Leon the Motorman, Mechanic to the Stars & Chevy 409 History

Leon the Motorman: 44 Years on the Los Angeles Airwaves

When Rick from the California Rifle and Pistol Association was driving to Sacramento for the night, the whole show became Motor Slingers, the format built for anything that hums, purrs, moves people, or flies. Leon the Motorman and George the Airplane Man took up the full two hours alongside Jeff and Jimmy, and the phone lines stayed busy from first break to last.

Leon’s 44 years on the Los Angeles airwaves is a number that takes a moment to sit with. He started as a guest on other shows, got good at it, and eventually earned his own program. Jeff has his own proof: a 1955 Chevy that quit on the side of the road, a call to Leon, and a diagnosis in about 30 seconds. Out of gas. Parked right outside a gas station. The conversation was brief and the car was running again in minutes. Forty-four years of that, coast to coast, and Leon describes the whole run the same way every time. A love affair with the work and the people on the other end of the line.

The Gunslingers also came into this episode with about seven years of their own show behind them, and the comparison to Leon’s run is something they take seriously. You reach a point where taking Easter Sunday off leaves you unsure what to do with yourself at three in the afternoon.

California’s Roads and Leon’s Move to Scottsdale

The unanimous verdict on California’s roads is not kind, and nobody in the studio disagreed. Potholes are eating shock absorbers and bending rims, and the front suspension costs are showing up in repair bills that drivers never budgeted for. Leon put it directly: the state should be paying for car repairs at this point. Hit enough bad stretches over a year and you are subsidizing deferred maintenance with your own vehicle.

The contrast with Orange County is visible from the road. Cross the county line and the pavement quality changes immediately on essentially the same tax dollar. Newport Beach roads are smooth. The disparity is hard to explain in terms of policy. Speed bumps go in with good fresh asphalt while potholes sit unpatched for years a block away. The suggestion was simple: take one speed bump’s worth of material and fill a pothole with it instead. Canyon roads have deteriorated badly enough that a driver who has run a particular route hundreds of times can get carsick on it now. The problem is statewide, and one of the hosts noted that Iran had recently surpassed Los Angeles as the holder of the worst roads ranking.

Leon made a personal announcement during this segment: he is moving to Scottsdale, Arizona, to be near his daughter and grandkids. He has lived in his same house for 55 years. The Motor Slingers format will continue through a Zoom arrangement worked out with Kevin, and when Leon comes back to Southern California to see his other kids, he will come into the studio in person. His hangar at the airport stays, and so does his plane. His Triumph motorcycle, however, is listed on Facebook Marketplace by his son Lance. Two kids remain in California, so Scottsdale is not a permanent departure. It is a headquarters change.

One of the Gunslingers had a direct encounter with the consequences of bad pavement on the way to the studio that night. A motorcycle went down on the 10 freeway near the toll lanes, and the rider ended up curled on the pavement. The right move was a dead stop with hazards on, holding traffic back long enough for another biker who pulled over to help the downed rider clear the lane. Everyone got out, but it was a close thing. The Gunslingers noted that experienced riders, people who have been on motorcycles since childhood and raced them across the country, are now leaving their bikes parked because the roads have gotten that bad.

Holster Carry: Cross Draw vs. Strong Side

Richard from Whiteman Airport called in to thank Leon for 44 years on the air, then put a clean question to Jeff: holster carry position, butt forward or butt rearward?

Jeff’s answer was clear. The preference is strong side with the butt pointing toward the rear, which is the conventional forward draw. Cross draw has legitimate advocates and works in specific situations, particularly for vehicle carry where a standard draw from the strong hip is mechanically awkward. But it demands its own dedicated training to run cleanly under pressure. A cross-body draw arc is longer and the muzzle has to travel through more of a sweep before it clears the holster and comes onto target. Jeff is capable with either hand, but for his setup the strong-side forward draw is the right configuration.

The Helms Bakery Truck and a Possible Tucker Radiator Cap

Jeff had been to the Pomona swap meet that afternoon, which is where he picked up the shirt he was wearing for the show. He ran into a man named Phil who had a late-1940s Helms Bakery delivery truck in good shape. Phil bought it from someone Leon had actually worked on the car with, and that previous owner had moved on to build something different.

Helms Bakery ran delivery routes through Southern California neighborhoods from 1931 until they closed in 1969. The bakery was headquartered in Culver City, and Leon remembered the whole town smelling like the operation when he first arrived in California years ago. Everything was baked, not fried. The donuts were hand-glazed and came out the size of a dinner plate, priced at a nickel. The trucks worked set routes and would stop in front of houses on request. A placard in the window flagged the driver, who would come around to the back of the truck, pull out the wooden drawers stocked with baked goods, and take orders. For custom items like birthday cakes, customers arranged in advance and the truck delivered on the day.

Phil’s truck still had the original whistle. Leon explained the construction: two Helms pipe plates with a rubber diaphragm between them and a small handle on the side. The horn mechanism sat underneath in the engine compartment. Simple in design, and the sound it made when he heard it again that afternoon brought the whole era back immediately.

Later in the show, Nicole in Culver City called in with a related puzzle. She has a heavy glass object on a metal base with tread on it. Someone told her it was a hood ornament or radiator cap for one of the long-hooded cars from the 1930s or 1940s. It is a glass fish, clear and possibly crystal, weighing about four pounds, with a hole on one side that may have been a vent or tube connection. Leon identified the Tucker automobile as one that used a glass fish radiator ornament, making it a potential match if the provenance holds. Czech Bohemian glass car ornaments from the same period also fit the description. The Tucker Owners Club and marque-specific collectors’ clubs are the right channels for identification and authentication. The Petersen Automotive Museum has a research library that could also help narrow it down. If it turns out to be a Tucker part, Gunslinger Auctions would be glad to take a look at it for consignment.

The Chevy 409: From Truck Engine to American Muscle Icon

Butch in La Habra opened with the 409 question and Leon answered. The engine’s origins were in trucks. Chevrolet built it heavy and large for commercial applications, then recognized what the engine could do in a performance configuration and adapted it for passenger cars. Fitted with dual four-barrel carburetors and solid lifters, it became one of the hottest tickets on the drag strip. Butch himself had put a supercharger on one in a dragboat and found out what the platform was capable of. Everybody wanted one, he said, and that was not an overstatement.

The 409 was available in the Impala starting with the 1961 model year and ran through 1962 as the most desirable pairing. The 1962 bubble-top with a 409 and a four-speed is one of the iconic combinations of that era. Butch asked about the 1964 and 1965 Impalas specifically, and Leon confirmed that a 1965 Impala with a 409 is genuinely rare. By that point Chevrolet was already transitioning to the 396 big block and the 409 was being phased out of passenger car applications. The 1965 had moved to a sleeker long-body style while the 1964 retained the boxier shape, and a 409 in that final year is a configuration most collectors have never seen in person.

One reason the 409 never completely displaced the small block was mass. It was a heavy engine, and Chevrolet kept developing the small block line in parallel. The 265, the 283, and the 327 were all making legitimate power without the weight penalty, and by the time the 327 was producing competitive numbers, the 409’s heft was a real disadvantage in anything where power-to-weight mattered. Leon built engines for a living and understood the tradeoff clearly. He still keeps a 327 in his 1965 Malibu. It starts every time and gets him where he needs to go.

Kirk on Facebook summarized the general sentiment: if it is not a 409, it better be a 427. The Gunslingers didn’t argue the point. The Beach Boys put the 409 on the cultural map in 1962 and it has not left. Butch closed by asking about the K11 Sperry gun sight from a B-24 nose turret, which opened up a parallel thread for George about flex-mounted .50 calibers in the nose compartment versus fixed guns on the B-25. On Motor Slingers, the distance between a drag racing engine and Pacific air combat is exactly one phone call.

T-Birds at Barrett-Jackson: From a Father’s Show Car to John Travolta

Frank in Tacoma called in with two connected Thunderbird stories. His father restored a 1955 T-Bird and entered it in concourse events around the Los Angeles area for years, winning about a dozen trophies. The car was not a trailer queen. His father drove it to shows, drove it home, and took it to club events. It was a real driver. After his father passed, the family eventually sold it. The buyer, according to Frank, was John Travolta, who was living in Carpinteria, California at the time. Travolta owns a turquoise 1955 Thunderbird and Frank was not certain whether it is the same car, but the timing and geography line up.

The second story came from another member of the same club, the Early Birds of Southern California. A man named George Watts owned the first production 1955 Ford Thunderbird. Ford confirmed it in writing. When Watts passed away, the car went to Barrett-Jackson, where it became the highest-selling car at that auction. Documented first-production provenance backed by the factory is about as clean as the paperwork on a collectible vehicle gets, and it showed in the final price.

Leon came at T-Birds from the shop side. When he finished trade school and went to work for a Lincoln-Mercury dealer, the Ford dealers in the area would not touch the early Thunderbirds. All of that service came to him instead. He found them uncomplicated to work on, with the possible exception of pulling the transmission, and he loved the cars. He also has a 1955 T-Bird of his own, one that came to him through a roundabout purchase from a well-known comedian’s brother. The comedian was a heavyset man and someone had retrofitted a tilt steering column out of a 1969 Chevelle to fit him comfortably. The result is a 1955 Ford with a steering column that reads Chevelle. It makes no sense, and that is probably what makes it worth telling.

The 1955 T-Bird ran a six-volt electrical system while the 1956 and 1957 models switched to 12 volts. The 1955 came with a 292-cubic-inch engine; the 56 and 57 got the 312. The 312-equipped cars had a passing gear that would pin you to the seat under hard acceleration, the back end squatting and the car just running. Leon recalled a 1956 with a Continental spare tire kit that was a genuinely enjoyable car at speed.

Mechanic to the Stars: Leon’s Hollywood Customer List

The second hour opened with the question the audience had been waiting for since the show started. Leon the Motorman, mechanic to the stars. He did not manufacture that title. It followed him from his shop into his public speaking and national radio work, and it fit because the list was real. He was not star-struck by any of it, which he said plainly and without false modesty. His technicians did the work. He ran the operation. The customers happened to be famous, and he treated them the same way he treated everyone else who brought a car in.

Loretta Young was his first customer when he opened the shop. She had been with him at previous locations and followed him to the new place. Judge Wapner was also an early customer. Leon worked through the list without embellishment. Michael Jackson the radio personality had a Rolls-Royce that came in regularly. Jack Lemmon was a customer who later wrote Leon a letter, a real letter. Bob Cummings came by every day for lunch and was an active aviator who owned a flying car based on the Cley body design. Leon has photos of Cummings flying it over the San Fernando Valley. Jean Peters, who was Howard Hughes’s wife, would come sit at the shop while Leon’s team worked on her car. On mornings when Leon stopped by her house to pick up her vehicle, she would invite him in for coffee. Phyllis Diller drove an Excalibur, lived off Sunset Boulevard, and was, by Leon’s description, a real character. Leon was the factory-recommended technician for Excalibur in the region, so her cars came to him by default.

Sammy Davis Jr. was a friend and called Leon at home about Rolls-Royce problems. Davis also appeared twice on The Rifleman, once as a timid man and once as a gunfighter who Lucas McCain had to shoot, which puts him on both sides of the show’s format equation. Dean Martin was an occasional customer. Leon used to drive past Frank Sinatra’s house on the way to Dean Martin’s place. Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s son, was a real good friend and recently passed away. Leon has photographs of himself with Ronald Reagan.

Dolly Parton was doing a television series and living in Los Angeles at the time, and every time she came into the shop, work stopped. Every technician put down whatever he was doing. Complete silence. Leon had to apologize and ask her to get back in the car before the shop could function again. He said it with full affection and zero exaggeration.

Evel Knievel came in twice, driving a Cadillac El Camino. Steve Martin was on the customer list. Shirley Jones and Marty Ingels were customers. Ricardo Montalban was on the list. Johnny Mack Brown, the old Western film actor who worked across the street, was a regular. Mickey Rooney. George Hamilton came in a couple of times in an old 1944 or 1948 Ford. James Earl Jones asked Leon once why he had never requested an autograph. Most of them were nice people. A few were not worth having back. He did not name the second group.

One chapter from the period that had nothing to do with cars: in the 1980s, NASA was running a civilian-in-space selection program and Leon was among the 100 candidates narrowed from a field of thousands. Letters of support came from Jack Lemmon and Michael Jackson the radio personality, among others. He had done enough radio about the program to build real visibility with the selection committee and was prepared to travel to Texas and Florida for training. The Challenger disaster in January 1986 ended the civilian program entirely. NASA sent him a plaque thanking him for his participation. He kept it. He was ready to go.

Shop Talk: Transmission Fluid, Tire Rotation and the 1971 Duster

Sean in Covina came in with two practical maintenance questions. First: is tire rotation on modern vehicles necessary, or is it a scam? The answer depends on the car. For vehicles with matching tire sizes on all four corners, rotation is a legitimate service that extends tread life and evens out wear across the set. Many late-model performance vehicles and some standard cars come with staggered fitments, meaning different sizes front and rear. On those cars, rotation is simply not possible because the tires are directional or profile-specific. The result is that performance tires on staggered platforms wear individually and get replaced one at a time rather than as a set. When the geometry of the car allows it, rotate them. It is worth doing.

Sean’s second question was about transmission fluid. The old conventional wisdom said to drain the pan and refill it, and not to flush. Leon walked through the history. Draining the pan replaces roughly half the total fluid at best because the torque converter and the cooler lines hold the rest. Put four quarts of clean fluid into a transmission that holds eight to nine quarts and you are blending new oil with old. The reason people were cautious about complete flushes was the older cellular seal design inside transmissions. Those seals would get hard and brittle when the fluid degraded, and if you flushed clean fluid through a marginal transmission, the change in fluid chemistry could accelerate a failure that was already coming. Modern transmission seals are a different material entirely and do not have the same sensitivity. Flush machines available today connect to the cooler lines and push clean fluid through until everything is replaced. Leon recommends the full flush when the equipment is available. It is the better service.

Randy in La Puente was working with a friend on a 1971 Plymouth Duster with a 340. The car had been parked for a long time and the question was whether to bring it back with the original intake manifold and a Holley carburetor, or step up to electronic fuel injection to address the ethanol content in current pump gas. Leon’s recommendation was unambiguous: keep it original. The 340 Duster is a collectible. An EFI retrofit requires significant electronics work and changes the character of a car that has real value in its original configuration. A well-tuned carb on a properly rebuilt 340 is not a compromise, and the car will hold and likely gain value as an original. Stay with the 340 and get the carburetor right.

Craig in Anaheim had owned a 1957 Chevy truck for 47 years and came in with a build question. He has two 265-cubic-inch engines from 1956 and 1957 truck applications, two 283s, and a 327, and wanted to know which direction to go. The options were stock with the 265 and a two-barrel, up to the 283 with a four-barrel, or the 327 with three two-barrel carburetors. The truck is a deluxe configuration with chrome bumper, stainless steel window molding, and a four-speed hydramatic, and it is rare enough that Craig can only find a handful on the internet. Leon said 327 without hesitation. Three deuces. Corvette valve covers. It will look stock from the outside and give a very different experience when the hood comes up.

44 Years on the Air: Leon’s Radio Career

Dan in Fullerton called in with a specific memory. The first time he heard Leon on the radio was in the mid-1970s as a guest on the Ken Minyard and Bob Arthur morning show at KABC. He was doing three or four minutes at a time back then, and even in that format Dan remembered thinking the guy should have his own program. The car knowledge was complete and came through clean in the room. Leon could not be stumped on a question, and in live radio that is not a small thing.

Leon came into broadcasting with no formal training. Elmer Deals got him started as a guest on a motor segment. He was invited back. Michael Jackson the radio personality started having him on regularly after that, and so did Dennis Prager. He was learning the craft in real time from some of the best radio personalities working in the country at that moment, and he absorbed everything he could during commercial breaks. Forty-four years later, the result speaks for itself. His own show ran 44 years. He was there at KABC when it was the number one billing station in the United States. He worked alongside the people who taught him and then outlasted most of them on the air.

Dan had a period-accurate story to share. October 1973, the Arab oil embargo, and he needed to get to an 8:00 class at Whittier College. His Volkswagen Beetle was running on vapors. He drove down Lambert Road in Whittier and could see the line of cars backed up at the Powerine station from a distance. He was about 30 cars back. He shut the engine off and pushed the Beetle the last eighth of a mile to hold his place in the queue, waited until a spot opened at the pump apron, and made it to the station before it ran dry. His son, when Dan told him the story recently, could not process that it had actually happened. Dan’s point was straightforward: energy independence matters, and a generation that has never seen it fail does not understand what the alternative looked like.

Marilyn called in from Hawaii. She had been a regular listener for years and called in to say so. Her first car was a 1968 fire-engine-red Chevelle with a 327, and by her account it moved. The car met its end at the back of a snowplow in Maryland when her husband was stationed on the East Coast. She called to thank the Gunslingers and say the show brings back the memories. That is the version of radio that runs 44 years.

After the break, Leon mentioned taking Ken Minyard and Bob Arthur out to Catalina on his 38-foot Scarab cigarette boat powered by two blown Chevy motors. Smooth water that day, Leon standing up to drive the way you do at speed on a boat like that. They made Catalina in about 28 minutes. Bob Arthur’s knuckles were white for most of the crossing. Leon has owned airplanes, boats, motorcycles, and cars across the decades, and would not change a single purchase. The May 30th auction at Gunslinger Auctions carries 742 lots and crossed $100,000 in pre-bids within four hours of the catalog going live. Bid online at HiBid or Proxibid. The Colts and military firearms in this catalog are worth a close look before auction day.

Corsair vs. Hellcat: Pacific Air Combat Compared

Barney in Sherman Oaks had donated 11 Texaco cast airplane models to the Condor Squadron for their June auction. These were Texaco promotional models, originally distributed through gas stations, and Barney described them as beautiful. The Condor Squadron staff at the office were already trying to buy them at the counter. He redirected them to the auction. Both Leon and George are members of the Condor Squadron, whose pilots fly T-6 Texan trainers in formation flights over Los Angeles and San Diego.

Joe in San Gabriel had a Corsair story from an Elks magazine. A Navy pilot pursuing a Japanese aircraft ran out of ammunition and pulled up close behind the Zero and used the Corsair’s propeller to chop the tail off the enemy plane. The Zero went down. The Corsair survived with minimal damage. George confirmed he had heard the story before. The propeller on a Corsair is steel, spun by a big R-2800 radial engine, and a Zero was not a heavily constructed aircraft. The physics were workable. Joe suggested the pilot earned a bronze award for it. George amended: probably a steel award, given the propeller material.

Ed in San Diego asked George for a direct comparison of the F4U Corsair and the F6F Hellcat for stability, handling, and dogfighting suitability. George was honest about the limits of his answer. He has backseat time in a Corsair but has not flown either aircraft as the rated pilot in command, so he cannot give a first-person comparison of the controls. What he could say was that both were highly effective against the Zero. The Corsair was fast, powerful, and could climb above the Zero and come down on it from altitude. The Hellcat was probably slightly more maneuverable due to its shorter wingspan and more compact design. In a direct matchup, George called it roughly a draw. Both aircraft were substantially superior to the Zero in structural strength and firepower.

The Corsair’s carrier landing reputation is where the “Ensign Eliminator” nickname comes from. The long nose completely blocked forward visibility on a straight-in approach, requiring pilots to fly a curved approach pattern to keep the deck in sight. Getting that right under operational conditions was difficult, and the learning curve was steep for newly designated ensigns coming straight from flight training. George also spoke to his own flight background. He spent the majority of his time in B-25 Mitchell bombers and has logged time in seven different B-25s. He also has backseat time in a P-51, a Corsair, and an FJ Fury, plus limited time in an A-26, a B-24, and a B-17. The B-25 is his airplane.

Mark in Woodland Hills had raised a story earlier about a World War II crew chief who reportedly increased a Corsair’s airspeed by 40 miles per hour by bending the propeller tips. George had not heard the story before. He said that 40 miles per hour would be a remarkable gain from a tip modification alone, and that the number had likely been embellished over time. Getting another 10 miles per hour out of a Corsair at maximum speed is already a significant engineering achievement. Forty is a different claim entirely.

The Little Bird Helicopter and the Artemis Capsule Recovery

Debbie in Whittier asked about small special operations helicopters she had been reading about. George identified them as Little Birds. The aircraft started as the Hughes 500, designated the O-6 in Army service, and the current special operations version is considerably more capable than the original platform. It is faster, stronger, and more mission-capable. It can be launched from small naval vessels, carries weapons packages, and has semi-stealth characteristics suited to low-profile operations. George noted it was used in the capture of a high-value target and has been deployed across multiple special operations theaters over the years.

The Artemis capsule recovery had aired the week before and the crew had personal connections to it. George’s son Scott is a 20-year Navy aviator and had attended the change of command ceremony for the USS John P. Murtha roughly six weeks before the recovery mission. The Murtha’s new commanding officer, Captain Kenny, took the ship out to conduct the Artemis retrieval. Two of the Artemis crew members were also Navy aviators whose careers had crossed with Scott’s at various points. The circles within military aviation run tight.

George explained the gap between splashdown and hatch opening that puzzled a lot of viewers watching the recovery. The large ship cannot maneuver close to the capsule because of hazards in tight proximity. The small recovery boats are on the capsule immediately, but the hatch cannot open until the crew inside has worked through a complete post-splashdown checklist. Explosive bolts need to be deactivated. Internal pressure needs to be equalized. Several other checklist items carry real failure risk, and all of them have to be complete before anyone touches the hatch from outside. Once the checklist was closed out, stabilizing floats inflated from the top of the capsule to keep it upright, and the crew opened up. The whole sequence looked slow from the outside but was running on schedule throughout.

During the mission, two C-130 Hercules transport aircraft that had brought the Little Birds and supporting personnel into the area became mired in mud on the airstrip and could not be extracted. Rather than leave serviceable aircraft behind for any party that might want to examine the equipment and techniques, both C-130s were destroyed on site before the team departed. George compared the overall complexity of the operation to the Bat 21 rescue in Vietnam, the 1972 extraction of Lieutenant Colonel Iceal Hambleton after his aircraft was shot down over North Vietnam. Both operations put extraordinary resources in motion to bring people home, and both succeeded.

The final segment closed with a call from Bruce in Lakewood about Sammy Davis Jr. and the overlap between the gunslinger and motorman worlds. Bruce owns a Colt Single Action Army that was engraved to Sammy Davis personally by Fred Roth Jr., president of Colt, and sent directly to Sammy’s home address, which was legally permissible at the time. Davis was a skilled quick-draw practitioner who could handle a Colt SAA with real ability. Randy from the previous segment had also mentioned that the day before had been the 84th anniversary of the Doolittle Raiders, and that he had met Dick Cole, who served as Doolittle’s co-pilot on the lead B-25. George confirmed that the one Doolittle aircraft that landed intact in Soviet territory was never returned. By the end of the war, the B-25s were obsolete anyway. That does not make it any less of a loss.