The Saga Ed Roth's Long Lost Orbitron
This story is so Ed Roth, it's almost unbelievable. And that's just the way Big Daddy would want it.
As of two years ago, when the Detroit Autorama featured a gathering of some 17 Roth-mobiles (both four- and three-wheel varieties; HRM Aug. '06) in a special posthumous Roth tribute, we thought nearly all of his far-out, fiberglass, mostly bubbletopped creations had finally been accounted for, especially with the totally unexpected appearance of Tweedy Pie. This little purple T-bucket roadster, ironically, was neither built by him (he stripped it, named it, then bought it), nor fiberglass (as nearly all other T-buckets were), nor had a bubbletop. But it became a well-known, popular Roth-mobile when Rod & Custom splashed it on its cover as "Roth's New Rod!" in 1962, and Revell made a long-selling model kit of it. This car reappeared briefly in 1975, dressed in chrome trinkets by its new owners, then disappeared into an old wooden garage for the next 30 years. I knew where it was, but the owner would neither let me see nor photograph it. Then bammo, there it was, looking like it did in 1962, on the floor at Cobo Hall in 2006. I guess all it took to finally get it out of the garage was a big wad of money. Reportedly-predictably-an even bigger wad of money carted it to another new home after the show.
We knew where Tweedy Pie was, but another well-known Roth machine-unquestionably his wildest of all-had been conspicuous by its absence for decades. We knew that the twin-engine, chrome-frame, bubbletop, Cyclops-nosed, and aptly named Mysterion had self-destructed from the weight of its two big-block Ford engines while being trucked from show to show, and little more than the front axle, wheels, and tires had been returned to Roth. In a lengthy, humorous account told in my book, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, His Life, Times, Cars and Art, custom builders Jack Walker and Doug Thompson were able to acquire the unwanted 'glass body from a custom shop in the Midwest in the '70s and seriously contemplated dumping the asymmetrical nose in the freeway median, lighting it on fire, and telling the cops it was part of a spaceship that fell out of the sky. But they didn't. They gave the remains to someone in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who gave them to a kid who may have tried to restore the Mysterion in his parents' basement but then had to get rid of it. We don't know. It might still be out there somewhere. It's a mystery. But it was so well-known and amazing (it, too, was a Revell model), that a complete, totally accurate replica of this vehicle showed up at Cobo Hall and was immediately snapped up by Ralph Whitworth, who is building a huge new automotive museum in Winnemucca, Nevada, which will include special Ed Roth and Von Dutch wings (stay tuned for more on this soon).
But the one Ed Roth fiberglass, bubbletop, asymmetrical show car that never seemed to be all that conspicuous either by its presence or by its absence is the one he called the Orbitron. After the highly successful bright-yellow Mysterion and hot-pink Road Agent (another good-selling Revell model), Ed crafted the dark-blue, somewhat boxy Orbitron in 1964, possibly in as little as one or two months' build time. Its signature characteristics were a half-round clear bubbletop over a white fur-lined, tub-like driver's compartment placed at the extreme rear of the vehicle, with the driver sitting behind the rear wheels, slingshot dragster-style (the rear tires were narrow-band whitewall slicks on deep-dish chrome Astro wheels to augment the image). At the front of the car, two regular, round, clear headlights were set into coves on either side of the midmounted engine, shark-fin fiberglass fenders half-covered the front wheels, and a strange half-round, half-rectangular nose held one regular headlight in the rectangular side and three in the much larger, round, barrel-shaped side. These lights were tinted red, blue, and green. Ed had been an electronics nut since childhood and knew that the latest electronic sensation-color TV-was based on combinations of these three primary colors. His theory was that when the headlights were turned on at once, they would produce one strong, white light beam. The theory was flawed, but that was a moot point since it couldn't very well be demonstrated at indoor car shows, anyway.
To make that point further moot, the Orbitron didn't make it to many car shows, Revell never made a model of it, and when it finally made it into a magazine (its one appearance), it essentially got fourth billing in the lower left corner of the Sept. '64 cover of Car Craft with the muted blurb, "Ed Roth's Orbitron." That's all. No starbursts, no flashes. Why?
Ed had a "mistake" pile at his shop that he was rather proud of. When he was welding and grinding a frame or an axle, or slapping plaster over boards and boxes to create his latest wild fiberglass body, if he didn't like the way something was turning out, he'd cut it off with a hacksaw and throw it on the mistake pile. He liked to boast that the pile got pretty big. But the Orbitron, along with the later, even less-seen Wishbone, were the only entire vehicles Roth ultimately labeled mistakes. He rarely mentioned the Wishbone, but he posed several reasons over the years for the Orbitron's lack of success.
His first conclusion was probably at least half right-that he should never have covered the engine with a hood. Ed loved chrome, multicarburetors, and wild pipes, and apparently so did the showgoers. But Ed was also strangely cheap and resourceful. If he couldn't wangle a big, flashy new engine or custom wheels and tires, he'd use what he could get or what was lying around. When Ford gave him the two new 406 big-block engines for the Mysterion, the company threw in an extra one for some unexplained reason, which Ed promptly dropped into a Gasser-style '55 Chevy coupe he used as a driver. When Ed was quickly assembling the Orbitron, no big, flashy new engine was in the offing, so he decided to plunk the available small-block Chevy and Powerglide left over from the '55 Chevy in his handmade 2x4 tube frame. He added three carbs to the Chevy and chromed it up, but it still wasn't a showpiece. So he covered it with a hood. And since his 'glasswork was quite sloppy, the underside of the hood didn't look very good, so he kept it shut. He called the engine a 283, and it might have been.
His second reason for this car's "failure,"after some hindsight, is probably also at least partly correct. The Orbitron debuted just after the Beatles stepped off the plane from England. As Ed said, "I was humpin' my booty to get it to Revell's HQ ... when the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and all model sales stopped. Guys got guitars instead o' cars."
Third, by this time, Ed's "monster shirt" business was booming and he finally hired some talented, trained artists, such as Ed "Newt" Newton and Robert Williams, to help create new shirt designs to meet the demand and to help design Roth's new show cars. Years later, Ed claimed that having these "schooled artists" design the cars was their downfall. In a small, revisionist book he self-published in 1984 called Whatever Happened to the Beatnik Bandit?, Roth wrote: "In 1964 I built a car called the Orbitron. I learned an important lesson from that car. Never draw a picture of a car before you build it. LISTEN UP DETROIT! Anything looks good if an artist draws it. Newton made the picture of that car look like a real machine. It turned out to be a mess. I sold that to some dude in Texas about 1969 and I hope it never surfaces again. YECH!" In all honesty, if Ed had built the car more like Newt drew it, with chrome carbs sticking through the hood or spaceship-like pods beside the bubble, it probably would have looked better. But Newton was hired after this project began, and we have a hunch the designs were more after-the-fact, anyway.
El Orbitron Perdido
Ed almost got his wish about the Orbitron never surfacing-it didn't for more than 40 years. Roth and his cars virtually vanished from the scene in 1970 when he closed his studio in Maywood, California. But in an article in the June '76 issue of Street Rodder titled "What ever became of Big Daddy Roth?" I showed that most of his creations, including the Bandit, Outlaw, Road Agent, and Druid Princess, even the Yellow Fang dragster were gathered in Jim Brucker's Cars of the Stars museum in Buena Park, California. When it closed three years later, many of the Roth cars went to Harrah's museum in Reno, where the Outlaw and Bandit were fully restored. After Bill Harrah's death, the Roth cars were scattered (some going, briefly, to Domino's Pizza owner Tom Monoghan). Most were restored one way or another (some by Ed's son Darryl, others by Roth-phile Mark Moriarity) and have continued to change hands for escalating prices. But the point of all this is that no one, not even Roth-philes, seemed to be asking, "Whatever became of the Orbitron?" The car got very little magazine or car show exposure, wasn't made into a model kit, and was not-by Roth's own admission-one of his stellar works.
Roth wrote that he sold the car to "some dude in Texas about 1969." I heard from someone that the owner had cut the nose off the body and removed the bubble to make it look more like the T-buckets that were popular at the time. In a later book (1995), Roth stated that Mike Lowe of El Paso, Texas, bought the car in 1973 and drove it to school. That book further stated that Lowe, having sold it, knew where it was and was trying to buy it back. As with many Roth stories of the time, who knows what was really the case?
According to Mark Moriarity, who verified it recently with Darryl Starbird, Roth actually sold the car to Darryl after showing it a couple of times in California. According to Moriarity, Starbird called Roth to ask if he could lease the Orbitron for his own car show circuit, and Roth said, "I'll just sell it to you for the lease price." So, ironically, this bubbletop bomb went from one bubbletop king to the other. Mark says he's seen photos showing the Orbitron, intact, in Starbird's shop. How and when it went to somebody in El Paso who might have cut the nose and bubble off it and might have driven it to high school, we just don't know.
But this is where the story gets weird. Even for a Roth story.
Those of you who follow things Roth and who browse the internet were very surprised to hear (and see) of the Orbitron's amazing discovery in the Mexican border town of Juarez sometime late last August. It was all over the E-waves. Photos were posted, and rumors were flying, including everything from the car's being an attraction in a traveling Mexican carnival to its being used as a trash can on a sidewalk in front of a porn shop no less than half a mile from the El Paso bridge when found, to its intended future use as a hot tub in said sex shop. More amazing than all this was that the photos showed that despite the nose being cut off, the bubble missing, and most of the interior and lights being gone, the rest of the relatively fragile 'glass body was completely intact, as were the chromed triple 97s and early Vette valve covers on the engine, and even the Astro wheels and thin-whitewall tires from 1964! Nicks in the faded black primer even showed the pearl blue underneath. How in the world could this last, long-lost Big Daddy Roth treasure have been sitting there, unnoticed, unrecognized, and ignored by millions of Mexicans and American tourists over these many years?
HOT ROD put its Texas correspondent, Jerry Heasley, on the case immediately. There's been a lot of talk and interest lately in rare barn finds. Of course, this one tops any we've shown in the last several months. But Jerry's been doing this since 1991, when he started a column called "Rare Finds" in HOT ROD's Mustang magazine. That very first column featured no less than a Boss 429 Mustang being used as a dog house in-yep-Mexico. It also turned out that the guy who finally located, recognized, and scored this find, Michael Lightbourn of El Paso, was well-known to Jerry. Michael is a young, unassuming guy, but he's already earned the nickname The West Texas Scout for finding rare musclecars and early Fords, many in Mexico. He has developed a network of helping scouts and informants.
Being from El Paso, he and his friends were aware of the Orbitron. Tony and Sergio Aguilar remembered seeing the car, with its three colored headlights intact, parked on Montana Street from 1972 to 1975 with a "For Sale" sign in the bubble. The car was then owned by a local attorney named Sid Abraham and a bail bondsman named Victor Apodaca. Vic couldn't remember exactly how he got the car other than he "might have obtained it in a criminal case." Hmm.
There were no buyers. But Sid's brother Eddie and his young nephew, John Attel, took an interest in the Roth show car. They knew what it was and were intrigued; John tried driving it to high school, but the carburetors were quirky, and he once got stuck inside the bubble for an hour. That was enough. He got a big-block Camaro and the Orbitron was back for sale. There's no mention of anyone cutting off the nose or removing the bubble at this point. Heasley simply says "the car remained unsold for several years." One guy from Oklahoma came to measure it to see if it would work as a salad bar for his restaurant. Apparently it wouldn't.
"Finally, two men from Mexico bought Orbitron for $1,500," reports Heasley. Apparently that was about 30 years ago, and all Attel recalls is that they "planned to use it in a carnival." Exactly how was unspecified.
Since Ed's untimely death and the publication of a couple of books mentioning that the Orbitron had gone to El Paso, a few people had shown up there asking about it. Because Lightbourn had a reputation for finding rare vehicles, some came to him. Knowing it had gone (possibly long gone) to Mexico, Michael asked his contacts there about it several times. No leads. Nothing.
Then, in May or June of last year, Mike got a lead from one of his informants about a '59 Plymouth Fury with dual carbs. He also mentioned some vehicle with a fiberglass body and a Corvette engine. Finned Mopars are hot, so Mike sent him a disposable camera. Hoping for some extra finder's fee bucks, the scout photographed the "ugly fiberglass thing" as well. When Mike got the camera back and processed the film, he knew the ugly thing was the Orbitron. And what was there was incredibly original. Wow.
The problem now was to (1) try to acquire the car without tipping off other collectors, and (2) get it out of Mexico without arousing the attention of potential banditos or greedy customs agents. Heasley reports, "Tracking cars in Mexico is fraught with obstacles for Americans. Thieves can snatch a nice car off a trailer in broad daylight." Michael says, "The hardest part is getting them out. Buying them, you still run the risk that you can't get the car into the States." He didn't even mention the hazard of carrying large sums of cash across the border.
But trying to buy this derelict turned out to be harder than Michael expected. There was a reason why it sat in plain public view on the sidewalk in front of the sex shop for so many years. Details get a little murky at this point, but the owner of the car (and the shop, we assume) apparently had no idea what it really was. And Michael didn't let on. He said he was primarily interested in the Corvette engine. We have no idea who cut the nose off, primered it black, or removed the bubble, seat, lights, and hood.
The car's preservation would seem equally mysterious. But we were not at all surprised when the owner's immediate reply to Mike's offers was "No se vende." Not for sale.
It turns out one of the two men who bought the car for a carnival was this guy's uncle. No one says what they actually did with the car, but he fondly remembered it from his childhood. It was passed down to him, and he thought his uncle had built it himself. Said uncle had died and wasn't around to set the nephew straight, strengthing his attachment to the hulk.
Michael's first offer was promptly refused. But he didn't earn his reputation for nothing. He visited or called the sex shop owner every day for three weeks. Finally the owner said, "I wouldn't sell it to you for dollars." Mike calmly replied, "OK, I'll give you dollars." That got his attention, but it still took three more days of haggling and finally a show of a large bundle of cash in a manila envelope to close the deal. Then he had to get it from Juarez back across the Rio Grande.
Mike called home for a rollback. The truck didn't arrive until 5:30 p.m., and by then the Mexican Customs were closed. But Mike figured he could work this to his advantage. He knew he didn't want to spend the night in Mexico with his prize on the back of a tow truck. It was a Friday in August and about 100 degrees. And the lines at the border were long. Mike paid the driver his $180 fee, plus a $100 tip to wait in line. He put one of his friends in the passenger seat and crossed his fingers. He also gave the friend some extra cash. When they finally got to the border, Customs being closed, they filled out some papers calling the derelict hulk a dune buggy and listing its value as near nothing. The friend also slipped the border guard $150. No problem, seor
As of Heasley's final report, Lightbourn had what's left of the Orbitron in his 20,000-square-foot shop in El Paso, safe if not wholly sound. Heasley said Mike's intentions were to consign the car to the R&M Auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, in January, adding "It will be restored and we'll all be able to enjoy this hot rod again." However, it wasn't clear whether he meant restoration would occur before or after the sale. Given Internet activity and worldwide interest at the time of this story's writing, we wonder if it will even make it to auction. The Orbitron was not one of Ed Roth's masterpieces. But it is one of only about a dozen signature vehicles built by Big Daddy from the Outlaw through Bandit II (depending, of course, on your definition of "signature"; this doesn't count various trikes, swap-meet wagons, and so on). Some remains of the Mysterion could still turn up-that's no more far-fetched than this story. But it couldn't be in original condition like this one. So it will remain to be seen what these remains are really worth.
The bigger question, perhaps, given all this latest barn-find frenzy, is whether these so-far-untouched remains of the Orbitron should be restored or not. What price patina? Undoubtedly we will find out. This incredible Roth story will continue.HRM
Photo Gallery: Ed Roth's T Bucket Roadster - The Orbitron Saga
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