Jim Loved Cars

The tagline on the Jim Marshall Photography LLC website and blog is Cars, Guns and Cameras … and there is a reason Jim always listed cars first.  In my opinion these fast, sleek beauties were the true love of Jim’s life.  Even though he was cutting out pictures of cameras and pasting them into scrapbooks at the age of 6 or 7, I think cars – the mechanical qualities, and especially the power and simple, elegant, loud-assed danger of hot rods – blew right past cameras as an object of his obsessive affection. And, as this blog follows immediately on the heels of the 100^th running of the Indianapolis 500 and with the 79th Le Mans 24 Hour Race slated for June 11-12, we thought this month was the right time to focus on this lesser known side of Jim’s love life. Jim’s fascination with hot rods was captured in a feature with Jim’s photos by Michael Dobrin for Rodder Journal #21, a quarterly for hot rod enthusiasts, which focused on his early days as a driver/photographer of the scene.  I find it interesting the piece didn’t talk more about Jim’s driving but rather focused on his documenting of the scene.  Maybe that was Jim’s preference.  He could be weirdly deferential, almost shy or self-deprecating, about his rather prodigious talents as a driver.  Maybe it was because his fame and infamy with cameras and guns had far eclipsed these original skills. I guess we’ll never know.

All I know is that one of the few things he ever gave me and then had the audacity to take back was, yes, another coat.  This one an extremely cool red boiled-wool jacket with leather sleeves (a riff on the classic letterman’s jacket from the ’50s); only this coat was not from college but a prize he earned by being the best driver or having the fastest lap or some such at a meet at the long-gone Fremont Raceway, which was located on the west side of Hwy. 880, approximately where Fremont’s Auto Mall Park is now.  The coat has “Jimmy” embroidered on it on the left side over his heart.  Imagine, there was a time when he was just “Jimmy,”  a self-described punk from the Western Addition.

Here’s an excerpt from the Rodder Journal feature:

“What’s not generally known about Marshall, however, is that his passion for cars was, by the mid-’50s, manifest in a series of street rods and hopped-up sports cars. And that his motoring mania led him to document with that little Leica the vibrant seminal drag racing scene on Northern California strips like Half Moon Bay, Vacaville, and Fremont. He was on the scene, too, at local road race venues like Laguna Seca to freeze on film the human drama of noble sports racers like Phil Hill, Richie Ginther, Carroll Shelby, Dan Gurney, Chuck Daigh and Stirling Moss.

“Marshall might’ve honed his crisp verite documentary style on Northern California drag strips and road racing circuits, although he admits to “messing up” a lot of film in those early days. “His first real hot rod ride was a yellow ’40 Ford coupe.  (It) had an 1⁄8 x 1⁄8 over flathead in it. Bought the car for $300 and took out the Ford three-speed and put in a LaSalle box. It had Weiand heads and manifold, an Isky cam and Belond headers.  ‘I used to go racing with Ted Muckey who had a hot ’32 five window B Fuel coupe. We’d go out on the Great Highway (which was then a wide, unobstructed four-lane northand-south roadway along Ocean Beach on The City’s western edge — ed.) and race with the Hi Domes, the Ramblers, and Pacers.

“ ‘Then I had this beat-up old ’32 Buick Series 90 limo. Man, I’d blow that thing out, about a mile to a quart of oil. Thought it was so fast until I found out that the speedo was reading in kilometers, not miles per hour.  We used to hang out at Gotelli’s and the old Champion Speed Shop in South City.  I met George Bignotti, who built midgets and then beautiful Indy cars. We bought some of our speed equipment over at Vic Hubbard’s in Hayward.  I also worked at Carroll McKim’s Mobil Station in high school.  It was on the corner of Fell and Baker, and we built MG racing engines. I did a 15-minute sports car show called ‘Concourse’ over at KROW in Oakland with Pat Henry, the great jazz guy.”

“As he thumbs through a stack of contact sheets from those early years, he gets even more excited. “Here’s the Top Banana from Vic Hubbard’s.  Hank Vincent was the driver. Faster than the Glass Slipper. Man, that was a neat machine. Fremont.  Here’s the Green Monster at Half Moon Bay.  Here’s the Gotelli roadster!  Here’s Jack Flaherty in his MG roadster — he was the best racer around here.” Jim later told another auto publication: “Whether it’s racing or rock ’n’ roll, it ain’t about the equipment, but it’s about the people that really captures the moment.”  And now you know where he first caught that momentous spark.