A Fond and Emotional Fairwell to Dee Wescott
By Albert Drake
Dee Wescott, the man who made Wescott one of the most outstanding names in hot rodding, passed away January 29, 2009, at age 81.

The funeral was held in the gymnasium of Damascus Community Church, a building large enough to accommodate a crowd of mourners estimated at 700. The funeral reminded me that although Dee had been a car guy since he was a kid, he had a life beyond hot rodding. He had been a volunteer fireman for 45 years, until he was forced to retire because of age, and there were over 80 firemen present along with 15 fire trucks. When you see that many firemen, in full uniform, it looks like most of the firemen in Oregon. Dee was also a politician, and many of the mourners no doubt lived in the Damascus area and knew Dee as their first mayor. Jim Wright, the second mayor of Damascus, spoke about working with Dee and mentioned that several important legislators had made the trip from Salem to pay their respects.



Most of us knew Dee primarily as a hot rodder. He was the man who engineered and produced the Wescott ’32 roadster, a body that made fiberglass respectable. Doug Nicoli, a long-time hot rodder and friend of the Wescotts, recounted Dee’s history with cars. He remembered a time during the mid-1950s when Dee was turning away from metalwork and turning toward developing parts from a new material, fiberglass. “I thought he’d been sniffing too much lacquer thinner,” Nicoli said, “but I was wrong.” Dee’s first venture was to make a fiberglass cover for the 1933-34 Ford gas tank. He then made a set of 1932 Ford fenders, using his wife’s 3-window coupe fenders as molds. This was the start of an industry. It really took off when Pete Sukalac wrote an article, “Glass Rods for Tomorrow”, in the August, 1958 issue of Hot Rod Magazine. It wasn’t simply a choice between fiberglass or steel, there were no metal parts available. A few years later Dee introduced his glass ’32 Ford roadster body. It’s safe to say that Dee saved hot rodding. It had gone into the doldrums during the 1960s and ’70s, and when it emerged in the 1980s as street rodding the life-blood of the sport was the Wescott ’32 roadster.

Bob Knowles has been a hot rodder since the 1940s and he worked with Dee in the mid-1950s, when, with Bill Peterson, they started the Portland Roadster Show. What, I wondered, was Dee Wescott’s primary ability? Knowles said: “He was able to take on a project and see it all the way through with excellent results. Not only with the (hot rod) club activities but he did it with his business and the fire department and then went on to become the mayor of the newest city in Oregon! How could you top that in your lifetime?”

Dee was a born organizer. He was student body president at Gresham High, where he graduated in 1943. That same year he bought the property in Damascus where his business is now located. In 1950, after a stint in the Navy and a term of college, he opened a combination service station, garage and towing service on the property. In 1953 the business became Wescott’s Auto Restyling, with an emphasis on customizing cars. Two years later it seemed as if half the customs in the car shows came from his shop. He was also interested in auto racing and, along with Rolla Vollstedt, formed the Northwest Motorsports Association, to obtain medical benefits for injured racers. In 1954 Dee was the prime mover in the formation of the Multnomah Hot Rod Council (MHRC) and its first president for two terms. The goal of the council was to get a drag strip where the hot rodders could safely race. But first, to raise money for the strip, the MHRC staged a car show in 1956; it was the first Portland Roadster Show. A couple years later the first legal (non-airport) drag strip opened at Woodburn. It must have given Dee great satisfaction to know that the MHRC, the Portland Roadster Show and the Woodburn Drag Strip have been in continuous existence for over half a century, and they continue to thrive.
Dee must have got by on little sleep, because he continued to work in his shop and for public causes all his life. In 1959, when Oregon celebrated its centennial, Dee organized events in rural Damascus, including the contruction of what might be the world’’s largest candle. He established the Damascus
Water Board and developed the area’s water system. He saw that Damascus got a fire station, and provided money to buy the land for Damascus City Park, which is beside the station. For 45 years he was a volunteer fireman, for which he received a Congressional Award. He served on the subcommittee for the Fiberglass Fabrications Association, which rewrote the building code for the fiberglass industry. He was also the chairman of the Board of Oregon Reinforced Plastics Association. For his work in hot rodding he was inducted into the SEMA Street Rod Hall of Fame in 1989. In 2005 he was elected the first mayor of Damascus. Even after Dee was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2007 he ran the meetings. He was aware of the implications of growth in the Damascus area, and he wanted to legislate what was best for the place where his grandparents homesteaded and where he lived all his life.



In 1979 I interviewed Dee Wescott, the only interview he ever granted, I believe. Eventually it appeared in my book, Hot Rodder!, but at the time of the interview I had only a vague idea of what I wanted to do. I was back in Oregon, and I knew I wanted to interview Wescott. How difficult could that be, I wondered; how much could be said about fiberglass? Give me 15 minutes I said. Well, the interview took several hours, partly because Dee had to leave whenever there was a fire or an auto wreck in the area, but also because the work he had done was terribly complicated. The ’32 body, for example, had to be built larger to allow for shrinkage, so that when the fiberglass cured the body would be exactly the same dimensions as the original Ford body. It took a great deal of engineering, a subject that Dee had studied at Oregon State College. Even the crates in which the bodies were shipped had to be engineered to withstand certain weights, both within and without. And then there was the life raft project when Dee worked with the U.S. Coast Guard to develop a bonding material which allowed a raft to be dropped into a rough sea from an airplane, and the Russian ship that had its bow sheared off and Wescott developed a way to foam the bulkheads that allowed the ship to sail back to Russia, and the special fiberglass covers built for radar stations in Korea, and so on. Dee had a lot to tell me! It made me realize that he was a very sharp man.

As the service ended there was the Ceremony of the Bell, where a bell is rung to call home the fireman; this is the highest honor firemen can pay a fallen comrade and it was an emotional moment. Then three bag pipers piped, and over 80 firemen in full uniform formed a double column and the casket was carried between the columns out to the fire truck and driven to the Damascus Pioneer Cemetery, where Dee was buried, less than a mile from his shop.