FOUNDER'S AWARD - Ed Almquist BIO 

Born and raised in Pennsylvania some 3000 miles across the nation from the hot bed of hot rodding, California, Ed grew up as a contributor to the sport by producing performance parts, building and driving a variety of race cars and providing some serious and accurate journalism.  

Growing up during the great depression actually made Ed become a tinkerer at a very early age and after learning to handle the family tractor at the age of eight, he decided to step things up a year later when he built and raced a soapbox racer powered by a washing machine motor. Later in his teens, he began modifying a Model T and after that venture came a succession of other hot rods and race cars.  

Still in his teens, Almquist invested part of his savings into a mimeograph machine and a typewriter and self-published the first two known hot rod "how-to books": Custom Styling Manual and Speed and Mileage Manual. This was in 1946, two years before Robert E Petersen published his first issue of Hot Rod Magazine. The best part of this venture is it was a financial success and the forerunner to countless other publications from the mind of Ed among which are Hot Rod Pioneers and The Creators of the Fastest Sport on Wheels.  

As good as the journalistic venture was and as much as he loved it, his book sales were really a means-to-an-end, designing and manufacturing speed equipment. Ed outfitted his shop in Milford, PA with as much equipment as he was able to and was soon in the business of crafting a variety of speed equipment and accessories. Among Ed’s offerings were a mini-supercharger, steel-pack and glass-pack mufflers, dual exhaust manifolds, a patented vacuum controlled fuel pressure meter and a multi-electrode spark plug, the spark-O-Matic, the forerunner to today’s Splitfire plugs. Ed also produced a line of flathead speed parts, cylinder heads, intake manifolds, head gaskets and a universal fulcrum shifter for stick shift trannys. He didn’t limit his manufacturing skills just to hard parts but also offered a line of style-setting fiberglass bodies and accessories. During the span of years from the 1940’s to the 1970’s, Ed was also one of the premier mail order icons in the motorsports world. Ed’s impact in the mail order world was twofold, he sold product through the millions of his own catalogs he distributed and he sold his parts through other such establishments including J.C. Whitney, Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penny.  

In 1966 Ed chose another part of the automotive world to enter into, oil treatments. His first such product was a molybdenum oil treatment under the name of Presto-Moly. This was followed by a succession of other products within this category and today, according to Ed, over the past 60 years he has developed over 100 different products. Ed is a charter member of NHRA and has been a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers since 1961.