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Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, whose
fantastic car creations and anti-hero Rat Fink character
helped define the California hotrod culture of the 1950s and
'60s, has died. He was 69.
Roth died Wednesday at his studio in Manti, Utah, said
Joe Bennett, a dispatcher with the Sanpete County
Sheriff's Department. The cause of death wasn't
immediately given.
A generation of teen-age rebels across the country found a
hero in Roth, whose chrome and fiberglass creations
stirred awe at car shows. Many adopted his airbrushed
anti-hero, the bug-eyed, menacing Rat Fink, who became
a cultural counterpoint to Mickey Mouse.
While Roth worked on custom cars in his garage-studio
near Los Angeles, youngsters across the country broke
out the airplane glue to work on intricate scale plastic
models of his "Outlaw" roadster, bubble-topped "Beatnik
Bandit," or futuristic "Mysterion."
As a designer, Roth was considered a genius and
visionary, not only for his radical designs, but also for his
pioneering use of fiberglass in car bodies.
He was described by author Tom Wolfe in his 1964 essay
"The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" as
the "most colorful, the most intellectual and the most
capricious" of the car customizers.
"He's the Salvador Dali of the movement -- a surrealist in
his designs, a showman by temperament, a prankster,"
Wolfe wrote.
Roth created Rat Fink and a host of wild characters to help
finance his car design work.
In 1974, he converted to the Mormon church and
abandoned his rebel lifestyle, however he continued to
work on car designs.
"My fanaticism with cars has just destroyed my personal
life," he told The Associated Press in a 1997 interview. "It's
an obsession, an addiction. Every day I pray to God,
`Release me from my calling!"'
David Chodosh, a friend and business associate, said Roth
was still working at the time of his death and was hoping to
tour a new car in 2002.
"The guy over the years has epitomized cool," Chodosh
said. "Even now, in so many ways, he is still the Boss
Fink."
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