The Life & Times of American Sports Car Racing Entrepreneur John Edgar, Part I

Edgar was our name. One of my earliest memories of my father is this—tall, bald, glasses, at the wheel of a car with a long blunt hood with fins going around it. I liked to draw pictures of us going fast down our street in Toluca Lake. We sped around the corner where Lon Chaney lived and went over to the big studio by the river where Bing Crosby worked. The car had funny headlights that folded up, and the dashboard was a lot of little metal circles that looked like whirlpools, and the leather seat smelled good when I buried my head in it so the sun wouldn’t shine in my eyes. When my father drove the car, he laughed and I did too. My mother drove it sometimes, and when she did, she looked like one of the movie stars we used to see at Lakeside Market. The top went back and the wind blew in, and we called it “The Cord.” It was 1938 and I was five.

John Campbell Edgar, my father, was a star salesman then. He sold commercial kitchen equipment in Los Angeles that was made at a factory his father and some other men founded three decades before in Troy, Ohio. One of them was named Hobart, and that was what they called it. They first manufactured electric coffee grinders and then meat slicers and food mixers, and their consumer machines were called KitchenAid. We had one of the big chrome plated mixers in our house that I used to sit on like it was a horse.