George Barris, designer of Batmobile and other custom cars, dies at 89

The “Kustom City” of 1960s North Hollywood housed a veritable gallery of cars, from Studebakers with restyled hoods to a car without a single straight line. They were all created and conceived by the era’s undisputed king of automobile customization: a spry Greek American man who liked to replace his C’s with K’s.

This was, of course, the linguistic habit of the culture associated with custom cars and hot rods at that time. But George Barris knew, ruled and in many ways defined that culture better than almost anyone else, starting with the first uses of the idiosyncratic letter K. The mecca of custom cars was “Barris Kustom City” — purveyor of “Kandy Kolors” and “Kandy Lac” paint.

Barris Kustom spokesman Edward Lozzi told the Associated Press that Mr. Barris died Nov. 5 at his home in Los Angeles at 89. The cause was cancer.

Mr. Barris started his first business, “Kustoms Car Club,” when he was in high school, after he and older brother Sam restored and sold a 1926 Buick. Their first custom car was a profitable one — and a telling precursor to the original Batmobile, the Munsters’ Koach and other star-studded vehicles that Mr. Barris designed.

The Barris name was synonymous with cutting-edge car customization and innovative design. His customers, apprentices and numerous admirers regarded his products as the highest art — and he as the most deft artist.

He was born George Salapatas on Nov. 20, 1925, to Greek immigrants in Chicago. After his mother died when he was 3, his father sent George and his brother to be raised by relatives in Roseville, Calif. An uncle, John Barakaris, Americanized the family’s name to Barris shortly after the boys’ arrival.
Although Mr. Barris was expected to enter the family’s restaurant business, his penchant for tinkering with cars was apparent early on. Kustom lore tells of a 7-year-old who made model cars and airplanes out of balsa wood; a 9-year-old who won prizes for construction and design; a 13-year-old who used knobs from his aunt’s dresser to customize the grille of his first car.
When Mr. Barris was 18, he moved to Los Angeles, where a dynamic teen car culture was beginning to emerge.
This was the difference between Barris’s story and that of other enterprising rags-to-riches kids, according to writer Tom Wolfe, who made Mr. Barris a central character in his essay collection “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.”
Mr. Barris’s work was deeply entangled with — and contributed immensely to — the rich mythology of a particular time and place.
“We’re . . . in the buried netherworld of teenage Californians,” Wolfe wrote, “and those objects, those cars, they have to do with the gods and the spirit and a lot of mystic stuff in the community.”
World War II had made cars hard to come by, so teenagers made custom-built cars from parts that they scavenged from junkyards into which few adults ventured. These vehicles were “mostly roadsters [open-top cars with two seats],” Wolfe recounted, but also “a lot of radical, hopped-up engines.”

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