Where It All Began
You hardly ever get an opportunity to see the origins of a hot rod trend or whole category of hot rod, but in this image from April 1957 you can see the two cars that started the T-bucket craze. In the foreground is Norm Grabowski in the first T-bucket, which had evolved from its original genesis to this later version used for the TV series Sunset Strip. In the far lane is the Tommy Ivo T-bucket—Ivo’s take on Grabowski’s T. This would become the archetype for most T-buckets to come, and there were many a comin’. Around this time, Grabowski built a T-touring that would be used in movies, becoming a star unto itself in the mid-1960s TV show My Mother the Car, while Ivo plucked the nailhead Buick from his T to launch a career in drag racing. Ivo had been a movie and TV star, walking away from the stardom to follow his love of drag racing, while Grabowski was launching an acting career getting bit roles that lead to a string of acting jobs in the movies. So while their pursuits were going in opposite directions, their ideas for stripped-down fun buggies helped catapult the culture of hot rodding—and a thousand fad Ts.
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