FIRST LOVE CARS ARE LIKE LIVING, BREATHING THINGS TO VAN NUYS NATIVE WHO GIVES HIS RIDES PET NAMES LIKE LOVERS.Byline: Brent Hopkins Staff Writer Betsy and Linda Lou were Dennis Adler's first loves, before the White Knight White Knight falls off his horse every time it stops. [Br. Lit.: Lewis Carroll Through the Looking-Glass] See : Awkwardness White Knight invents clever objects that never work. [Br. Lit. , the smokin' silver Camaro and the Horse With No Name rode into his life and changed it forever. A car isn't just a way of getting around for the 60-year-old minister and retired film technician - it's a living
"A bunch of my friends and I cut school to go to Malibu," he recalled, thinking back to the days of Van Nuys High, class of '64. "The temperature gauge A temperature gauge is a device used to indicate the temperature of an item being monitored. The display can be an analogue dial, an Analogue range or a digital readout. The word gauge would seem to exclude a thermometer, which uses the thermal expansion of a liquid, but in the went up, so I pulled over and figured we'd just let it cool off. Not a drop of oil in it - froze that engine up totally. We hitchhiked back and the engine wasn't the worst thing. Telling my dad was." He was just 15 when he got that '49 Ford that his dad, Ed, bought for $75 and helped him fix up. Metallic brown, lowered, with a three-speed column shift and "Linda Lou" painted on the back, named for a big song back in the '50s, the car provided hours of entertainment for the gang in the backyard. They couldn't even drive it yet, but they were always learning how to make it roar. They'd walk up to Pep Boys on Van Nuys Boulevard, buy brodie knobs A brodie knob (alternate spelling brody knob) is a knob that attaches to the steering wheel of an automobile. The knob swivels, and is intended to make steering with one hand less difficult. decorated with little flowers or bikini-clad girls to help spin their steering wheels and pin-stripe kits to pretty up paint jobs. Once they could drive, they'd make the cruise circuit from the old Bob's Big Boy on the boulevard up to Oscar's Hamburgers on Van Nuys and Saticoy Street. It was all cool and easy back then. Maybe you'd square off against a pal to peel out at a light, but no one got into much trouble. When guys really wanted to blow off some steam and smoke their tires, they'd go to the San Fernando San Fernando, city, Argentina San Fernando (săn fərnăn`dō), city (1991 pop. 144,761), Buenos Aires prov., E Argentina. It is a district administrative center in the Greater Buenos Aires area. Drag Strip drag strip n. A short, straight course or track for drag racing. in Sylmar, where no one got caught in the crossfire A multi-GPU interface from ATI for connecting two ATI display adapters together for faster graphics rendering on one monitor. CrossFire machines require PCI Express slots, a CrossFire-enabled motherboard and, depending on which models are used, either a pair of ATI Radeon adapters or one when they turned their engines loose. Adler hung around with The Essentials car club, watched The Top Hats and The Exchangers roll alongside. After Linda Lou's sad end by the side of the road on the way to Malibu, he picked up Betsy, a '55 Ford Station Wagon. His buddies threw surfboards in the back and they shot through the canyons to Zuma Beach. He was a lousy surfer, but he had a blast anyhow. Later on in '62, he got a beautiful lowered white '58 Chevy Impala impala, species of antelope, Aepyceros melampus, closely related to the gazelle and found in the savannah and bush country of E and S Africa. It is the antelope most commonly depicted in illustrations and in motion pictures. , bone stock with a black and green interior. People called it the White Knight. Adler raced it every chance he could, letting loose its 348-cubic-inch engine to scream down the boulevards. That was nothing, though, compared to his brand new Camaro, purchased in 1968. That baby was so fast, with its 396 engine hooked to a three-speed hydromatic transmission, he called it the trouble car. So much trouble, with the big black stripe on the hood, it didn't even need a special name. Today, he's jumped back to Fords, spending his time fixing up his wife's 1970 Mustang mustang [Sp. mesteño=a stray], small feral horse of the W United States. Mustangs are descended from escaped Native American horses, which in turn were descended from horses of North African blood, brought to the New World by the Spanish c.1500. Fastback fast·back n. An automobile designed with a curving downward slope from roof to rear. Grabber. He bought it for $6,500 a few years back and sank $30,000 into it, painting it pumpkin orange with luxurious purple flames across the front. The Horse With No Name, as he calls it, has brought home 50 awards and trophies. The car's a little different, he rolls with the Valley Mustang Club these days, but in a lot of ways, Adler's still the same guy, hanging out with his buddies in the parking lot. "We stood around and talked about cars," he said. "We even got to school 45 minutes early - can you imagine a kid today getting to school early for anything - every morning, just so we could kick tires and talk about what we were doing." CAPTION(S): photo Photo: (color) Dennis Adler poses with "The Horse With No Name," a 1970 Fastback Mustang. David Sprague/Staff Photographer |
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