The Jim Jacobs Story

Touring Thacker
Expat Brit Tony Thacker, the executive director of the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum, also knows Jacobs' lust for hitting the road. "When I moved to America in 1988, I stayed at Jake's house in Temple City for approximately a year," Thacker said. "It was like living with a movie star. Everybody knew him. Every weekend we would jump in the tub and go somewhere. We'd get up Saturday morning and go to Pie 'n' Burger for breakfast and figure out where we wanted to go. Whether we went up the coast, or to the desert to meet Jocko Johnson, it was a cool introduction to the inner circle of hot rodding."

P-Wood Heads East
"Jake was a fun guy to travel with on cross-country trips heading to the NSRA Nationals," began Pete Eastwood. "Jake was always the lead car. We'd get up at 5 a.m. and have our cars rolling by 6. By the time we stopped at 7:30 a.m. for breakfast, we'd have 100 miles behind us. We covered about 400 or 500 miles a day.

"Jake had a great nose for travel adventure," Eastwood continued. "We'd be going through the Midwest and he'd pick old two-lane highways. We'd pull into some burg about lunchtime. Jake would peel down some little side street and park his car. We'd all follow and he'd jog over in front of some little diner. He'd always pick the ones that had pickup trucks parked in front. We had the best lunches. We'd get back on the two-lane and stop at all kinds of goofy novelty museums. We'd be at the motel by 4 p.m., in the pool by 4:30 p.m., and having a steak dinner at 6 p.m.

"At about 7 p.m., all the street rodders we spent the night before with would be straggling in. They'd been grinding down the interstate all day. You know, a 10-car gas stop turns into an hour, then they have to pee," laughed Eastwood. "Our gas stops would last about eight minutes because we had fun stuff to do. Joe Mayall (NSRA editorial director) would call us the wild bunch."

Good Guys
"I met Jake and a bunch of his friends at an Early Times picnic held at the Compton Rod and Gun Club," began former R&C editor Bud Bryan. "There were so many great guys in the group that I started to hang out with them. That's where I first met Pete Eastwood, Jerry Olds, and Jim 'Brass Radiator' Babbs. They accepted me in the group; I was at Rod & Custom at the time. The thing I liked about the group was that it didn't seem to matter who I was, or where I was coming from. I felt comfortable around them. Bellflower used to have such big backyards. We used to have hot rod backyard parties and park our cars under the avocado trees, mostly Early Times guys. Jake was always there. We'd talk about the cars, look at them, and take pictures of the cars. It was a culture, a bunch of good guys."

A Little Off The Top
Chopping a top was almost a lost art when Jacobs chopped his three-window. "I called a shop to get a price on chopping the top," he explained. "When they gave me a price, I thought, 'I don't have that kind of money, I'll just do it myself. I can learn to do this.' There wasn't much to go on. I just used my own common sense."

"I recognized in Jake a real talent and creativity where he was cutting and welding metal," Bryan said. "There was a real drive there! I went over to Jake's house and he told me the top was coming off tonight. He had cut the top with a hacksaw. I held the tape and he was measuring it for the first time. It was dead-nuts on. You know when you cut anything with a hacksaw how the cut wavers? Not his. We sat the top on and it was perfect."

Work at R&C?
"I asked Jake if he ever thought about writing about this stuff," Bryan continued. "We were looking for someone who knew what they were looking at." The timing couldn't have been better for Bryan to pose the question. What frosted Jacobs was the number of times, while reading a street rod feature, he saw information he knew was inaccurate. Jacobs entered the world of automotive journalism as an associate editor with R&C in 1970, and his knowledge overshadowed any shortcomings he may have had with the written word as far as Bryan and publisher Tom Medley were concerned.

"He wrote good captions," Bryan said. "We had tech sheets with all the information on a specific car. Jake knew how to put that entire wording together without it being chunky."

"Bud would have me in his office on every car feature he wrote and he'd hand me a photo," Jacobs said. "He'd ask me, 'What do you see?' [I'd say,] 'That's a Deuce axle, those are '40 spindles, and those are '48 brakes.' I could recognize that stuff. And Bud would go, 'OK.' The tech sheet the car owner filled out might be totally different, but Bud trusted my accuracy."

Still Going
Jacobs was inducted into Darryl Starbird's National Rod & Custom Hall of Fame Museum in 2002. His name was added to the list of other inductees like George Barris, Bill Hines, Dean Jeffries, and his late great boss, Ed Roth. Jacobs could've flown to Tulsa and rented a car to receive the honor-but not Jake. He drove solo in his '29 panel from his home in Apple Valley, California, to Afton, Oklahoma, for the occasion.

Jacobs is an anomaly for a guy so well known. He's on the A-list of many high-profile industry functions, yet he'd much rather scrounge through an obscure swap meet, hang out at El Mirage, or have dinner on Fridays with a bunch of regular Joes.

Like his parents, Jacobs lives frugally, but he invested shrewdly in real estate. Nevertheless, he still builds cars for himself and for friends.

Jim Jacobs is an unpretentious, roll-up-window kind of guy who's as innovative as Stroker, and artistic as Tom Medley. Why, Jim Jacobs is Stroker. The light bulb still goes on upstairs and the Heliarc is close by. The passion has returned. What's Jake got up his sleeve this time? I'll never tell.

The Doors
The frame belonged to a '34 five-window coupe that Dan Woods (wearing the hat) and Jake were tearing apart. Sheldon Bardin (holding the wheel) and Johnny Sitz (with the cutting torch) added their expertise. Jacobs, looking like he was about to perform a juggling act, had some real juggling to do shortly after this photo was taken in '74. The doors against the wall came up missing.

"I had to find replacement doors in a hurry," laughed Jacobs. "Somewhere I found another really nice donor '34 body and got the doors off of it."

End of the story, you say? Remember, this is Jitney Jake, so try to keep up. "I was building my yellow coupe at the time and the front half of my roof had damage, so the body that I got for the doors became a donor for the front half of my roof. Besides, in the chopping process, my roof had to grow in its length, so I took the front half of the roof off of the donor car, cut it a little bit longer, and put it on my car," Jacobs explained. "Now I had this really nice body with no doors and the front half of the roof was gone after I was done with it. Some guy from Pasadena called me up and said, 'I've got a '34 five-window coupe body here, and you can have it if you come and get it.' I went and got it ... and it was chopped! It had been a racer with a real nice chop job and great doors, but the whole bottom half was junk. I sold off the two bodies, which were used to make one chopped five-window.

"The chopped top off of the race car body was put on the good body with the doors, which ended up belonging to Skip (Lokar Performance Products) Walls."

All because the doors came up missing.

"When I was looking for a likely candidate for the Stroker McGurk Award at the '87 Goodguys event in Pleasanton," said Tom Medley, "I was distracted by a commotion. I was out looking around at the cars when I saw a big crowd on the grass. 'What the hell's going on here,' I thought. Here was Jake, Pete Eastwood, and a bunch of guys, and they're painting Jake's rusty old tub with brushes. Those guys were having a ball. When I was ready to present the award to Jake, four or five beautiful cars had passed through to loud applause when here comes Jake driving the tub in front of the grandstands. He had his cowboy hat on; all of a sudden the place got silent-they were in shock! I began, 'You missed the whole point folks. Here's a guy that built a car in a couple of weeks. He came up here by himself, had a flat tire on the Ridge, and walked until he found a tire at a construction site. Not only that, he's going to drive this thing to Bonneville. You don't have to have a lot of money and spend a zillion dollars to have fun.' After that, the crowd gave Jake a round of applause."

"Jake and I were walking through Pasadena and saw a guy with a guitar case with labels plastered all over it," recalled Tony Thacker. "Jake said he always wanted to do that with the tub. [Gray Baskerville called it "Jakeoupage"] I said, 'Let's go do it.' We went home and started cutting up old Hot Rod magazines and put them on the tub. At lot of people were upset by that, but it just makes the issues that are left more valuable!"