The Dave Ellis Photo Collection

Larry Craig's 1957 Cadillac with members of the Sultans of Long Beach car club. Craig, a custom car painter who rented Larry Watson's old shop in Paramount, painted the car himself and had hydraulic lifts installed all the way around. By the time this photo was taken, the car had been sold to Sultans member Gary Reynolds. Photo courtesy of Dave Ellis.

The Dave Ellis Collection is a collection of custom car and hot rod memorabilia assembled by Dave Ellis (ca. 1949 – January 2023) of Apple Valley, California. Over the course of his life, Dave built one of the most extensive private collections of automotive memorabilia in Southern California, with an emphasis on highway transportation advertising and car club culture.

Background

Dave started collecting at the age of five or six, when his mother, who worked as a cashier at a restaurant in Long Beach, began bringing home 1:25 scale promotional model cars from car guys she knew. He grew up in the Long Beach and Bellflower area and spent his teenage years hanging around Gene's Muffler in Paramount and Larry Watson's paint shop across the driveway, where he watched the Southern California custom car scene up close from the age of 14.

The Collection

At the time of his death in 2023, the collection included over 150 photo albums documenting the Southern California car scene, business cards from multiple eras (including several Larry Watson cards), car show discount coupons, stickers, water slide decals, an original full-size car show poster featuring Sonny and Cher and Rat Fink, AMT model car club memorabilia, and items signed by George Barris.

Dave collected car club plaques from across the United States. His interest in plaques started when he visited the original Service Center in Compton as a boy, where the entire back wall behind the sales counter was covered with car club plaques from all over Southern California. He collected license plates from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. in 1949, his birth year, and was working on finding matching dealer frames for all of them. His license plate frame collecting started at age 15, when he worked as a lot boy at Parkwood Chevrolet in Lakewood and saved the frames he removed from trade-in cars instead of throwing them away.

Dave's water slide decal collection started at Lion's Drag Strip, where he bought decals at ten cents each every Saturday night as a kid. The collection also included pinstriping art, gas pumps, oil cans, neon signs, a 1015 Wurlitzer jukebox, movie posters, and menus from old car hop restaurants.

Dave also had copies of Norwalk Coachmen car show films from 1955 and 1957, shot at Norwalk High School. The films were in color and included aerial footage taken from a helicopter. They showed Keith Christensen handing out trophies as a teenager, Big Daddy Roth's shop pickup, Norman Grabowski's first T-bucket, and all the Renegades club cars.

Apple Valley

After moving to Apple Valley, Dave enlarged his garage and turned his home into a showcase for his collection. "From gas pumps to jukeboxes to oil cans and car parts, his collection soon became the envy of many out-of-town collectors," Keith Christensen wrote. "The trading and selling of vintage items became a retirement avocation for him."

Dave hosted an annual barbecue at his home that drew 75 to 80 people of all ages. "Just to see people when they walk into my building or walk into my house and they look around and they get a smile on their face," Dave said. "That makes it all worthwhile."

"I don't wanna leave stuff in boxes. Nobody can enjoy it. I can't enjoy it," Dave explained. "That's the thing about collecting, especially when you collect advertisement. If you can't display the stuff, I mean what's the use in having it?"