There was a time when custom car culture was as mainstream as professional sports. Back in the 1960s, custom car shows were huge events that hundreds of thousands of people saw over the course of a weekend, and the promotion that went into them was incredible. That’s the story behind the Zingers, a collection of cars built solely for promotional purposes, partially by a custom car builder not long out of his teens.

Chuck Miller’s first car was a 1950 Ford Coupe he picked up at the tender age of 15. “I paid $35 for it,” says Chuck today. “I finished it when I was about 18.” When Chuck finished it, Larry and Mike Alexander — the A Brothers — took a huge interest in the car that the young Chuck Miller built. Mike and Larry ended up photographing the car for a magazine. “I was 18 when my first car was in  a magazine. That was cool back then. I started doing different cars of my own.”

In 1968, Chuck built the Fire Truck, a C-cab Model T-based rig that perfectly blended every “every young man’s enthusiasm for fire equipment, the booming T-bucket craze and the enduring popularity of the early ‘C-Cab’ Model T trucks.” It was the kind of show car that people bought tickets to see. It won the prestigious Ridler Award for 1967.

It’s hard to fathom now how much juice came with winning that award. Don Ridler was the first professional promoter hired by the Michigan Hot Rod Association to assist them with the fledgling Autorama in the fifties. In 1963, Autorama decided to honor Don Ridler, who had prematurely passed away, with an award given in his name.

Miller’s Fire Truck split the A Brothers’ wins in 1967 and 1969 for the staggeringly cool Dodge Deora and the T-Bucket-based Top Banana in 1969.

The Fire Truck’s enormous popularity — it sold for $55,000 in 2012 at RM’s Arizona sale — cemented Chuck Miller’s Styleline Customs as a builder of killer custom cars. His next project directed his path toward building the cars that would inspire a generation of car geeks.

Around the time Miller was showing the Fire Truck, Tom Daniel was designing a wild custom car of his own, only in 1:24 scale.  Monogram Models commissioned Daniel to build his second model for the company, the insanely cool Red Baron, a T-Bucket-inspired hot rod with a German helmet for a roof and a six-cylinder aircraft engine for power. It capitalized not only on the hot rod craze, but on the popularity of Peanuts, and the song Snoopy vs. The Red Baron, which the Royal Guardsmen sent to number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in December of 1966.

In 1969, Bob Larivee contracted Chuck Miller to build a life-size version of the Red Baron for use by Promotions, Inc., which was just getting its start promoting some of the biggest car shows in the country. By the 1980s, Promotions, Inc. would be producing over a hundred car shows across the country, but the popularity of specialty-built cars like the Red Baron really put Larivee — and Chuck Miller’s Styleline Customs — on the map.

Topping the popularity of the Red Baron was a challenge, but Chuck Miller was up for it. Model car manufacturers MPC produced a wild line of custom cars called Zingers in 1971. Larivee thought that with a whole line of full-scale Zingers, he’d have the kind of attention for Promotions, Inc. that the Red Baron had drawn years before.

“It took about two months,” says Chuck Miller, to construct the four Zinger full-scale cars he built. Actually, they’re a half-scale version of  real cars, but with full-sized engines blasting out of the hood. The first was a Volkswagen. “We built a clay model, just like an auto manufacturer’s studio would,” according to Miller. They ended up with a fiberglass Volkswagen that was either a half-scale or a quarter-scale model, depending on how you look at it. End-to-end, side-to-side and top-to-bottom, two Volkswagen Zingers fit in the space of a full-scale Volkswagen.

Miller also built a “1970-ish” Corvette, a Dodge A100 van, and a semi-rig based on a GMC Astro 95 Class 8 cabover. The Dune Buggy was built by Steve Tanzy, and the the ’57 Chevy and the A100 pickup in the original MPC ad were never built.

All of the Zingers were simply rolling models. None of the engines functioned. “We stripped all the guts out of the engine,” he says. They had no cranks or pistons, and were — in Miller’s words — “a rolling engine stand.”

Lots of parts came in from Cragar, which loved to have their name plastered all over the cars as thousands of fans walked past. Goodyear also provide the 15×15 Indy tires on the rear. The Zingers that Miller built had tongues built on the front axle to make hauling them around easier.

The Zingers went on to become some of the most incredibly popular custom cars of the 1970s. A few are still around, though the A100 van sold at auction in Auburn, Indiana and has never resurfaced, and a second version of the Corvette that Holley commissioned was destroyed in transport when it got loose in the back of a truck.

Miller sold Styleline Customs to protege Mike Kieliszek a few years back. In recent years, Miller was honored with inductions into the Detroit Autorama Circle of Champions, Hall of Fame North at the St. Ignace Straits Area Antique Auto Show, Kustom Kemps of America Hall of Fame and Darryl Starbird’s Hall of Fame. The most recent honors are to be chosen Builder of the Year at the Detroit Autorama in 2010. He’s written a book, which is available on his website.