RIP Tex Smith

[Moby Vic]

One of rodding's originals is gone:
http://autoweek.com/article/car-life...mith-1933-2014

Excerpt:

Word came last week from Gary Medley, son of the late Hot Rod cartoonist Tom Medley, that hot-rod icon, journalist, book author and all around good guy Leroi “Tex” Smith had died. Smith had moved to Australia a decade ago and passed away there from a lingering illness. He was 81.
“He was a long-time hot-rod writer, editor and book publisher and so much more,” said Medley. “He and my father started the Street Rod Nationals when my father was publisher at Rod & Custom and Tex was a contributor.”
Smith seems to have had more than just a guiding hand in the creation of many rod-related institutions.
“It’s a tall order to say anyone ‘created’ anything, because there’s always so many people involved, but there would be no Street Rod Nationals, no National Street Rod Association, no LA Roadster Show, no StreetRodder magazine as we know it today and so many other events and institutions if it weren’t for Tex Smith,” said Brian Brennan, network director of street-rod groups for the publishing company TEN: The Enthusiast Network. “He also gave any number of guys their start as journalists, and as we bring people in we realize that all of us trace our family tree back to Tex for getting us into the business.”
Smith grew up in Oklahoma and moved to California at a young age, taking up with hot rodders and lakes racers from the start. In the early ‘50s he was a fighter pilot, serving in Germany. At around that time he met Wally Parks and eventually got a job first at the NHRA with the Safety Safari and then at Hot Rod magazine. His radically designed XR-6 roadster won America's Most Beautiful Roadster in 1963. He was around at the start of go-karting, too.

I have several of his books. He did a great job of documenting the early days of rodding.