Chip Foose grew up in his dad Sam’s hot rod shop in Santa Barbara and spent many days and nights there building cars.
“My mom would call at 4 in the morning and ask when I was coming home,” the younger Foose recalled. “Sometimes I’d fall asleep in the car I was working on, get up, come home to take a shower and then go to school.”
He painted his first car, a Porsche 356, at age 13. He bought his first car the same year, his dad’s 1956 F-100 shop truck, and spent the next three years customizing it. He was so active as a youth that picking the “start” of his design career was a little awkward. So organizers of the Foose 30th Anniversary in Design Celebration at the Petersen Automotive Museum decided to start with his first “paying” job, with ASHA Corporation in his native Santa Barbara in 1986. That’s as good a point as any. But you could make a case that this is his 40th year in design, too.
Whatever the year, Foose has been around a long time and it’s high time to celebrate…however many years it’s been.
The celebration took place Saturday, July 23, in the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. They rolled the Round-Door Rolls out of the atrium and rolled the Foose Impostor in, then set up about a hundred chairs for the fans and set up a stage for Foose and a few assorted Foose-related dignitaries to wax poetic on their favorite carmaker….