Gangway!

The word was relayed through the drive-ins, malt shops and garages speckling the Los Angeles suburbs. "Tonight, Sepulveda and Hawthorne." By 10 p.m., 100 hopped-up jalopies and denuded, low-slung hot rods had gathered at a mile-and-a-half stretch of straight highway between suburban Torrance and Redondo Beach.

Lookouts were posted along both sides of the straightaway, flashlights ready to blink at the first sign of police. The first few cars took off with a roar, sped down the highway at 60, 70, 100 miles an hour. They ripped along two abreast, made oncoming motorists scurry to the side of the road. The boulevard's residents took one resigned look and telephoned the police.

Six squad cars sirened into the boulevard. The speedsters roared away in all directions, careering through side streets and bumping across empty fields with gnashing gears and wide-open throttles. As usual, police caught only a handful.

"Crocks" & "Goats." Cops of the Los Angeles area were accustomed to such antics. By last week more than 4,000

Southern Californians in their teens and twenties had taken to jalopies and hot rods. The thing to do was to buy an old car, preferably a '32 or '33 Ford and strip it down to the essentials. With a flair for mechanics and enough money ($1,000 to $2,000), a kid could go on from there, transform his jalopy into a well-engineered hot rod, complete with extra carburetors, lightened flywheel, supercharger and five to ten coats of glistening lacquer.

Hot rodders look with disdain on the lowly jalopies, call them "peanut wagons," "crocks" or "goats." A hot rod is different. "The only way I can define one," said one Los Angeles youngster, "is that it's something with four wheels that's got something inside." The hot rod rolls out of a backyard garage a bumperless, fenderless, hoodless, roofless, uncomfortable concoction which runs so fast its driver must chug and jerk through town in low or second gear to stay under the speed limit.

"Dragons" & "Gents." Last week's rip through Sepulveda Boulevard (where 30 hot rodders condescended to mingle with jalopy racers) was just an impromptu "drag race," a hell-raising skirmish good for scaring the citizenry and testing the latest motor and fuel adjustments. The real hot rodders meet on weekends at the hard-packed sandy stretches in the dry lake beds of El Mirage, 106 miles northeast of Los Angeles. There, under careful racing conditions, hot-rod clubs known as the "Dragons," the "Cranks" or the "Gents" skim over the sand at speeds of 100 to 180 m.p.h.

Los Angeles, which has managed to survive a cemetery with a floodlighted duck pond, Mickey Cohen and the tribal rites of Hollywood, seemed to be taking the hot rods in stride. The smartest thing to do was keep off the streets after dark.

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