They mostly were good ol' boys from Odessa and the surrounding area. And they had the need for speed. They found their fix behind the wheel of their hot rods.

It was a simpler time when "souping up" a passenger car didn't cost an arm and a leg.

Most of those who lived through the experience agree that the hot rod era really began in 1955 when Detroit manufacturers started producing what eventually would be known as muscle cars.

Working on those cars, and finding ways to squeeze more speed of them by improving on the engineering of the automakers, was considered a challenge.

"Here was a bunch of guys who were sort of ahead of Detroit," Mike Moore said. He's retired from the insurance business and living in Round Rock these days. But he has such affinity for the bygone era that he commissioned a painting of Tommy's Drive-In, a popular hangout of the car crowd. The painting includes Moore's 1955 Chevy and those of his friends parked around the hangout. The original is on loan to the Parker House Museum, but Moore has a website devoted to Tommy's and the social scene that surrounded it (www.michaellewismoore.com). One of the other cars in the painting is a Corvette that was owned by Roger Rankin. He bought the vehicle from one of the mechanical wizards of the day, Buddy Bradshaw.

"These guys were brilliant," Moore said. "Buddy Bradshaw was so smart." He relates how the 1959 Impala equipped with two four-barrel carburetors "had a dead spot in it when you stepped on it." But Bradshaw discovered a way to remove some of the linkage connections to alleviate the problem. And he was protective of his little secret.

And speaking of Bradshaw, the guy is still very much of a car guy. He's still drag racing at age 73 and has passed along the bug to his son, Alan Bradshaw, an Odessa chiropractor who has raced at the highest level of NHRA in the top fuel division.

The elder Bradshaw has a stock answer when somebody asks him when he's going to quit: "I tell them I'm going to keep going as long as there's one guy out there I can outrun."

He also says those old days produced "stories on top of stories on top of stories." A lot of them are racy, but not necessarily from a vehicle standpoint.

And then there was Bob Glast, who saw his love of cars as an entrepreneurial opportunity. The racers needed speed equipment, and he made it his business to find the parts they wanted. "It was my first business at the ripe old age of 15. The nice part of business back then was that it was cash on delivery."

Bradshaw vouches for Glast's business acumen. "He sold more stuff out from under his bed than some of the auto parts stores."

Glast eventually took over the family business, City Pipe and Supply. But he still has fondness for his car tinkering days. "The difference between my '56 Chevrolet and today's cars is I don't know whether I could get the hood open now. Back then if you had a half-inch-9/16 wrench and big screwdriver, you could do just about everything to a car."

Moore recalls that the hot rod crowd "was consumed emotionally and mentally with making those things go fast."

Glast said, "Everybody knew each other. It was a very social group of people. We had a club called the Odessa Quarter Masters and for a while we met at the Ector County Courthouse, but we had to move it because there were a couple of guys who weren't very comfortable being there."

Another name that keeps coming up in discussion of that era is Carl Goetz, who started out as a Ford man but was converted to Chevrolets. Glast recalls riding to Sioux City, Iowa, with Goetz for a match race. It was a long ride home towing the Odessa super stock entry because the Iowa racer swept the two-out-of-three match. Goetz ended up selling vehicles for Broncho Chevrolet. He died in 2002.

They did their share of street racing, usually on quarter-mile stretches of fairly isolated flat straight roads on the outskirts of town. But the serious competition came at the relatively few dragstrips in the area. Glast said the closest strip was in Hobbs, N.M. And there was one at Wall, east of San Angelo and another in Amarillo, making up a triangular circuit where natural rivalries developed.

Bradshaw remembers that his first race was on a road at the airport near where KMID-TV is located. And he still has his first trophy that he won with his '55 Chevy at Kermit.

He said, "I built a lot of engines and I'm pretty proud of them." He's also proud that "my son has taken my knowledge and brought it into the 21st century" with his drag racing exploits.

Bradshaw started a car club as well. It was called the Odessa Quarter Horses. When people would ask what horses had to do with cars, he'd reply, "We run a quarter of a mile at a time, and we are the hosses."

Every car nut from the 1950s had his or her reasons for their obsession. But the common denominators seem to be pride, competitive nature, potential profit motive and the accumulation of a lot of fond memories.

And, as Moore points out, "The old street rod thing is still alive." Must be, since Bradshaw is still bringing home trophies.