JCD666

Standard Automotive Manufacturing Company was founded in 1952 in Los Angeles, California by Aaron Fenton. He jumped in with both feet as the hot rod craze took off, making everything from headers, cams, and air cleaners, to heads, intakes, shifters, and wheels, all sold under the brand name of Fenton. While many of their products were clearly knock-offs of other popular aftermarket parts, they did make a few original designs here and there. As a result, Fenton’s products were usually noticeably cheaper than the brand name version, especially when it came to custom wheels and by the ’70s, wheels were their primary focus.

The Allman Brothers Band rose to prominence due to their unique blend of musical genres, captivating dual guitar performances, and unmatched stage presence, solidifying their status as one of the most influential rock bands of their era. Formed in the early 1970s under the leadership of Duane Allman, Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, and several other talented musicians, the band played a pivotal role in defining the Southern rock sound and pushing the boundaries of the jam genre. Throughout their career, which was marked by both adversity and success, the Allman Brothers Band produced numerous hit songs that left a lasting impact on the music industry.

The AC Spark Plug Company was founded on October 26, 1908 by Albert Champion and William C. Durant in Flint, Michigan. As the company name might suggest, the duo design and manufactured spark plugs for a variety of applications, with their biggest sales channel being an OEM provider for Detroit's burgeoning automotive industry. By the late '20s, AC was making more than just plugs, adding various small electrical components to their catalog. It was at this time that one of the big three purchased AC, making them an exclusive manufacturer supporting their brands, and leaving the other 'big two' to find new suppliers. This '60s era cool cat design was used to promote AC's plugs as an aftermarket replacement in speed shops and parts stores.

Enduro Racer (エンデューロレーサー) is an arcade racing game that was released in 1986 with two arcade cabinet versions — a stand-up cabinet with handlebars and a full-sized sit-on dirt bike cabinet. It is often seen as a dirt racing version of Hang-On, as it uses a similar engine and PCB, and was ported to consoles and home computers as well. Based on the sport of Enduro, players ride a dirt bike through seven stages, which have elevation changes and turns, and must avoid other riders as well as logs and boulders. Controls for the game are based on a motorcycle's handlebars, with a throttle and brake control. Players can pull up the handlebars on the cabinet to perform a wheelie, and also jump logs on the track.

A Flight to Lowlands Paradise was a music and arts festival held on November 24-25, 1967 in Utrecht, Netherlands. Organized by Utrecht-based artist and painter Bunk Bessels, the festival took place in the Margriethal of Jaarbeurs. The entry fee was 10 Dutch guilders (approximately $4.80), which included breakfast, plus access to the event. The 18-hour-long festival had no top music acts, but include experimental theater, dancing, poetry, films, body painting and massage. On December 28, 1968, a second Flight to Lowlands Paradise was held, postponed by a month from its original date of November 23 in an attempt to get a major headliner to sign on to the event. While several did sign on, each cancelled for one reason or another.

Established in November 1966, The Black Cat Tavern was a gay bar located in Los Angeles, California's Silver Lake neighborhood. Two months later, on New Year's Eve, several plainclothes LAPD officers infiltrated the tavern. After arresting several patrons for kissing, the undercover officers began beating several revelers, ultimately arresting fourteen patrons for assault and public lewdness. With no resolve for those wrongfully attacked and arrested, a civil demonstration of over 200 people to protest the raids was held on February 11 outside The Black Cat Tavern. This was one of the first demonstrations in the U.S. protesting police brutality against members of the LGBT community, preceding the Stonewall riots by over two years.

Gruppe 6, formally Gruppe Sechs, is a fictional entity from the GTA Universe that provides private security services. With a fleet of armored trucks and armed security personnel, Gruppe 6 helps major corporate clients move gold, cash, and other valuables on the streets with protection that local law enforcement is unable to reliably deliver.

Black Cat is a comic book adventure series that ran from 1941 to 1951. The stories center around Linda Turner, daughter of a movie star and stuntwoman, who became one of Hollywood's biggest stars, and got bored with make-believe life in Hollywood. When she came across a plot by a German spy, she realized she could help her country and have fun by taking on the identity of The Black Cat. She has no superpowers but is whip smart, a skilled fighter, knows karate and acrobatics, and is good with javelin and lariat. Assisted by Rick Horne, a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily Globe, and her sidekick Black Kitten, Black Cat was Hollywood's most glamorous detective star!

In the '70s, Americans smoked weed that came from south of the border, commonly Columbia. This cannabis was far less potent than today’s, as imported weed was a mixture of leaves, stems, flowers, and other plant parts, plus it lost much of its potency on the journey. The low quality product is what lead to home grown marijuana in the hills of Northern California and Southern Oregon in the '80s. This home grown cottage industry flourished, providing much of the product for the nation’s cannabis users by 1985. Quality, and likewise, potency, of American cannabis would continue to rise from here, as locally grown American weed contained less filler, and more flower, and focused on the curation of the unique strains available today.

Based loosely on David Morrell's 1972 novel of the same name, First Blood was the first of the Rambo films, and the sequels which were war adventure films set abroad, First Blood was a post-Vietnam psychological thriller set in America. It's a serious, dark, movie with a somber tone and a sympathetic lead character you can't help but support. From excessive violence and over the top explosions to unlimited ammunition and high body counts, most everything that Rambo is known for nowadays is completely absent in the original film.

In 1972, Mill Jennings sold his gas station to Billy Carter, brother of President Jimmy Carter. It became an important landmark in the history of Plains, Georgia in 1976 when Billy’s station became famous nationwide, as journalists covering Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign made it their headquarters. In 1981 Billy sold the station to his son-in-law, and in 2008, it became the Billy Carter Museum. During its heyday, you could find Billy running the show, and his step side shop truck parked on site, which featured his CB handle, 'Cast Iron' prominently on the doors.

In the early '70s, racing fuels hit the market from several major petroleum refineries to meet the needs of various motorsports. As increasingly higher performance racing engines were developed with higher compression ratios, they needed higher octane fuel to operate. Octane is one of the most significant differences between racing fuel and standard pump gas. The fuel at the corner gas station ranges from 87 to 93 octane, but racing fuel ranges from 100 to 120 octane. While the big brands focused on a few standard blends, indie outfits like Randy's Racing Fuels popped up to create custom blends. After perfecting their 'Formula 69' base, they proceeded to develop the perfect blend of secret spices to give their racing fuels the edge.

Movie Gallery opened as a small specialty video store in 1985 in Dothan, Alabama. The next five years saw them grow to about 50 stores, but tn the '90s, an aggressive expansion strategy saw the chain become one of the biggest video rental operations in the U.S., with over 950 locations. In the early 2000s, Movie Gallery was the second-largest rental chain in the U.S. and Canada, with over 4,700 stores worldwide. Despite the company's meteoric rise, by the end of the decade, digital downloads and streaming had taken their toll on video rental stores, and Movie Gallery was not immune. In April 2010, the company was headed into bankruptcy, and began liquidating all of its stores... the last Movie Gallery locations were closed in August 2010.

Upon their formation in 1982 in Jonquière, Quebec, Canada, Voivod primarily played speed metal heavily influenced by late 70s metal bands. The group would play their first live show (Later released as the demo Anachronism) on June 25, 1983 in Saguenay, and release another demo in January 1984 entitled To The Death! before getting signed. The band’s thrash-based debut, War and Pain, was released on August 10, 1984, followed by Rrröööaaarrr in 1986. Killing Technology is their third studio album that was released in 1987 and was the first to combine elements of progressive rock to the band's thrash metal sound, revealing a new sound influenced more by hardcore punk and crossover than metal, and had estimated sales of more than 60,000.

Raybestos was established in 1902 by Arthur H. Raymond and Arthur F. Law of Bridgeport, Connecticut to manufacture automotive brake linings and components. In 1906, Raymond and Law invented the woven brake lining, an important innovation in automotive brakes that not only made brake pads last longer, but improved performance by dissipating heat better than previous composites. From 1919 to 1989, Raybestos brakes were manufactured by Raymark Industries in Stratford, Connecticut. Since the early days, Raybestos was involved in motorsports, using what they learned on the track, and applying it to their consumer products, and often used "speedway tested for turnpike safety" in their advertising.

Buses emerged as a popular mode of transportation during the 1920s, initially serving as a more flexible alternative to trains, as they were able to reach areas that were not accessible by rail, connecting smaller towns and rural communities to the larger cities. As a result, buses played a crucial role in the development of the American transportation network. The end of World War II was followed by a decade of increasing prosperity, and the mid-20th century saw bus travel decline due to the rise of air travel, interstate highways, and increased car ownership. It was at this time that bus companies went into overdrive advertising their well established services as safe, convenient, and affordable ways to see America from coast to coast.

When The Bike Shop opened their doors in Lancaster, Pennsylvania early in 1971, their grand opening newspaper ad made some big promises. The ads read, "Dynamite for your bike! If you ride a custom or competition motorcycle, we guarantee that a visit to The Bike Shop will be a mind manipulating experience of the first order. Try it and see." While this sounds more like an ad for a head shop, it probably piqued the interest of more than a few bikers in the area. Over the years, they put out several mail order catalogs and successfully advertised their eclectic wares in biker rags. From what we can tell, they were always a little on the trippy side of things, and this two faced biker crest design sums up the shop's vibe quite nicely.

Wine coolers were a play on the spritzer, a drink diluted with carbonated water that has been around since the 1800s. Homemade wine coolers were made from white wine and lemon-lime soda, but in the ’80s, wine coolers began hitting store shelves with all kinds of fruit flavors, quickly becoming popular with consumers. These were all actual blends of cheap white wine, carbonated water, and fruit flavors. Things were looking good for the wine cooler market, but Congress decided to rain on their parade in January 1991 when they quintupled the excise tax on wine. This made wine blending bad business and ushered in the era of the malt beverage, and without the need to balance flavors with white wine, flavors became even crazier.

Founded as Charles Auto Supply in 1934, Charles would go on to open a dozen locations throughout the greater Washington Metro area, subsequently changing their name to Charles Auto Supply Stores. The retailer’s initial offerings were basic repair parts and supplies, but by the time the boys began coming home from WWII and began hot rodding their cars, the Charles stores began adding speed parts and go fast goodies. Streamline was Charles' house brand for several products, including their 'Hi-Speed Motor Oil.' By the late ’70s, dedicated speed shops and national auto parts supply stores were putting the squeeze on Charles Auto Supply Stores, and they struggled throughout the ’80s before closing up shop some time in the ’90s.

Formed in Sydney, Australia in 1985, Sadistik Exekution was an extreme metal band known for their outrageous live show antics, notorious behavior, non-conformist attitude, and their own extreme form of death metal. While the band has firmly stated they should not at all be confused with or labelled as black metal, they’re ironically credited as being a key influence of early Scandinavian black metal bands. Sadistik Exekution released five albums and two singles, and called it quits in 1999.

Igniting the air/fuel mixture in high performance racing engines is not an easy task to begin with, but factor in high compression, extreme boost pressures, exotic fuels, and a litany of other variables, and it can become near impossible. In the mid- '80s, Snake Bite Ignition Systems set out to design a complete ignition solution that was not only easy to dial in for any high performance engine application, but was daily driver reliable. From their shop in Phoenix, Arizona, Snake Bite's sophisticated hand fabricated systems were capable of lighting the fire in even the nastiest of big blocks, while still being able to control timing to one-tenth of a degree for one hundredth of a second in any cylinder through individual cylinder timing.

Published by Shinseisha, Gamest was a Japanese video game magazine that specialized in covering arcade games. The first issue hit newsstands in May 1986, and was originally bi-monthly, becoming a monthly publication in the late '80s. The magazine had a heavy-focus on shoot 'em up arcade games, but would also cover games from other genres. An annual feature of the magazine was their 'Gamest Awards,' which awarded to games based on reader votes. Gamest originated from the bi-monthly fanzine VG2 Newsletter from the early '80s. The magazine ran for several years, with its final issue being released in September 1999. Following the bankruptcy of publisher Shinseisha, many editors would move to ASCII and create a successor, Monthly Arcadia.

Established in Santa Barbara, California in 1979, Nomura Racing was a bicycle shop and BMX racing team that pioneered a data and material-driven approach to bicycle frame design and fabrication. Wade Nomura's unique perspective on BMX racing quickly garnered attention, both for the lightweight design of Nomura frames, and also through the numerous titles won the Nomura Racing Team took home. The very first 20" Nomura Racing frame sold on June 10th 1980, and the final one was made in December 1984 after Nomura suffered a racing injury and discontinued BMX racing and fabricating frames. Nomura Racing's hand made, small batch BMX frames have become highly sought after by collectors all over the world decades later.

King Kobra was a hard rock group founded in 1983, releasing three LPs in the mid- to late '80s that ran the gamut from heavy metal to AOR. They disbanded in 1989 but reconvened in 2010 with a retooled lineup and issued two more full-length albums, King Kobra, and King Kobra II, before disbanding a second time.

Located on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California, the Dudley Do-Right Emporium was a small, eccentric gift shop named after the fictional Canadian Mountie, Dudley Do-Right, The emporium was founded and run by Jay Ward, creator of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (1959–73). The gift shop was located at 8200 Sunset Boulevard, a few yards from the former Jay Ward Productions office at 8218 Sunset Blvd., the tiny studio building where the cartoons were produced. The Dudley Do-Right Emporium opened in 1971, and after a 34-year run, closed its doors in April 2005.

People love a good eclipse, but what is arguably the most famous eclipse in history is from a beloved '80s movie when a kid on his BMX bike takes flight with his extraterrestrial pal and crossed in front of the full moon.

Killer shark movies got their start back in the '50s, and ended up being a film genre all their own that continues to be explored to this very day. From the absurd and ridiculous to the serious and realistic, there is no shortage of shark movies, over 180 of them, including the Japanese dubbed sequel, Monsutākirāsame 2 from 1978.

The Danse Society was a goth rock band formed in Barnsley, England in 1980 from the remnants of local post-punk bands Y? and Lips-X. Operating in a raw, atmospheric realm that is less campy than many of their goth peers, The Danse Society's general lack of concern with charts and commercial appeal was part of their charm. Between 1980 and 1982 the band released a handful of singles and EPs, and the debut album “Seduction” on their own label. The band topped the indie charts with the single “Somewhere,” and the success of “Seduction” resulted in a major label deal in 1983, followed by a sold out tour. The Danse Society released two more singles and the album “Looking Through” before breaking up in 1986.

The late '60s saw the birth of organized long distance desert racing, with the granddaddy of them all being the big 1000 event that started in 1967, with everything from trucks, dirt bikes, and buggies all competing at once. The course has remained relatively the same over the years, with about every other event being either a point-to-point race from Ensenada to La Paz or a loop race starting and finishing in Ensenada. Air-cooled buggies were one of the easiest ways for aspiring racers to get in on the action, and in 1971, Rapid Cool made it even easier with their line of oil and transmission coolers designed to keep air-cooled engines and their mated transmissions cool during the extremes of desert racing.

Tony's Express Inc. was founded in 1954 by Tony Raluy in Fontana, California. The company was family-owned for almost 70 years, but was sold in 2023. At the time they were sold, Tony's had 200 employees, 87 drivers, and a dozen owner-operator line haul drivers. The following year, the fortunes of Tony's Express took a turn as they suddenly found themselves insolvent, ultimately resulting in the troubled firm shutting down for good.

Eliminators is a low budget 1986 science fiction action film about a pilot who crashes and nearly dies, leading to a mad scientist turning him in a 'mandroid' time travel test pilot. Mandroid goes on the run, and meets a scientist, a riverboat guide, and a ninja. They band together to stop the mad scientist from traveling back in time and taking over the world. The whole thing is pretty bonkers, and while it's not that good, even as a B-movie, it actually did ok at the box office. In recent years, Eliminators has become a cult classic by cinephiles and VHS collectors alike, and is often screened at B-movie festivals and events.

Lasonic Electronics Corporation started out in 1978 designing portable audio devices, primarily what would become known as boomboxes, and had them manufactured by Yung Fu Electrical Appliances, which is based in Tainan City, Taiwan. After years of making some of the most popular boomboxes available, in 1985, Lasonic released what is arguably their crowing achievement — the flagship TRC-931. With a black case and colorful graphics accented by just the right amount of chrome, the TRC-931 could be seen everywhere from movies and music videos to skate parks and breakdancing sessions. Decades later, original TRC-931 boomboxes are considered the holy grail by many collectors and rarely change hands once they've been acquired.

The National Recovery Administration was part of a myriad of agencies formed under President Roosevelt's New Deal initiative, this one designed to help America recover from the Great Depression. Founded in 1933 to stimulate industrial recovery, The National Recovery's mission was to limit competition and halt the spiraling pattern of wage reduction and price falls, while maintaining the integrity of the free market. The administration requested the input of businesses, labor, and consumers in drafting new guidelines for working hours, minimum wages, and production norms. Registered businesses were allowed to exhibit a blue eagle emblem, and customers were encouraged to patronize establishments where this symbol was displayed. 

Rising (also known as Rainbow Rising) is the second studio album by the British-American heavy metal band Rainbow that was released on May 17, 1976. Rising captured Rainbow at the peak of their creative powers, chronicling the band's neoclassical metal compositions at their most ambitious, and their growing fixation with fantasy lyrical themes. The record is largely considered a masterpiece of heavy rock and is consistently included among the greatest heavy metal albums of all time.

Founded as Charles Auto Supply in 1934, Charles would go on to open a dozen locations throughout the greater Washington Metro area, subsequently changing their name to Charles Auto Supply Stores. The retailer's initial offerings were basic repair parts and supplies, but by the time the boys began coming home from WWII and began hot rodding their cars, the Charles stores began adding speed parts and go fast goodies. By the late '70s, dedicated speed shops and national auto parts supply stores were putting the squeeze on Charles Auto Supply Stores, and they struggled throughout the '80s before closing up shop some time in the '90s.

Based on the radio drama Challenge of the Yukon, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon was a half-hour American action adventure TV series. Broadcasted in color on Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. from September 29, 1955, to September 25, 1958, the show ran for 78 episodes over three seasons. The show followed Sergeant Preston of the North-West Mounted Police, who patrolled the Yukon Territory in search of renegades and outlaws, during the time of the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s. Preston was assisted by his Alaskan Malamute, Yukon King, who had been raised by wolves. At the end of each episode, Preston would turn to his dog and say, "Well, King, this case is closed."