"A few years later I started getting heavily into car magazines. On Saturdays i used to go grocery shopping with my mother, and the highlight of the trip would be hanging out at the newsstand checking out all of the car magazines. I got hooked on car magazines not long after I learned to read. Building model cars came next.

"The Dallas neighborhood we lived in bordered and industrial park, and within bicycling distance of a 10-year-old were a Dairy Queen and a couple of other drive-ins where you'd see lots of cool cars cruising. At night, especially on the weekends, there was plenty of street racing on the deserted roads of the industrial park.

"When you would get a glance at a custom-usually just something that was nosed, decked and lowered-it was a pretty exciting thing. These memories, along with the magazines, are what I'm trying to recapture today. Isn't that what we are all trying to do?

"I am definitely an era guy. I really dig the early '60s. That's the period my customizing efforts are centered on. I try to do stuff from that time period, but I like to create my own cars rather than duplicate actual customs from back then.

"When we were getting ready to take the Impala to Oakland this year, we were trying to figure out how to describe my involvement with the car. We ended up saying that I designed it, since I contributed lots of the ideas and a few of the parts, but I'm not the owner or the builder. So I became the designer for the purpose of signage and stuff. But I don't think that's a good way to put it either. GM designed this car; what we did was restyle it. Restyle it. Restyle is a much better word. LIt sounds like a custom work, don't you think? We restyle these cars to suit our own tastes with a specific era in mind.

"When I look at cars from the late '50s and early '60s-especially Chevys and Cadillacs-I see lots of curves in the sheet metal that, frankly, remind me of the shape of women. I think the designers at GM did this on purpose as a way to try to get a young man's heart and then his wallet. the cars have contours and folds in the sheetmetal that are, in my eyes, automotive cleavage, and the rear fenders on my '51 Chevy are shaped very much like the hips of a woman. These cars have a very sensual-and I think that is the right word, as opposed to sexual-shape. I feel this way about a lot of good customs. Larry Watson's Chevy and Cadillac are good examples. Of course, when you start talking about the Cadillacs, you get into that whole Dagmar bumper thing.