The Seal Beach Classic Car Show made its debut on Main Street on April 1988, with around 50 classic vehicles sharing space on Main Street with hayrides, other children’s ries, and vendor booths. But thanks to some vision, hard work and perhaps a little magic, it has grown into what’s now billed as the largest beachside car show in Southern California.
The event was originally just an inducement by the Seal Beach Business Association to get more shoppers for the Spring Sidewalk Sale. In fact, at the time it was almost an afterthought, according to the man who started it all, Steven Bruce.
In late 1987, Bruce, a local financial planner, was the newly-elected President of the Seal Beach Business Association, a group that splintered off in the 1970s from the Chamber of Commerce to focus on Main Street/Old Town business issues such as their semi-annual sidewalk sale, an event that had been declining in popularity.
“At one of my very first meetings as President,” recalled Bruce, “I pitched the idea of making the sidewalk sale more fun, more of a party, perhaps with a hayride, some food booths, and maybe even a car show. And then I said, ‘and we’ll also close down the street.’ Oh, did that get a response – you can’t do that! They won’t let you.”
Undeterred, Bruce went to the police and explained his idea. They and the city were fine – but because they would be closing “turn pockets” on PCH, a state highway, they had to get CalTrans approval. “It took a couple more weeks but we got the go ahead.”
“I was a car buff – I had a Jaguar XKE – but the only thing I really knew about car shows was that Seal Beach cop Rick Paap had introduced me to another car guy named Bob French. French, who lived in Downey, owned a 1960 Lincoln Continental Mark V convertible was a performing comedian and magician, a card-carrying member of the Magic Castle, but he also promoted car shows. “Bob got some flyers printed and handed them out at other car gatherings – and boom! we’re in the car show business.” French lined up some sponsors and even arranged to have some other cars brought in besides his Lincoln.
Bruce lined up the Lions to host a pancake breakfast and then hot dogs and burgers for lunch. “And we also got volunteer help that day from some other local car guys.”
Paap, who worked the show as a policeman for five years and as an emcee for another seven, remembers that first show well. “It was small – maybe only fifty cars – but everyone felt it was a success.” So successful the Association decided to do include a car show at the Fall Sidewalk Sale. That event, held on October 3, 1988, attracted over 125 classic cars.
“That show went well, too,” recalled Bruce. “But the spring show just seemed more fun, so we decided to just do the show once a year in April.” That decision forced Bruce to step back. “I do taxes, April is my busiest month, but I still helped out where I could – especially on show day. I loved the whole atmosphere, all the families and the moms resting with their kids on the sidewalks. The restaurants being busy. It was great.”
While a Business Association member served as co-chair to work with the city and handle permits, French stayed on as the primary organizer, but he was aided by the local car buffs who had now formally banded together a few months earlier as the “Bay City Rodders” car club. Many were Seal Beach city employees, including a few policemen and firemen and Jack Osteen of the Rec Department. Two of the key Rodders were policeman Pat Sullivan and fireman Don Mape. Sullivan is now retired and lives in Arizona, but Mabe still lives in Seal Beach, and can be frequently found holding court and talking cars and at the Yucatan Grill or Marni’s.
“Don and I and George Steele used to meet up at Ascot Raceway in Gardena,” recalled Sullivan. “Don and I kept saying we should start a car club. Finally, we did it – and started meeting in the Public Works meeting room and then the police station.” It seems the first Seal Beach car show was the catalyst, because the group officially organized in summer 1988.
Both Sullivan and Mabe remember the first car show as kind of loose. “People just parked wherever they wanted,” said Sullivan. “But we knew car shows – at least the ones we liked,” added Mabe. “So we volunteered and took over the car stuff, assigning the car spots and loading them in an organized manner. Plus, we handled the trophies and awards.”
Sullivan said Mabe grew up in the Compton car culture so he knew all those guys growing up, plus he had built a lot of cars for those guys. He built the 1941 Willys that is on display at Rick Lorenzen’s Automobilia Museum near the old Lions Dragstrip site in Wilmington.
“We mainly left the applications, sponsors, and admin stuff to French,” said Mabe, “and he also got the flyers made up – although we did help distribute them. We’d drop them off at the car events we went to – like the Donut Derelicts who still meet every Saturday Morning at Adam’s Donuts in Huntington Beach.
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“Next thing we know we’re up to 300 cars and it’s a great event,” said Mabe. “Cars right there on Ocean with the pier in the background and up and down Main Street and Central. On a sunny spring day. And the whole town comes out. It’s a big event, but it’s also so local. You would run into 100 neighbors and friends whichever way you walked.”
1992 saw French leaving to focus on his shows at Belmont Shore, Palm Springs and a new one at the Balboa Pier in Newport Beach. Mabe says the business association asked us to step in “so we basically ran the whole show for a couple years.” Part of French’s departure was due to a Business Association decision to keep the show as local as possible with only entries from Seal Beach residents or merchants accepted up to a couple months before the event. The number of cars was also limited to 400 and old newspaper photos show they were now lining up cars along the curbs of Main Street, allowing viewers to stroll down the middle.
Nonetheless, by now the event had gotten so big, the Business Association moved the Sidewalk Sale to March.
Stan Anderson, the owner of Coach’s restaurant, became president of the Business Association in 1994, and raved about the Rodders work. “They were great. The Rodders ran the show and we paid the bills and then split the profits. We’d use our profits to fund the Christmas Parade, and the Rodders donated their share to lots of groups around town.”
“It was a great arrangement,” said Anderson, “until I almost screwed it up. I made the mistake of appointing as co-chair a guy who owned a coffee shop and some property on the 300 block. Well, he thought he was in total charge of the show and came in and told the Rodders that we’re going to do things differently and basically wouldn’t even talk to them. Or at least that’s how they felt. I mean, the Rodders are all great guys. But somehow he ticked them off. So in February 1997, the Rodders President at that time, Bill Barger, tells me ‘We love the event, we love the city, but we’re not working with this guy. So good luck with the event but we’re out of here.”
“Fortunately, I got Dennis Pollman involved and he was able to obtain the mailing list from the Rodders, and Kim and Steve Masoner also stepped in and we salvaged the event that year but it was little rocky for awhile.”
The Rodders were gracious in their version of the parting. “We were getting older. It was a good time to move on,” said Mabe. “By then we had trained a lot of people on the best way to organize the cars.”
Not all of the Rodders got out of the car show business though. Some members continued to help Bob French with his Belmont Shore car shows – which at that time was a spring show at the beach and a fall one at Marine Stadium. After a couple years, French passed away and the Rodders took over the organizing and cut back to just one show a year, in the Fall on Second Street.
The Second Decade
In 1998 Business Association President Stan Anderson volunteered himself as the 1998 event co-chair (“I had to make amends after what I did in 1997,” he joked), but he again had key help from Kim and Steve Masoner and Dennis Pollman. “Dennis always had a car at the event anyway. Of course, much of that was for his insurance business. He’d get in car shows and then pass out his cards because he specialized in classic car insurance.”
Kim Masoner owned Sandcastle Marketing in town and gained more publicity for the cars show in the regional newspapers like the Times, Press-Telegram and Register. She also made the Sun realize the event was a great opportunity for them as well – organizing local merchants in 1998 to advertise in a car show center spread for the first time. The ads included such remembered local institutions as The Shore Shop, the Seal Beach Inn, the Seal Beach Car Wash, and Russell’s Hamburgers.
Anderson gives all the credit for the show’s continued success to his board which included the Masoners, Robin Fairman, Beverly Rigney and Pat Eskenazi.
By summer 1999 Kim Masoner had become Executive Director of a revived and reorganized Chamber of Commerce and organized a merger of that group and the downtown merchants into a single group, the Seal Beach Chamber & Business Association. The new group now organized events such as the Holiday Parade, Summertime Music on Main Street, the September Sand Castle Contest, and the Halloween on Main Street, as well as the bi-annual Sidewalk Sales and the annual Classic Car Show.
“Besides her marketing skills, Kim also did a good job in getting better cars,” remembered Steve Masoner, “She made it so applicants had to submit a photo of their car, so we could be more selective.”
Steve also recalls Kim hiring established local artists to get better looking posters. “Unfortunately those earliest posters and other car show documents were stored in a container at First Street and were ruined when the container leaked during a heavy rain storm.”
Steve remembers his main contribution as loading in cars from six entry points instead of just Ocean and PCH. “This way our crew could start loading cars a couple hours later, minimizing the engine revving before 8am which I’m sure the residents appreciated. We also tried putting cars back to back in the center of the street to see if that would improve traffic flow.”
By 2003, newspapers were saying the event had grown to 30,000 attendees, with many driving their cars into town and struggling to find a spot. Early organizers had alleviated this in 1991 by arranging with the Rossmoor Shopping center to operate a shuttle bus from their lots to Old Town and back. In subsequent years additional shuttles operated from the Rockwell (now Boeing) lots, as well as from the Alamitos Bay restaurants and most of all, to parking sites on the Navy base. This changed with the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Parking was not allowed on the Navy Base in 2002, a shortage not unnoticed by some local merchants. Some on Main Street but most at the Seal Beach Center, asked the city council to not approve the car show on Main Street. But public comment from residents and other merchants at Council meetings in 2003 and 2004 convinced the Council to approve what was now the town’s biggest event of the year.
By 2004 the Masoners were focusing their volunteer energies to the Save Our Beach non-profit, so local chiropractor Brian Glowacki stepped in as co-lead organizer in 2003. In 2004, Joann Adams, owner of Bogart’s Coffee and one of the local merchants who spoke in favor of the car show, took the reins and held the post for three years. “For my first year I had a co-chair who went home to sleep during the car show and never came back. That was fun.”
The next year Joann recruited the help of local mechanic Brian Warner, owner of Brian’s Automotive Service. “I moved my business to town in 2001 and I started entering the car show then. And then Joann asked me to help out, so I did.” For Warner, it was a labor of love. “I’ve been a car guy for over 50 years,” he later told the Press-Telegram, “and I personally worked on a lot of cars that were seen in the show.”
Another local car show regular over the years was Bob Griffith, long-time owner of Bob’s Rexall drug store and much of the 300 block where he stores many of the cars he has shown over the years. Probably best known among these is the NASCAR stock car once driven by Jeff Gordon.
Warner took over as the sole event chair in 2008 and he says his main contribution was increasing the categories for awards. “You can’t compare a Rolls Royce to a 57 Merc. They’re different animals and should be compared against similar cars.” Another benefit from more trophies was it got more local businesses involved as trophy sponsors.
But the biggest reward for Warner is the event’s importance to the community and town’s economy. “I love to see my small business neighbors really do well – the stores, restaurants and pubs and ice cream and coffee shops.”
Under Warner the show grew to well over 600 cars, although he cut that back a bit after a year. “It was getting too crowded, and we wanted to give people a little more room to walk.”
In 2011 Warner gained the assistance of Vince Bodiford who had come to town as the new Publisher of the Sun. Bodiford, a big-time car buff himself, recalled that “As a publisher you always want to get involved with local business and events, and when I saw that the town had a car show, I made sure we got very involved with that.”
Bodiford took over the show’s reins in 2013, and immediately put his own stamp on the event by arranging for highlights of the show to be broadcast nationally on various cable networks covering motor sports.
Bodiford also reached out to the Bay City Rodders to see if they were interested in again helping run what they had helped start. “That didn’t go anywhere. Some members would still show their cars in the SB show, but there was not much interest beyond that.” It turned out the Rodders’ numbers were dwindling and they would soon end their involvement with the the Belmont Shore show.
In 2017 Bodiford and his group, led by local uber volunteers Deb Machen and Seth Eaker, revived a vintage Motorcycle area – this time at the Pier. The Vintage Motorcycle show featured 75 brands from Europe, Japan and, of course, classic American Harley Davidsons.
When Bodiford left town to head up a midwestern newspaper syndicate, Tim Way assumed the chairman role, a post he held from 2018 to 2023. But he wasn’t alone, bringing back Brian Warner as his co-chair. The first two years didn’t miss a beat, and the 2020 show was also a sell out until Covid forced the cancellation of that year’s show. 2021 started out equally rough, but the crew pivoted to run a very successful Classic Car Cruise in October 2021.
2022 saw a return to normalcy, with car sell-outs and big crowds returning to Main Street, a feat repeated in 2023.
For 2024, Way and Warner have allowed the show’s reins to pass on to Gary and Diana Bean, who bring a lot of experience running the Chamber Health Expo and other events to the table.
In addition to the Lions pancake breakfast and hot dog and burgers lunch, other activities now include live music throughout the day from bands on three stages, fun and interesting vendor and nostalgic displays, a Pinewood Derby, and even celebrity appearances,
Actual attendance is hard to gauge, but Seal Beach police have estimated it as between 25,000 to 35,000 over the years. What’s not hard to estimate is the financial impact of the event which provides nearly 60% of the Chamber’s annual revenue. In addition to event costs, it also helps pay for other Chamber community activities such as the summer concert series, and holiday parade.
Most of the show’s revenues come from the car space fees and t-shirt sales which are usually sold out by noon, according to Warner. The vendors around the event provide a significant contribution as well.
The car show is also the second largest fundraiser for the Seal Beach Lions Club which annually feeds around 1,000 people and now takes in more than $5,000.
Another beneficiary of the show’s crowds is the Seal Beach Animal Care Center which raises around $2,000 from selling baked goods at the Car Show. Other nonprofits which have benefited include Interval House, Casa Youth Shelter, Seal Beach Tree Project and the Save Our Pool campaign to help improve the McGaugh School pool.
Over the years, there have been the predictable complaints from a very small minority of people, but they are drowned out by those who appreciate the event’s positive impact on the town.
And although it is a Chamber event, the organizers are the first to say it takes an entire to village to put on this show. It couldn’t be done without the help of well over 100 volunteers, city staff, and members of the public works, lifeguards, and various other departments.
Who would have thought that around 50 hot rods on Main Street in 1988 would turn into the city’s biggest annual event and the largest beachside car show in California? ####
Note: this history was originally published in the Seal Beach Sun, but is still a work in progress.If you have additional information (or images) to add, please contact larrystrawther@gmail.com.