Real Hogbear

Nobody knows how many hot-rod racing fans there are in the U.S., but Robert ("Pete") Petersen of Los Angeles knows their lingo. At 25, he has already made a small fortune publishing Hot Rod and other "hogbear" (real thing) magazines for them (TIME, Feb. 19, 1951). Early last fall Publisher Petersen and his top staff cartoonist, Tom Medley, 31, got an idea: since rodders seem to like their music as hot as their hopped-up engines, why not give them some with real "lowdown, George-gone-all-the-way" hot-rod lyrics?

Cartoonist Medley went to work on the lyrics. Joe ("Leadfoot") Darensbourg, a clarinetist with Kid Ory and His "Flat Out" Five, turned out a gutbucket background. Sample lyric:

I was settin' in a drive-in having a Coke, When in drove a roadster with a half-inch stroke; The body was channeled, the top was

chopped, The headers were chrome, and the axle

was dropped,

And the cry went up, 'If it goes, then--Drag it out, drag it out, drag it out'

Last November Petersen and Medley let fellow hot-rodders have a preview of Saturday Night Drag Race over the loudspeakers at the Paradise Mesa Drag Strip in San Diego, and the rodders "got all shook up." Consensus: "Man, that really comes on like a bomb," "Greatest invention since the wheel," "Real catbird," etc. Last week, as a result, record counters across the nation began filling up with material for a new musical mania.

Petersen & Co. now have four numbers, including one about a motorized cowboy ("Instead of prodding with his spurs, he mashes on the gas"). But Lyricist Medley is still especially fond of Saturday Night Drag because it has a moral: "This hot-rodder gets caught, catch it? So maybe kids listenin' to the record don't go out and race except at a track. Catch it?"

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