- Car customizer Gene Winfield has died at the age of 97
- He was one of the last of the great customizers from the 1950s and 1960s
- His projects included show cars, television and movie cars, and plastic models
Famed car customizer Gene Winfield has died at the age of 97. He had worked in his shop in California and made appearances at car shows into his nineties, but more recently suffered ill health, including alleged physical abuse from a caretaker, and then a diagnosis of cancer.
Winfield was one of the last ties to the “golden age” of auto customizers in the 1950s and 1960s, alongside such people as Sam and George Barris, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Dean Jeffries, Darryl Starbird, Bill Hines, and the Alexander Brothers.
He also helped inspire the next generation of customizers, including builders like Chip Foose, whose father Sam was a shop foreman and painter in Winfield’s shop.
Winfield was a master of metalwork, with a specialty in “chopping” cars—taking off their roofs, cutting the pillars, and then welding the roof back on to lower the car’s profile. It’s tougher than it sounds, especially on the 1949-to-1951 Mercury models Winfield favoured, since the cut-down roof has to line up with the car and look proportionate. He was also given credit for creating a paint scheme known as “fade-away,” where disparate colour shades blend into each other.
Winfield was born in Springfield, Missouri in 1927, and a few years later his family moved to Modesto, California. He started out building model airplanes and cars, which progressed to a 1929 Ford Model A that he bought when he was 15 and promptly started modifying. He enlisted in the Navy toward the end of the Second World War – his age prevented him from joining sooner – and afterwards started modifying cars for others. He also got into racing, including on dry lakes, drag strips, and circle tracks.
He later signed up for military duty again and was stationed in Tokyo as a cook, where he honed his skills under the tutelage of a Japanese metalworker and built cars with some like-minded American soldiers. On his return, he opened Winfield’s Custom Shop in Modesto in 1951.
What put him on the map was magazine and show coverage of his “Jade Idol,” a 1956 Mercury finished in 1959 for a customer; it included quarter panels from a Chrysler New Yorker, matching front and rear grille bars, a “sectioned” body with four inches taken out of the middle, and his fade-away paint.
He was hired by plastic model company AMT in 1962, where he built full-size cars that were made into models, or copies of the toys as promotions for them. That led to him making custom cars for movies and television shows, including Star Trek and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. That specialty lasted quite a while—he even made the futuristic cars for the 1982 film Blade Runner. When the custom auto scene faded in the early 1970s, he worked as a stunt driver in movies and television commercials.
Among his accomplishments, three of his cars won the prestigious America’s Most Beautiful Roadster award; he was one of four customizers commissioned by Ford to modify a vehicle for its Ford Custom Car Caravan, which made the show circuit to promote the automaker; he is in numerous automotive halls of fame; and he created and sold his own line of reproduction parts for custom cars. Always approachable and willing to share his knowledge, Winfield was a regular at car shows where he would chop a car on-site to show how it was done, and ran classes to teach metalworking to enthusiasts. RIP, Mr. Winfield, and you’ll be missed.
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