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History
The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Automotive Industries page on 1 September 2019, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Edelbrock, LLC is an American corporation engaged in the design, development and manufacture of specialty automotive and motorcycle parts. The company is headquartered in Torrance, California along with its R&D, manufacturing, distribution and Russell Performance Plumbing divisions. The Edelbrock Sand Cast and Permanent Mold foundries are located in San Jacinto, California, and the Carburetor Division is based in Sanford, North Carolina.
Vic Edelbrock founded the corporation in 1938 when his desire to increase the performance of his 1932 Ford Roadster led him to design a new intake manifold, friends and fellow drivers soon wanted one as well. This transformed his repair garage into a parts manufacturing enterprise, making one-of-a-kind equipment for automobiles.
Vic Edelbrock Sr. was born in a small farming community of Eudora, Kansas in 1913. After the family grocery store burned down in 1927, he left school at the age of 14 to help support the family by ferrying Model T Fords from Wichita to the many outlying farms in the area. The frequent stops to replace parts that shook loose on the region's dirt roads made him an expert at impromptu repair work. Soon after, he found work in a local repair shop, working as an auto mechanic in a local repair shop.
When the Great Depression hit in 1931, Edelbrock went to California to live with his brother, Carl. Initially, he moved in with his brother and took a job as an auto mechanic. In order to earn some extra money to open his own repair shop, Edelbrock took an evening job in downtown Los Angeles parking cars at a large apartment complex. It was a chance encounter at this parking complex where he bumped into the 19-year-old Irish woman, Katherine (Katie) Collins, who was working as a day maid. Despite the fact that Katie was engaged, Edelbrock convinced her to give him a chance and not marry her fiancé. Vic and Katie married in June 1933, just eight weeks after meeting.
As a 22-year-old, Edelbrock teamed up with his new brother-in-law to open his first automobile repair shop on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Business flourished and in 1934 Edelbrock moved into his own shop on the corner of Venice Blvd and Hoover in Los Angeles. Business continued to grow rapidly and he moved his shop three more times in the 1930s. In 1936, Katie Edelbrock gave birth to Vic, Jr., the couple's only child.
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Tarantula/Torker Popular Hot Rodding, July 1972 View Edelbrock Torker Advertisement - 3,549KB |
