A LONG, STRANGE TRIP

FOR A CENTURY. CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND CAR CULTURE.

- JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN

CALIFORNIANS DRIVE THROUGH clouds of opportunity and enthusiasm. We rushed to the state in the 1840s and '50s to find gold. We loved the beach and popularized surf culture. We built space rockets, North American P-51s, and Lockheed Electras that were brilliant flyers and way prettier than they had to be. We are home to the world's salad bowl and the birthplace of that thing called the internet. Music, movies, personal computers, smartphones, personality cults, ranch dressing, left-wing politics, right-wing politics, and houses built on stilts over eroding beaches innovative Californians are always exploiting opportunities and indulging enthusiasms.

But the word that matters here is "drive." No country, state, kingdom, or emirate has more comprehensively centered around the utility of and love for cars, trucks, SUVs, hot rods, dune buggies, ATVs, roadsters, limousines, and the occasional three-wheeler. And we are always fearlessly futzing with anything that already works.

For more than 100 years, California has been where what's next in cars is baked. The next 100 will probably be the same story. It starts with Ford's Model T and goes past Tesla's Model S.

Arriving in 1908, as the movie industry was establishing itself, the Model T put motion into motion pictures. It starred alongside silent comedians from Charlie Chaplin to the Keystone Kops and reached full hilarity being repeatedly destroyed by Laurel and Hardy in the Twenties and Thirties. Meanwhile, on the other side of Los Angeles, George Riley was building the "Multi Lift," which modified the T's valves for higher lift and better efficiency. The aftermarket speed industry was born.

The Walter M. Murphy Company opened in Pasadena in 1920 and would produce some of the greatest coachwork ever plopped atop a Duesenberg chassis. Murphy produced true California classics before closing in 1932.