How many young kids during the Sixties, and much earlier, got their first exposure to parts that made cars go fast through a crude, hand-lettered catalog that was topped by a cartoon character in a hot rod whose mouth was twisted into a weird grimace? The answer: Plenty, because the catalog was the perfect price for a kid-free. They mailed away for them by the thousands.
And that, in a nutshell, is how a very unlikely automobile and racing enthusiast named Charles Edward Card Jr. came to be a pioneer in the American high-performance industry, operating from the equally unlikely locale of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Card understood the cult of personality, and knew how to market himself as effectively as the speed parts he sold. "Honest Hisself," as he came to be known, is still considered a major force in the development of the speed industry, 30 years after his passing.
It was an astonishing journey for a guy whose life's work seemed as if it would revolve around hawking lettuce and tomatoes, not manifolds and ignitions. Born in 1905 in Chattanooga, Card was the son of a man who moved from New Jersey, of all places, to southeastern Tennessee during the carpetbagger era of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. Like many transplanted northerners in those years, the elder Card succeeded in business, in his case, wholesaling produce. Dubbed PeeWee as a child, Charley Card showed a fascination with the earliest of motor vehicles, including his father's 1911 Willys-Overland truck.
Chattanooga was a strategically located Southern city, a major hub for the Southern Railway and, bisected by the Tennessee River, a key barge port. The Card produce business boomed during World War I, and soon after the armistice, Charley had his first car, a Model T. With the T, and a later Whippet roadster, he became active in local speed contests. One of these, to the top of Lookout Mountain, attracted the attention of the record-setter, Cannonball Baker, who got Charley to tune his Franklin Airman sedan that later set a mark from downtown Chattanooga to the mountaintop. By the Thirties, Charley was a regular attendee at the Indianapolis 500, frequented local oval races in the South, and was clearly into hot cars in a big way.
He wasn't called "Honest Charley" yet. His longtime employee Mike Goodman explained that the moniker was coined sometime during World War II, when Chattanooga exploded again, the rise in his produce business matching stride with the local coal and coke industries and a boom in the shipment of war materiel. Charley and his wife Grace decided to open a restaurant on the ground floor of a local hotel.
"This was before the speed business," Goodman said. "Honest was running this restaurant out of the Reed House, and on busy days, he'd move the cash register outside on the sidewalk so there'd be more room inside for customers. So one day, he put this hand-lettered sign on the register that just said, "How honest are you?" He let the customers start paying outside by themselves and make their own change."
The clientele started referring to Charley simply as "Honest." Soon after, Honest folklore has it, another customer who knew that Charley liked cars tried to pay his own bill with a triple-carburetor manifold for a flathead Ford instead of with legal tender. Intrigued, Charley accepted it, and quickly resold it at a profit. By this time, Honest-or "Honest Hisself," as spoken by Charley in the third person, after being dubbed thusly by an acquaintance, had an idea that he could sell more than salad ingredients and make money at it.
In 1948, he opened the Honest Charley Speed Shop, and was one of the first purveyors of performance equipment to offer a mail-order catalog, headed by the unforgettable "Honest" logo, with all the artwork hand-drawn by his eldest daughter, who was already known as Honest Ann-honest. The lines he stocked included Weiand, Kong and Harmon-Collins, manufacturers already well known from the booming California hot-rod scene, but whose products were readily adaptable to the, um, unique requirements of southern Appalachia.
"After the war, there was a lot of optimism here, as on the West Coast, and the boys here were pursuing their passion for cars," Goodman explained. "The difference here, in Tennessee, North Carolina and north Georgia, was that there was a lot of bootlegging of moonshine. East Tennessee was especially well known for illegal spirits. A lot of cars back then were not only being raced, but used to haul illicit whiskey to Nashville, Memphis, Atlanta. Honest sold speed parts to bootleggers, who in turn sold them to revenuers and, in turn, to racers.
There were a lot of roadsters, and a lot of Midgets around back then, but mostly it was '37, '39, '40 Fords." One of the toughest pre-war Fords belonged to, yes, Honest Hisself. With a built '48 Mercury flathead and a '39 Tudor body radically channeled over '34 rails and then fitted with wider fenders and skirted wheels at each corner, Honest's Ford ran as strong as 137 mph in the Daytona Beach speed trials. Using what he sold paid off, and by 1953, Honest was out of food-related businesses entirely and fully immersed in selling speed.
Millions of Honest Charley catalogs, couched in whimsical "Southern English" were mailed free of charge before Honest died in 1974. His crowning achievement came in 1970, when he was the second person inducted into the Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Association's Hall of Fame. In 1998, collector-vehicle tire producer Corky Coker revived Honest Charley, which now specialized in body add-ons for a variety of cars and light trucks, with Goodman as president. Sales manager Joe Lombardo, like Goodman a former employee of the original Honest Charley's, is married to Honest Hisself's granddaughter and can succinctly summarize Honest's legacy.
"My wife called him Granddaddy Hot Rod," he said. "Particularly in the South, he gave credibility to the performance industry and, in many ways, actually created it."
This article originally appeared in the September, 2004 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.
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