By Louie Mayall
MAYALL’S ’33 FORD SEDAN O ne of my favorite stories is about my dad, Joe Mayall, picking up his ’33 Ford sedan at the 1973 Street Rod Nationals in Tulsa. At
Joe started rodding with his first car, a ’46 Ford sedan, then a ’59 El Camino and then a ‘50s Ford pickup, but his first full build was his sweet ’31 Ford coupe (that’s still rodding around). The coupe also coincided with him becoming a freelance automotive journalist (many stories in late ‘60s rodding magazines) and he started the Yellowstone Rod Run, that is also still going strong.
that time he was a budding nuclear engineer in Idaho driving the full-fendered Model A coupe he had built from scratch. That car introduced him to doing some freelance articles for the rod magazines and by 1973 he had already produced the Yellowstone Rod Run a few times (he was the originator) to draw in more cars to shoot features of. Joe hit it off with everyone from the NSRA at the Nats in Tulsa and came back with a volunteer job as the Division Director for the Northwest. He also traded his award-winning Model A for a ’33 Ford sedan. People were shocked he made the trade, but he needed back seats. He had a wife and two kids they were trying to stuff into a ’31 Ford coupe. Joe’s wife, Lois, was probably understanding because she shoved the two kids into her C2 Corvette, but ultimately the family got a ’33 sedan and a suburban—you can’t stop the progress of family. In 1975, Joe moved the sedan and the whole family to sunny California to take a job at “Rod Action” magazine working for Tex Smith. Soon he was the editor, and he moved to being the editor of StreetScene in 1978. The chassis on the ’33 has really been through the ringer over the years. The rod came with a dropped I-beam holding Joe traded the coupe for his ’33 at the 1973 Street Rod Nationals. People thought he was crazy since the coupe was nicer and who would want a ’33 Ford sedan? Of course, like Joe, rodders all had growing families and by the ‘80s, a ’33 sedan was far more coveted than a Model A coupe.
up the partially boxed frame with factory crossmembers. Eventually Joe installed a Corvair frontend that never worked right that he wrote about as a freelancer, so he installed another Corvair that also didn’t work, and he also wrote about those problems in Rod Action. Eventually it had a four-bar and 5-inch dropped axle, but the 5- inch drop was replaced with a 4-inch drop when 14-inch wheels were installed. Today the car rides on a FatMan-mounted Mustang II that’s narrowed 2 inches with manual rack and pinion steering, a big antiroll bar and Bilstein shocks to smooth the ride. That was a little narrow for the Vintage Real Wheels, so a big brake kit from ECI with Chrysler rotors moved each side out 3/4-inch. The car
60 JUNE 2024
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