Can you pinpoint the moment when the custom car bug bit you? Gene Blackford can.
It was the summer of 1953, and 12-year-old Gene was walking with a buddy through the Portage Lakes resort area near Akron, Ohio. A crowd of people had gathered near a roadside custard stand, and Gene wandered over to see what the commotion was about.
"Somebody in the crowd said 'What is that?'" Gene remembers. "And someone else said 'A California custom.' And here's this purple car. I was just mesmerized. And that just soaked in really far, you know, as a kid."
The car was none other than the Polynesian, Jack Stewart's sectioned '50 Oldsmobile, fresh from the West Coast after being built at Valley Custom in Burbank. The encounter made Gene's day. Little did he know then how its lasting impression would affect him decades later.
Jack Stewart's CruiserThe car Gene saw was not just any California custom. It was perhaps the best-known car to come from one of the most respected shops of the 1950s: Valley Custom. The Burbank-based business was a partnership of future National Rod & Custom Car Hall of Fame members Neil Emory and Clayton Jensen. From 1948 to 1960, they worked their hammer-welding magic and lent a simple-yet-sophisticated design sense to dozens of custom cars and street roadsters, including Ron Dunn's sectioned '50 Ford and Dick Flint's iconic Model A track roadster.
According to a 1990 interview with Emory, Jack Stewart had just returned from military service in the early '50s when he saw Dunn's Ford in the Motorama show in Los Angeles. An Ohio native, Stewart talked to Emory and Jensen about giving his '50 Olds 88 a similar treatment. Unlike most customers of the day, Stewart didn't want to fool around and have the headlights frenched one month, the taillights done the next month, and so on. He wanted the whole car customized, start to finish, at one time. He was the type of customer most shops dreamed about.
Stewart's Oldsmobile got the full custom treatment over the course of about nine months. A 4-inch body section was its definitive modification, but it also got reshaped front wheel openings, custom fender skirts, and a bold front bumper/grille built from a '47 Olds bumper in a custom opening with a shapely lower pan. The headlights were frenched and recessed using handmade and drilled stainless rings, while frenched '52 Studebaker taillights got a similar treatment. Emory and Jensen were true craftsmen, preferring to hammer-weld and metal-finish the body panels rather than slather on lead filler. Very little lead was needed before the metallic orchid paint was applied.
The car's construction was thoroughly chronicled in the emerging enthusiast media. Hot Rod and Rod & Custom ran stories in their September 1953 issues, while the 1954 Motor Trend Custom Cars Annual contained dozens of pages of buildup photos. At some point prior to its completion the Olds earned its Polynesian moniker, a name likely derived from the Tiki bars and other South Pacific influences in Southern California at the time.
Just Another Used Car Stewart returned to Canton, Ohio, shortly after the Polynesian's completion and, like most customs of the era, used it as regular transportation. It even served as his wife's car for a while, until she became pregnant and couldn't fit behind the wheel. In the ensuing years, the car turned up in several East Coast magazines-including the pocket-size Custom Rodder-and, as Gene discovered, caused quite a commotion wherever it went.