Yahoo Autos Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s VW-Powered Wishbone Custom to Cross the Auction Block
The man behind the "Rat Fink" legend created this odd custom and then rejected it, but now it's up for grabs at the Tupelo Automobile Museum's liquidation auction with an estimated $80,000 to $12,000 selling price.
The Wishbone, featuring an air-cooled Volkswagen flat-four engine and fiberglass body, spent a decade in hiding before being acquired by the museum.
The Wishbone never achieved the same notoriety as the Outlaw, Beatnik Bandit, and Mysterion, among others in the Kustom Kulture scene of the '60s.
Of all the customs, hotrods, and show cars to emerge from the fertile mind and workshop of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, the Wishbone was by all accounts his least favorite. No stranger to self-promotion and value of a quirky mystique-Tom Wolfe once referred to Roth as the Salvador Dali of the hot-rod world-the Volkswagen-powered Wishbone was exiled by Roth before returning for a brief encore in the hands of traitors. At least that's the way Roth saw it.
Building surrealist cars with a subversive element was Roth's trademark, but he was also making legitimate bank selling his custom airbrushed and screen-printed T-shirts at car shows and events while even more cash rolled in though a licensing deal he had with model kit maker Revell. Roth would also famously create Rat Fink, an illustrated mascot that could be dropped into almost any Southern California subculture setting, (e.g., surfing and hot-rodding), taking his public profile to new heights. At the peak of the craze, Roth would design and build a new car every year, send it out on the then thriving show-car circuit, and license the design to Revell to re-create as a model kit. It was a foolproof operation, until it wasn't.
Roth spent a good amount of time completing the Wishbone, only to be told by Revell that the delicate front suspension and spindle wheels were too difficult and expensive to mass produce in scale for the model kit. The news coincided with a dip in interest in the entire Kustom Kulture scene, which frustrated Roth enough that he simply cut the Wishbone into pieces and tossed it in the bin, declaring he never wanted to see it again.
Dirty Doug, one of Roth's shop employees, rather liked the project, however, and he asked Roth if he could salvage it for parts. Roth begrudgingly agreed, under the condition that the car never be reassembled.
Doug was a man of his word, to a point.
He claims to have traded it to another builder, who in turn reassembled it and promptly put it on the show circuit. (Rumors and reports persist that the buyer was none other than Darryl Roth, Ed's youngest son, but this has not been confirmed to C/D.) When Roth found out, he quickly called his lawyers, and the Wishbone quietly disappeared from the public eye. Roth would divorce and remarry at least two times in the ensuing years, straining relations and communication with his children during the late 1970s and early '80s. (He died in 2001.)
In the early 1990s, the Wishbone appeared without warning at an auction, where it was purchased by the Tupelo Automobile Museum for display. Its whereabouts in the ensuing decade before the its purchase by the museum are left up to speculation, but it has remained on display without controversy since the museum acquired it. Now scheduled to be auctioned at the Tupelo Automobile Museum's liquidation auction scheduled for April 27-at no reserve-the Wishbone is ready to find its forever home.
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