![]() ![]() When Hafen traveled to Manti to choose some of Roth’s art, he went with a shopping list. Hafen traded a sapphire, gold and diamond ring for some of Roth’s artwork. Hafen couldn’t quite understand the concept, so Roth sculpted his idea out of clay and drove it to Hafen’s shop. Then Roth met Ilene, and sent Hafen more sketches. “He could be no one else and that proved too much for her.” “He was still Big Daddy Roth,” Hafen explained. Roth sent him sketches, but the engagement didn’t work out. When that marriage ended in divorce, Roth began frequenting singles dances and met a woman he wanted to marry. He married his third wife and moved to Manti, Utah. Midlife, Roth began re-examining his situation and subsequently joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Rat Fink t-shirts were extremely popular then, and still sell well through hotrod websites. ![]() Roth’s most widely recognized cartoon character, Rat Fink, was the monster-like antithesis of Mickey Mouse. He received 1-cent from each kit sold and in 1963 earned $32,000 in royalties. The Revell toy company produced model car kits from Roth’s designs. ![]() With the advent of fiberglass construction, Roth began designing and fabricating fantastic one-of-a-kind hotrods. He studied engineering in college, but building cars is what interested him most. Roth grew up in California and had an affinity for both fast cars and drawing grotesque cartoon caricatures. He gave me his card and called me about a month later.” When they met, Hafen gave Roth his card and told him, “I build lots of custom design stuff. The image and name of the design, Wasted on Wine, didn’t fly with Hafen’s mom. He remembers the shirt he wanted but wasn’t allowed to purchase, a Beatnik beret-wearing ratrod with a goatee holding a bottle of wine. For sale on the back pages were t-shirts with Roth’s idiosyncratic cartoon designs. Like Roth, Hafen’s specialty is custom design. Hafen owns Charley Hafen Custom Jewelers and has known of the Big Daddy and his artwork since he was a boy. “I thought, ‘Whoa! That’s Ed Roth!’ when I saw him,” recalls the Salt Lake City jeweler. At the time of his death in 2001, he was working on an innovative hot-rod project involving a compact car planned as a radical departure from the dominant "tuner" performance modification style.Charley Hafen met the celebrated artist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in 1996 when Roth was hawking his signed silkscreened drawings at a car show. Roth was active in the field of counterculture art and hot-rodding his entire adult life. Sloane, Steve Fiorilla (who illustrated some of Roth's catalogs), and Ed Newton who designed several of Roth's cars and many of the t-shirt designs. Numerous artists were associated with Roth, including painter Robert Williams, Rat Fink Comix artist R.K. His creations include The Outlaw, The Beatnik Bandit, The Mysterion, The Orbitron, and The Road Agent among others. Roth is also known for his innovative work in turning hot rodding from crude backyard engineering, where performance was the bottom line, into a refined art form where aesthetics were equally important, breaking new ground with fiberglass bodywork. "Stanley Mouse", and the lesser known Redina Studios soon followed, but Roth is certainly the individual who popularized the "Monsters in Hot Rods" art form. By the August 1959 issue of Car Craft Weirdo shirts had become a full blown craze. Roth began airbrushing Weirdo t-shirts in the late 1950's along with fellow Kustom Kulture pioneers Dean Jeffries and Pete Millar at Car Shows and quickly became the forerunner of the movement. Roth is best known for his grotesque caricatures typified by Rat Fink depicting imaginative, out-sized monstrosities driving representations of the hot rods that he and his contemporaries built. The 1961 Beatnik Bandit hot rod at the National Automobile Museum, Reno, Nevada. He grew up in Bell, California, attending Bell High School, where his classes included auto shop and art. ![]() As a custom car builder, Roth was a key figure in Southern California's Kustom Kulture and hot-rod movement of the 1960s. Ed "Big Daddy" Roth was an artist and cartoonist who created the hot-rod icon Rat Fink and other extreme characters. Art Brokerage: Ed "Big Daddy" Roth American Artist: b. ![]()
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