Alex Xydias obit

Alex Xydias—Hot-Rod Hero, WWII Vet, Filmmaker—Has Passed Away at 102

Xydias founded the So-Cal Speed Shop and was a major figure in the rise of hot-rodding.

 He was not on the list.

Original hot-rod hero, founder of the So-Cal Speed Shop, WWII veteran, one of the founders of SEMA and the SEMA Show, Alex Xydias passed away this morning in Southern California. He was 102.

Xydias' life mirrored that of the American Century. He was born in 1922 in Hollywood; his father was a movie producer, a talent that would help him later when he started filming the Indy 500, Sebring, and other major races across the country.

Xydias grew up during the Great Depression, working at a gas station on Hollywood Boulevard for 10 cents an hour. When he found out about a job that paid 11 cents an hour, he took it immediately.

"Imagine a time like that, when just a single penny would make that much of a difference," he once told us.

When the U.S. entered WWII, Xydias enlisted in the Army Air Corps, training as a flight engineer and gunner on the B-17 and then the B-24.

"I was a pretty good shot, too," he once told Autoweek.

He never served overseas but, as he liked to joke, "I did a heckuva job protecting Arizona from Japanese attack."

When he got out of the service in 1946, he used the $100 the Army gave him to found the So-Cal Speed Shop, selling Edelbrock and other brands of speed equipment to enthusiasts of the new hot-rod movement. To get the word out about his business, in the days before even Hot Rod magazine was founded, the Speed Shop went racing, first with a belly tank then with a streamliner. Xydias drove.

"The belly tank was like a pressure cooker inside, and I was perched in the nose with no protection—I was the crush zone," he once told the American Hot Rod Foundation.

With Xydias at the wheel, the So-Cal belly tank set the Class A Streamliner record at 130.155 mph. That led to one of the first covers of a new publication, the aforementioned Hot Rod magazine, founded by his friend Pete Petersen.

Next, he enlisted another friend and fellow WWII flying vet Dean Batchelor to build a streamliner. They modeled their car after the pre-WWII Auto Union Type C land speed racer, but they put it on the frame rails of a Model T. They used the engine from the belly tank. Neil Emory and Clayton Jensen of Valley Custom built the aerodynamically efficient aluminum body.

The first Bonneville Nationals took place in 1949, and the So-Cal team was there, setting a Class C Streamliner record at 189.745 mph with a top speed of 193.54 mph. The following year they set a record at 208.927 mph with Batchelor behind the wheel.

By the early 1960s, seeing what he thought was a decline in the hot-rodding industry, or at least a decline in the flathead Ford V8 So-Cal specialized in, Xydias decided to start filming races and screening the films in auditoriums around Southern California.

"We had a station wagon and a couple cameras," Xydias once recounted.

They'd set up in corners at Indianapolis, Sebring, Pikes Peak, and other racing venues and start filming. With a limited amount of film and a shoestring budget they had to make sure they were in the right place at the right time. When the race ended, they'd pack everything up and drive right back to Hollywood to process the film, edit it together into a race report, then sell tickets at auditoriums. This was the only way racing enthusiasts could see what happened at Indy or Daytona. It was long before our modern sense of racing on television. Time was of the essence.

"One guy would drive, one guy would sleep in the back, and third guy was there to keep the first guy from falling asleep at the wheel," he once told us of his trips around the country.

With the advent of live television, that phase of his working life faded away and he joined the staff at Petersen Publications in 1963 as editor of Car Craft. Later he became publisher of Hot Rod Industry News and helped found the SEMA Show.

In 1975 he went to work for Mickey Thompson to launch the SCORE Off-Road Equipment trade show, where he worked until Thompson's untimely death in 1988.

Soon after that, Beverly Hills car enthusiast Bruce Meyer introduced Xydias to hot-rod entrepreneur Pete Chapouris, who was interested in rebranding his own shop as the SO-CAL Speed Shop. The two hit it off famously, and SO-CAL was reborn (now in all-caps).

The year 2012 marked the founding of the Alex Xydias Center for Automotive Arts, located just a crankshaft's throw away from the NHRA Pomona drag strip. The center was founded with donations, including a large grant from the Petersen Foundation. It essentially replaces what had been the high school shop class, teaching youth of today about auto industry skills they might not be able to learn anywhere else.

Xydias was also a longtime friend of Autoweek, meeting with your author, the West Coast editor, regularly for lunch, first at Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake, then at a café closer to his home in Sun Valley, where he'd regale us with tales of hot rods past. Our last lunch was only weeks ago. His memory and enthusiasm remained sharp up until the end.

It's hard to imagine not hearing him call up and say, in his gravelly voice, "Hey pal, how ya doin'? Let's go have lunch. Whaddaya say?"

Self

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