Maybe you’ve heard of Carl Casper, maybe not – but chances are, he built some of the cars of your childhood.

Casper, the legendary builder, car show promoter and racer, is in Bowling Green this weekend to serve as grand marshal for the 18th Holley National Hot Rod Reunion at Beech Bend Raceway Park. The three-day Reunion, a major fundraiser for the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum in Pomona, Calif., ran from Thursday through Saturday night at Beech Bend.

On Friday night, Casper was among those celebrated during an honorees’ reception at the National Corvette Museum.

“The NHRA, the reason I’m here is because they have been the leader in safety in racing and just one of the finest organizations there is,” Casper said. “And the fact that since 1960 I was involved with them as just a kid, I’m still astounded by their organization and how they do it. And a person I got to know quite well was Wally Parks, who is the founder of NHRA.

“And so the reason that I’m here is to hopefully raise money for the museum they have in California and I want to help them raise every dollar they can.”

Casper, a Flint, Mich., native who started building custom cars at age 19, has enjoyed a long and successful career as a designer, builder, craftsman, promoter, restorer and racer.

Perhaps best known in Kentucky for the Carl Casper Custom Auto Show held every February in Louisville for 55 years (1963-2017), Casper made the Louisville stop his very last show before retiring from promoting in 2017.

“It was tremendous,” Casper said. “They just humble the daylights out of you. Of course my favorite spot in the country – and this is a guy who’s been to California, everywhere – is Kentucky. I like the people.”

Casper first came to prominence as a teen when his 1951 Chevrolet dubbed the Exotic Empress won best of show at Detroit’s Autorama at Cobo Hall, then claimed Top Custom at the NHRA’s 1961 Nationals Show in Indianapolis. That came a year after he entered his first show – and didn’t win.

“I went to Detroit, I was a teenager and I entered the show – they were giving away a new car – and I didn’t win best of show, so I didn’t get the car,” Casper said. “I got third place in my class, very disappointed, but it humbled me. I realized we’ve got some work to do.”

Following his breakthrough success with the Exotic Empress, Casper next built The Undertaker. A modified roadster for both showing and racing, The Undertaker took the Sweepstakes at the 1963 NHRA Nationals Show and would be the first of many Casper builds turned into model kits.

Following the success of his next build – Casper’s Ghost, a roadster that won the Sweepstakes at the 1964 NHRA Nationals Show, the Rod Championship at the 1965 Winternationals show and the title of America’s Most Beautiful Roadster at the Oakland Roadster Show – Casper turned his attention to promoting custom car shows in cities throughout the U.S.

“So now I was really on my way,” Casper said. “I pretty much retired from competition, and then I started producing shows. Then between producing, co-producing and partnering I basically did over a thousand shows over a 50-year period. We were doing about 30 to 35 shows a year – New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Phoenix – you name it. There’s about roughly 35 to 45 primo cities in America that have the massive population.”

It was during one of those early shows in Akron that Casper got a call from a representative from Aurora Plastics about an idea he’d unsuccessfully pitched to create a line of monster-inspired concept cars to tie in with the company’s deal with Universal Studios to develop monster-themed models.

“I’m in Dayton doing my first show and the phone rings, and they say, ‘Hey, that crazy idea you had … we’re starting production Monday. We’ve got a guy coming in on a plane and he wants all your drawings,’” Casper said. “And I said, ‘You told me it was stupid, so they’re all in my head. I didn’t even bother to lay them out.”

Given a three-day deadline while still working on the car show, Casper got the concept drawings done in time. Aurora sold more than a million of the Casper-designed models ranging from Dracula’s Dragster to the Wolfman’s Wagon – those original kits, priced at 99 cents, now sell anywhere from $750 to $3,000 apiece, Casper said.

Casper also dove into racing, finding his greatest success as a builder and owner in the 1970s with the Young American, a Top Fuel dragster driven by Danny Ongais that beat drag racing legend “Big Daddy” Don Garlits in head-to-head matchups at the 1970 NHRA Supernationals.

While many of Casper’s car designs might be instantly recognizable to model-kit builders and drag racing fans, it’s his work in Hollywood that likely has garnered the most widespread recognition of his work. Casper’s first job building cars for film stemmed from the contacts he’d made booking celebrities for his car shows.

“I think probably the most famous would be the movie and TV cars,” Casper said. “I got a phone call from a friend of mine – I was of course always dealing with Hollywood, booking celebrities and actors and actresses. And I got a call and he said, ‘Hey, we’re over here at Warner Brothers and they’ve got this show coming out and it’s called ‘The Dukes of Hazzard.’ And I said, ‘Dukes of Hazzard … uh, dukes? Is this like a medieval show?

“He said, ‘No, it’s a bunch of hillbillies running around with a car called the General Lee’ and this, this and that.”

Casper took the job to build a fleet of General Lees for show, and also worked out a deal with Warner Brothers Studio to show the cars around the world.

“Believe it or not, it just became a major hit – it was just unbelievable,” Casper said. “People in Europe, people in Australia, South America and throughout the United States – it was just a major hit. People loved it.”

Casper was soon churning out builds of iconic Hollywood vehicles – among them the Pontiac Firebird Trans Am known as K.I.T.T. from “Knight Rider” and the van for “The A-Team,” then was tasked with building the Batmobile for the Tim Burton-directed 1989 film “Batman.” Casper followed up as the Batmobile builder for the 1992 sequel “Batman Returns.”

“We had a good relationship with Warner Brothers, so they agreed to work with us to have the rights to tour the country and the world and everywhere with them, so we built them,” Casper said. “And then when “Batman Returns” came up, they needed three cars for that movie. So we built three for the actual movie. So they became very important, and on the tour they were just huge, massive successes.”

“… It was a great ride – a lot of fun, a lot of excitement. Just very popular. Our shows set attendance records everywhere. And it was a wonderful thing.”

Casper still stays active, occasionally taking on a car build but focusing more now on his painting and sculptures. Even know, he said, he still works a half-day – that’s 12 hours, in Casper’s reckoning.

“I was flat broke, so I thought, hmm, you make a living with your back, you make money with your brain,” Casper said of his early career. “So I started realizing designing and the creative arts is really an attractive career. And the other thing I realized is that if you can somehow, some way make your passion your vocation, you can actually say you never worked a day in your life. You played.

“So I feel like I’ve played all my life – I try to keep it a secret.”{&end}