>1 (800) Chopper
"Tom came in one day and said something about making a catalog," Tex said. "I knew what he wanted so we created Chopper Guide. It was a big, perfect-bound sales catalog that happened to have how-to and feature articles stuck in it."
If Street Chopper was the prototype biker magazine (remember, it existed prior to Easyriders), Chopper Guide was the catalog to end all. It was 300 pages total, 200 of which were catalog and 100 editorial. "Plus the catalog was full of topless women as well," Steve Stillwell revealed.
And it was a hit. "We put that on the newsstand for $1.75," Jim said. "We sold 50,000 copies out of the 100,000 run, so we made a ton of money off it and sold a ton of parts. "Tom couldn't believe that he was getting people to pay him for a catalog and still get them to buy product from them," Steve said. What's more, Chopper Guide meant that Street Chopper opened up to include others' ads, which meant more money yet.
The catalog and magazine empire bumped AEE and TRM into a new 10,000-foot commercial building on Via Burton in Placentia. "The last place was an absolute hole," Dave said. "It was a wooden building and I can't tell you how many times the guys in the welding shop caught the place on fire."
"I mean it just exploded," Dave said, invoking an ironic metaphor. "If my memory serves me right we sold $1.6 million on the books, and in the early '70s that was an incredible amount of money. Of course what the government didn't know was all the money that came out under the table. The business just went phenomenal because of the magazine."
They say if you're poor you're crazy but if you're rich you're eccentric. Well money made Tom the Robert Ripley of the publishing world. He started indulging his fantasies with the AEE Choppers revenue. For example, sometime in 1968 he bought a lion. Robert K "RK" Smith-who helped found Truckin' magazine and later on went to Hot VWs magazine where he works to this day-waxed nostalgic.
"Oh Boomer," he exclaimed. "I basically raised him in the back of my shipping room (at the Whitaker shop). I'd take him with me as a passenger in the company van to go get parts. Tom gave me a battery cable with an end on it, and every time he started jumping on me or acting up, I'd just hit him over the top of the head and tell him to stop.
Jim Clark chimed in. "Ford gave us a '64 van for a Popular Hot Rodding project. (Tom) parked it in his driveway and had barbed wire around the yard. He left the back doors open so the lion could get in during the night." Apparently one night someone tried to steal the van's wheels. "Well the lion must've come out to play because there was a big section of barbed wire torn down where someone scrambled over the fence rapidly and there was a wheel laying there on the ground where he left it," Jim said.
Brian Brennan, who came on in 1971 and who runs Street Rodder today, fondly recalled the two cougars, Spoke and Cibié (as in the lights), that Tom bought in 1969 or 1970. "When they were kittens they'd run around the office," he said. "Of course these are 40-to-60-pound kittens. I used to go down to Demmler Chicks in Anaheim and buy chicken necks by the bag. That's where the early TRM Publishing logo came from."