All of a sudden the parking lot stirs with commotion. People are talking, girls are squealing and pointing – something big is happening. You stand up and look out over your roof and the wildest car you have ever seen is burbling through the parking lot. Your eyes are hit with a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors. What is it? It has four headlights, an exotic square roof, fins, a hood scoop, bullets on the taillights, lakes pipes, spotlights, a brass plated mesh grille, a massive chrome bumper, and the craziest paint job that you have ever witnessed with some kind of silver stripes and candy purple boxes. This must be the most radical custom ever built. Who did it? Barris? Starbird? Winfield? Surely this is the work of a master. The girls are going crazy – reaching in the car like Elvis himself is driving. You find yourself in disbelief and awe. Who is that?

It comes to a stop and a local painter named Larry Watson gets out and stands up. You have just been introduced to the Vino Paisano and the custom car world will never be the same. This is the cutting edge and a defining moment.

Larry Watson was born in 1938. He grew up watching people like Barris and Von Dutch do their thing. Inspired after seeing Von Dutch’s pinstriping work, Larry decided to try it on his high school car, a ‘50 Chevy. Like most customs, it was a work in progress. It was nosed and decked and then customized with Merc taillights, ‘56 Olds headlights, and his signature scallops. He pinstriped a rose and a dragon on the dash, doing such a good job that kids in school thought it had been done by Von Dutch. Word got out that he could lay lines and soon others came by to let him work on their cars.

A friend asked him if he could do something about the paint runs on his ‘54 Chevy that a local shop had painted. Larry rented a spray gun and a compressor and taped off the affected areas into “scallops” adding more to the trunk to tie it all together and shot it right outside in his driveway. The next day he had a line of people waiting on him when he got home. He continued to paint cars in his driveway until his parents asked him to stop after getting complaints. Evidently the cars weren’t the only things getting painted. The neighbor’s laundry that was drying on the clothesline was also getting custom paint from the overspray. While you or I would probably be overjoyed to have even a single sock with Watson overspray from his early days, the neighbors didn’t quite see it the same way.

In 1955 he opened up a paint shop called “Watson’s House of Style” in North Long Beach. It wasn’t long before he had six employees working twelve hours a day, cranking out candy paint jobs, scallops, pinstriping, seaweed flames and more. Business boomed as magazines featured his latest cars and proclaimed him as the King of the Custom Painters.

His ‘50 Chevy had become known as the Grapevine and for many it remains as the definitive early Chevy custom. Larry sold it in 1958 for $1,500 and began looking for another ride. Many of his jobs were adding custom touches to brand new cars and he wanted to do the same. What he really wanted was a new Cadillac Brougham, but that was far too expensive. He eventually found himself at Downey Ford, looking at brochures for the newly redesigned Thunderbird. It was exotic, as if Detroit had been paying attention to the customized car scene. It was long and low, it had four headlights, small fins, and it even came with optional tuck-n-roll interior.

Larry told them to call him as soon as the first car with tuck-n-roll interior arrived. When it did he went down to take a look. The black and white interior was indeed tuck-n-roll, but the exterior was pink. The staff was shocked when he took it anyways, not knowing what he had in mind.

Immediately the coil springs were cut, dropping the car five inches and it was taken to George Barris’ shop. Employees Bill Hines and Bill DeCarr went to work shaving the emblems, rounding the corners, and replacing the door handles with electric solenoids and door poppers.

When it was ready it was taken to Watson’s for paint. The custom paint scene was in a state of experimentation. Painters fed off of each other as they worked out techniques and struggled to get materials to cooperate with their visions. Pushing the envelope, Watson decided to try something.

Watson sprayed the entire car in a silver Metallic with a mother of pearl made from imported ground fish scales and seashells which later he called his platinum pearl. He also skipped the usual transparent black toner. His visions of accenting the silver base came to a halt when he rolled it outside and into the sunshine. He decided it was much too bright and back in the booth it went.

He followed the bodylines with one and one quarter inch masking tape, and outlined his very first panel paint job in the process. He sprayed a special burgundy blended with purple toner mixed up by Joe Sheline and then pinstriped the edges. It’s rumored that he called the car Vino Paisano after a bottle of wine on a shelf in his shop. Others say it was due to the color, but in any event, the name stuck.

Three short weeks after taking delivery in early 1958 Larry Watson was driving his customized “squarebird.” The 1958 models were just starting to hit the showrooms and most folks didn’t have a clue that Ford was redesigning the T-bird into a four-seater. To the average person the Vino Paisano was the most exotic car they’d ever seen.

This ushered in a whole new era of “customizing with paint.” Detroit’s cars were wild in design, and moving results could be achieved by shaving the chrome, swapping the wheels or hubcaps, adding some accessories, and giving it a wild paint job. The eye could be tricked into thinking a car was radically customized with moving lines and colors. For custom shops, jobs moved along faster than chopping tops and building fadeaway fenders. Customization was in high gear and new cars were the hot ticket.

The candy pigments used in the late fifties were temperamental at best. The color was prone to fading in the sunlight and often required touch-ups or re-sprays. Watson’s T-bird wasn’t immune to this, either. To fix it, he masked off more panels within the panels and added more colors. This second version looked even wilder. As with most customs, it was eventually sold off so he could buy a new Cadillac.

Larry Watson continued to paint cars until he moved to Mexico in 1966 to pursue a career as a T.V. actor. He appeared on 141 shows between 1967 and 1985 working on episodes of Colombo, Mission Impossible, MacGyver and The Dukes of Hazzard.

The T-bird bounced around for a while before dropping out of sight. It’s rumored to have spent fifteen years disassembled in a body shop before being meticulously restored back to the original version with the help of Watson in 2000, who matched the paint and outlined the panels. It spent some time on display in the Peterson Museum and attending a few car shows.

The car went across the auction block in August of 2009. Trace Edwards and Riun Van Driessche purchased it then passed it onto Roger and Marie O’Dell who had a long time dream of owning the car. They are the current curators and have reunited it with Larry. It currently sits in his personal museum in the Southern California’s high dessert. Since the T-bird originally debuted in 1959 at the Renegade’s Car Show at the Long Beach Auditorium, Edwards and the O’Dells thought it fitting that the car re-debut in Long Beach at the return of “Showcase of Kustoms” which will be held at the Long Beach Arena in September of 2010. They will also be showing the car at various events around the country.

The Watson T-Bird can be viewed parked in front of Larry’s Downey shop front (Paramount Blvd.) in the lobby area of the Long Beach Sports Arena-All Weekend! Come down and see the Legendary T-Bird he created at the age 18, view the photo gallery of his Kustom history and pick up a copy of his latest book “Watson’s Kustoms’ with Cool Chicks & John Law”