Henry Gregor Felsen photo source: front porch expressions.
Who was this serious looking man and why do I consider him an icon of automotive literature? Like most artists, we remember their work instead of the artists themselves… but actually, without their work, what would we remember about any artist?
Mr. Felsen was an American Mid-Western writer during the 1950s. He wrote fiction, primarily for junior and senior high school-age students. He is best remembered by many automotive enthusiasts for a series of teenage adventure stories, starting with this book:
This is the same edition that I borrowed from my school’s classroom lending library. I managed to find a copy over 60 years later.
This book struck a nerve in me. I was in the fourth grade when I first read it. I had always had a fascination with cars but I didn’t have a direction or know the language to express it. In Bud Crayne, –the story’s lead character– I found a kindred spirit. Though not so much in his personal life story. Bud had experienced little of a normal family life, he had been orphaned and was raised by an older bachelor uncle. He was a loner, and he turned to his car as an expression of his identity and his individuality. The following passage sums this up:
“No wonder then, that Bud felt more than a pride of ownership in this fellow hybrid that was his car. Made with the work of his hands and the thought of his brains, it was his totem, his companion, his dog, his drawer of shells, his treasured childhood blanket and fuzzy bear.”
Yes, I would say that Mr. Felsen UNDERSTOOD the bond between a youth and his machine.
Years later Henry Felsen’s daughter Holly decided to have a reprinting of this iconic first book. She posted on the HAMB (Hokey Ass Message Board) trying to gauge potential interest before committing her money to the project. It turned out that she was amazed by the outpouring of response. Many older car enthusiasts shared with her the depth and the degree that her father’s stories had meant to them; how these stories touched their lives and helped them form their concept of what a car guy is. Previously Holly had no idea that her father’s writing had been so influential and memorable to those who read them.
Felsen’s most remembered novels besides Hot Rod are:
Road Rocket (Later re-titled to Boy Gets Car)
Crash Club
Street Rod
Rag Top
and Fever Heat.
There is a lot of teen angst and rebellion in these stories, and they do not always end in the happy manner we might have liked. Mr Felsen wanted his stories to have a moral. He wanted to persuade his audience to do the right thing –to behave in a socially acceptable and responsible manner. The car is often the catalyst in a teenage rite of passage.
Besides Hot Rod, I think that my favorite novel is Boy Gets Car –formerly titled Road Rocket.
This edition was part of the Bantam publishing release. The cover art portrays a much more mature character than is described in the novel.
In this story, a group of young car-loving teenage boys have formed an informal car club; the Road Rockets. They have a wonderful time holding meetings in the basement of the young protagonist, Woody Ahern. They get together to discuss exciting topics like boring and stroking a flathead Ford engine, multiple carb setups, and performance-enhancing gearing changes. They get to argue the merits of various modifications, while Woody’s mother brings down a platter of snacks, cookies, and milk. They are just having a grand old time. It’s a good thing that none of them owned an actual beat-up old car, as it was a lot more fun to talk the talk. (That’s still true for me today!)
Mr. Felsen captures the zeal, longing, and naivete of a young teenager, especially in contrast to Woody’s long-suffering father, who is a coach at the local junior high school. One evening Coach Ahern accompanies his son on a foray to the back row of the local, low-buck used car emporium.
The father gets into a discussion with Sid, the owner of the car lot. Sid pulled his hat down: “You ever buy your boy anything like an electric train when he was younger?”
Ahern nodded: “I got a buy on a good train set. Forty dollars for the works.”
“All right. If you spent forty dollars on him when he was seven, it won’t kill you to spend another forty on him now, particularly if it’s his own forty. Look at it this way Mr Ahern. Your boy doesn’t want a car, he wants a big toy. If he wanted a car he wouldn’t be looking in that back row. Believe me, sir, there isn’t anything that will keep a car crazy boy off the streets better than an old car in his garage. Instead of rattling around all night with some older kid who has a car, he’ll be at home, working on his own little pride and joy. I don’t think that it makes any difference to kids like yours, if their cars ever run or not. What they want is a real car to work on, with real gears, and real transmissions, and real engines(…) Maybe he’ll learn more from an old car that won’t run than you can ever guess. One thing, he’ll find out whether he likes to work on cars, or just thinks that he likes to work on cars. Think of it like an electric train or an erector set, or some big toy like that. Let him have it.”
Well, that is real life for you. We all had ideas and dreams of the future when we were younger, not always based upon a realistic assessment of our situation. Still, life should be about learning, and our best lessons are usually taught to ourselves.
I like this cover much better. It portrays a bewildered young man peering under the weirdest looking hot rod I’ve ever seen.
All this fun is shattered when Woody actually goes out and buys an old beater. The boys had previously decided that all member’s cars would be treated as “club cars” and they would all work on each other’s cars as they acquired them. Standing in front of a rusty beat-up, smelly old heap, they realized that it just wasn’t as much fun as they thought it would be. Of course, they were happy to ride around in a car while it was still running. In a short time, Woody’s friends abandon him. He is left alone with the reality of a tired old car that needs a lot of time, money, and labor. Maybe more than he can invest in it.
Woody is plagued by self-doubt, but like car enthusiasts everywhere he gets down to business.
I like this story because it captures the innocence of young love; well young car love at least. Meanwhile, Woody’s father isn’t the least bit interested in cars; they are transportation, that’s all. There are more important things in life, like getting an education and later a career. So Woody, as a middle-class kid, is not exposed to the reality of his father just wrenching on some old beater so that he can just make it to work.
In Woody’s idealism, he sees himself working on cars not only as a hobby but as a career. As a mechanic, racing pit crew member, or maybe someday as a racing car designer. Woody’s father sees all this as a dangerous distraction, and even worse as a dead end. Especially for the son of a teacher/coach. Respectability is not found as a grease monkey under some old car! What middle-class parent wouldn’t worry that his offspring was so intent on dropping down the social and economic scale? Could Woody become a JD (juvenile delinquent)?
Unfortunately, this was the reality that middle-class parents associated with hot rodding in the early 1950’s. So many families had escaped poverty after the Second World War, and some of those returning GIs took advantage of the GI Bill to attend college or trade school and climbed into middle-class respectability and opportunity. Losing that was something that these parents took seriously and feared, they knew the harsh realities of life.
Photo source: William Gedney, photos of the Cornett family in rural Kentucky 1964-1972
Digging through the spare parts pile. I guess ‘Paw just set his gun aside while he was working.
What Woody wouldn’t, and couldn’t realize at this age was that cars could be an interesting hobby and pastime. There was no need to make them a career. Of course, there are many types of careers in the automotive world. White collar as well as blue collar.
Mr. Felsen wrote cautionary tales of just how dangerous cars could be. Not only about reckless driving as described so graphically in “Hot Rod” but also how they could become a distraction to an aspiring middle-class kid’s social and economic development. But his stories also captured the hopes and dreams of thousands of young car enthusiasts of my generation.
And let’s end with a more cheerful middle-class image.
Photo source; Life magazine.
Related CC reading:
Man, I would scour the Jr. High library for anything by Henry Gregor Felsen.
Was “Hot Rod” the one with the pink Merc death car? That image has been seared in my mind for about 50 years.
The pink car is in Street Rod. These stories really stuck with us young gearheads.
Ah, thanks! I knew you’d know 😉
I remember reading his books. They made me feel quite grown up after reading “The Hardy Boys” books.
I loved these stories growing up. I even bought a copy of Street Rod off eBay a few years ago. Still enjoyed it.
Discovered Felsen in junior high school, along with a few other car enthusiast friends at the time. Pretty sure we read all of them, except for ‘Fever Heat’, which I don’t recall. Great books, we particularly enjoyed the usually gruesome dispatch of the morally backrupt antagonist in every story, Heady stuff for a 13 year old!
I remember reading Hot Rod in my high-school library-at least twice. I’m thinking I may try to find it in my local library and read it again. Felsen did a good job of instilling a respect for responsible driving combined with a love of powerful cars.
I enjoyed reading this account of something I had almost forgotten. Books lived a longer life in a school library and these were still around when I was growing up, where the 1950s already felt so distant in a way that 2004 doesn’t to me now.
Always the crash at the end to reinforce the message of the book as well.
These books were off my radar when I was the appropriate age, but I’m happy to be introduced to them and can definitely see the attraction. Thank you Jose!
Can I also say just how much more attractive I find the cover art on the last image of “Boy Gets Car” versus the stuff on the Bantam editions? If I’d seen that last image (and again, these either weren’t in my jr./sr. high school library, or I just never got over to the fiction section…that’s much more likely), I’d have been totally absorbed trying to figure out what kind of car that was, what the kid was doing with that front wheel (brakes? bearing?), and identifying other aspects of the $40 car. All of that racing stuff with the girls clearly in their 20s? Meh. (particularly back then, for me)
I’ve always been so very much more attracted to nonfiction than fiction. That said, I’ve also always been attracted to fiction that has a large dose of (non-fiction) how to. When I was in upper elem school and early jr. high, my favorite book was My Side of the Mountain…fiction, yes, but I spent several years scheming on how to escape into the wilderness and live in a hollow tree, cooking acorns, and being best friends with a raccoon. So, I can absolutely see the attraction of fiction that focuses on DIY hot rodding.
I remember reading Hot Rod as a kid, but discovering that the last few pages had fallen out. Even at that age, I’m pretty sure I could see how it was going to end. I think my local library had more by W E Butterworth, because I recall those better.
Fans of Felson would probably also like the Black Tiger series of YA novels by Leonard Wibberley writing as Patrick O’Connor. All six are available from Amazon as E-books. My local library only had three of them but I read them several times each.
I loved the Black Tiger books. A few years ago my sister gave me a full boxed set.
I’m another guy that fondly remembers the Felson books. It was Junior high school for me in the early ’60’s. They were in constant circulation from the school library. I thought I had covered them all but also do not recall Fever Heat. Crash club made an impact.
If I’m not confusing a subject from someone else’s work, in one of the books there was a character with a souped up “Jimmy”. Only later did I guess that that referred to a larger displacement GMC I-6.
Are my eyes deceiving me, or is the Cornett family dropping a W-block Chevy into a 1963 Oldsmobile?
It’s a 409 being removed or installed in a ’65 Chevy. More pictures of that and many others in a post linked at the bottom of this post.
What about William Campbell Gault? He worked the same vein of high school car books. I always suspected he and Felsen were the same person.
Oh yes, I remember these books! I plowed through every one I could find at my school library.
Thank you for this overview, Jose. I somehow missed Henry Felsen’s fiction books when growing up but did read his nonfiction book, “To my Son, the Teen-Age Driver” back in the late 60s when I was learning to drive.
One dictum that has always stayed with me was his sage advice on navigating a tricky intersection: The question is not “can you make it?” but rather “can you afford NOT to make it?”
This book was published in 1965, well before the introduction of fuel injection and computerized engine controls. With carburetors, there was always a risk of hesitation or even stalling when entering or crossing fast-moving traffic from a stop.
On my daily commute to the office, I had to make a left turn across a 60-mph divided highway without a traffic light, and this maxim would pop up into my mind.
I read Boy Gets Car in 6th grade and Street Rod in 7th or 8th grade. When I was approaching driving age, my parents gave me To My Son the Teenage Driver.
About three years ago I had some correspondence with Felsen’s daughter Holly Felsen Welch. She sent me a very nice response to my initial email:
“I always love hearing from Dad’s readers! You have quite a history with the books!
“I’ve often heard from others that they learned lessons from Dad’s books, and never felt like he was preaching at them. Those stories have stayed with us.
“You have certainly owned a variety of cars! Glad you had a real interest in them, and that he might have given you a little of that.
“I’m your age … so have had a chance to look back and see how much Dad has influenced so many people over the years!!”
In Boy Gets Car I got that Woody’s father didn’t want him to invest time and energy in the car to the point of neglecting school, but I missed the larger point about his father not wanting him to be socially downward mobile. But hey, I was 11 and took my family’s comfortable circumstances (Dad was a Ph.D. research chemist) for granted.
To My Son the Teenage Driver also makes the point that you shouldn’t necessarily become a mechanic because you’re car-crazy in your teens. Of course, Felsen had no way of knowing that 60 years later, mechanics would have to deal with cars stuffed to the gills with electronics.
Around the time I read Street Rod, Mr. Zarbatany, my English teacher, assigned us a book report, but with a difference. We were to start the report with the climax and then give the backstory. I wrote my report on Street Rod accordingly, beginning with Ricky Madison’s fatal race with Link Aller.
In hindsight Street Rod has some fairly deep stuff. I’m thinking of the passage early in the book where Sandra insists that Ricky back off from racing another car (or else he’s to let her out), he says, “Now he’ll brag that his [stock] car took a rod,” and Sandra says, so what? Good microcosm of the macho teenage male mentality.
At the end of the book where Ricky is thinking that he’ll put Link Aller in his place just once, and he’ll never have to do it again, it wasn’t lost on me that when Ricky played his own game, he won first prize at the car show and won the girl. And when he played Link’s game briefly, he lost everything. Years later I’d learn to call it Greek tragedy.
Article about Felsen in the Des Moines Register:
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2014/09/19/henry-gregor-felsen-boy-write/15872475/
Thank you Staxman for the link to the article in the Des Moines Register. I think that these books made a strong impression on young readers, who were, or were going to be, car guys at an early age. It was because they gave voice to feelings that were seldom acknowledged by the adult world. While adults could understand the motivations of a young, intensely scholarly student who dreamed of achievement in academics in college, or the young star athlete that dreamed of having a professional career in sports, many couldn’t understand why some kids were so “into” cars.
In Boy gets Car, Woody’s parents are very concerned about their Son’s interest in cars as being a distraction and a dead end. I found this an interesting aspect of the story. I meant no disrespect to the Cornett family who worked hard to survive under trying economic and social conditions. I come from blue collar roots and I am familiar with the need to have to work on an old car to get to work on Monday. I am part of the “dirty hand brigade” that works on their own cars and as well repairs around the house. Over time, my family and myself moved into the middle class, but I retain much of my DIY mentality.
I wanted to share how important these Felsen books were to me at the time, I know that many of you feel the same.
This is the first of a series of opinion pieces that I will be sharing with you. I hope that you will find these entertaining and that they will spark a bit of dialog. These are just my opinions and observations, but of course, this is an opinion based website.
A couple more relevant links:
https://iowahistoryjournal.com/publishers-perspective-volume-7-issue-5-car-show-pays-tribute-hot-rod-author-felsen/
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/felsen-interview/
Wow ;
Thank you for this informative article and the various links .
I can’t say I’ve even read any of these books but I’ll certainly look for the anthology his daughter had printed .
I remember the various young man and his car books I began reading in the late 1950’s, they certainly helped me decide to become a Journeyman Mechanic and a staunchly Conservative Blue Collar person much to the dismay of my parents .
-Nate
I’m not familiar with Mr. Felson’s works, I’ll have to check them out! My memory recalls two (2) car-centric literary works as a child, the first being “The Jeep”, about a long teenage boy’s quest to acquire a Jeep as his first car while on the verge of getting his license. The other was a series of books about the adventures of a Formula 1 driver, whose name escapes me, as he ran at the Bonneville Salt Flats in search of a land speed record with a four-engined car, or his triumphs in Formula 1, with his trusty head mechanic, the Scotsman “Worm” MacRae at his side through it all! If anyone remembers the name of the main character in those books, or some of the titles, I would be very grateful!
P.S. The book about the land speed record got me an “A” on my fourth-grade book report about that particular tome, so while my memory has holes in it, it was a great read for this former fourth grader, LOL!