to insure no one dings the doors!), but we wanted to see those cars roll into the lot under their own power, not on a trailer. But, I have to admit that by the time I was fired (December 31, 1983 – and I deserved to be fired) I was kind of over Street Machines. Maybe this little story will help explain my frustration.

Throughout the Eighties and well into the Nineties I’d have guys coming up to me at a drag race, saying “Hey, remember me?” “Please forgive me, but I meet a lot of people, so help me out a little.”

“Okay. You shot my car!”

“I’ve shot a lot of car features.”

“It was the Camaro. The red one.”

During my career I bet I shot hundreds of red Camaro Street Machines. So many that I was totally burned out on them. I am not knocking red Camaros, so please hold the hate mail, but if you attended 162 baseball games plus the playoffs for 20 years, how much interest and excitement could you generate for that 21st year?I just shot too many features and attended too many events to maintain my edge. As I said, I deserved to be fired.

I’ve been in this business almost 50 years and have seen a lot of changes, and there are more big changes coming down the pike right now. Magazines as we once knew them are going to fold completely, or radically change if they hope to survive in today’s marketplace, but no matter what happens to magazines and publishing, Street Machines will live forever, thankfully.

2014 Street Machine Nationals Champion Jon Asher

2014 Street Machine Nationals Champion Jon Asher