Ed Iskenderian, Hot Rod Pioneer Known as the ‘Camfather,’ Dies at 104

Jeré Longman

New York Times

As a Los Angeles teenager in the 1930s and early ’40s, Ed Iskenderian built a roadster from a used Ford Model T and raced with friends on dry lake beds in the Mojave Desert at speeds that eventually reached 120 miles per hour.

In time, Isky, as he was known, became renowned in the high-speed community as an affable, cigar-chomping hot-rod pioneer, innovative machinist and clever promoter nicknamed “the Camfather.” Taking a cue from the “Godfather” movies, his company advertised that it would “grind you a camshaft you could not refuse.”

Mr. Iskenderian, whose broad impact on the automotive racing culture ranged from drag strips and salt flats to the Indianapolis 500 and Daytona 500, died on Feb. 4 in hospice care in Torrance, Calif., said Nolan Jamora, the chief operating officer of Iskenderian Racing Cams. He was 104.

Mr. Iskenderian was best known for building or “grinding” camshafts, which are essentially an engine’s heartbeat. A camshaft consists of a rod and shaped lobes that synchronize the opening and closing of the engine’s air intake and exhaust valves. The size and shape of the lobes can be adjusted to affect power, torque, performance and fuel efficiency.

Car and Driver magazine noted in a tribute that Mr. Iskenderian’s “influence can be felt in every form of motorsport today.”

As one who revolutionized the camshaft business, he helped to turn “a hobby into an industry” of customized auto parts worth more than $52 billion in annual sales in the United States, Mike Spagnola, the chief executive of the Specialty Equipment Market Association, said in a statement. Mr. Iskenderian was the trade group’s first president, in 1963.

He started his own camshaft production company, as the sole employee, in 1946. A onetime apprentice tool-and-die maker, just back from wartime service in the Army Air Forces, he found the Los Angeles hot rod scene running at full throttle and the wait for high-performance camshafts to be a frustrating five months. He bought a grinding machine from a mentor and placed it on a dirt floor in a back room of a friend’s machine shop in Culver City, Calif.

His first major project was enhancing the performance of Ford Flathead V8s, a dominant racing engine of the 1940s and early ’50s. His solution was to create “fast action” cams that opened the intake valves earlier and held them open longer during the combustion process, allowing more air and fuel to flow into the cylinders, boosting horsepower.

Within a decade, he became the leading cam authority. His cams powered numerous iconic engines, including the four Pontiac V8s that fueled Mickey Thompson’s Challenger 1 when he became the first American driver to exceed 400 miles per hour, on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah in 1960.

Mr. Iskenderian also built the technologically challenging four camshafts used in a turbocharged Cosworth DFX V8 engine that Johnny Rutherford drove to a commanding victory by 30 seconds in his Yellow Submarine at the 1980 Indianapolis 500.

“Give him a lawn-mower engine, and he’d probably hot-rod it and love it,” Matt Stone, Mr. Iskenderian’s biographer, said in an interview.

The camshaft company, now in Gardena, Calif., south of Los Angeles, has expanded to 60 employees and 100,000 square feet of space. Mr. Iskenderian was considered among the first to use computers to design camshafts, though it was also said of his skill, with only mild hyperbole, that he could grind one out of a broomstick.

“He was deeply and perennially curious,” said Mr. Stone, the author of “Isky: Ed Iskenderian and the History of Hot Rodding” (2017). “He just wanted to know, ‘How does that work, how can I make it better, faster?’”

Edward Iskenderian was born on July 10, 1921, in the farming community of Cutler, Calif., in the San Joaquin Valley. His parents, Dickran and Armine (Keremian) Iskenderian, were Armenian immigrants who owned a small vineyard but lost most of their grape crop during a winter frost in 1920.

The family soon moved to Los Angeles, where Dickran Iskenderian, once a blacksmith, opened a shoe repair shop. Ed, too, began working with tools when he took shop class in grade school. He learned in junior high to repair radios for his neighbors and took automotive shop class in high school.

“I’m sure this is why I ended up wanting to make or fix things,” he told his biographer.

As a teenager, he and his friends bought used Model Ts for $5 or $10, stripped them down to make them faster and to resemble cars they had seen at tracks and in newspaper photographs. Before the term “hot rod” came into use, early modified cars were known as “gow jobs” — “gow” being a slang term for hopped-up or souped-up.

After World War II, he resumed modifying the Model T roadster he had as a teenager and, in June 1948, was featured on the cover of the fledgling Hot Rod magazine. His roadster was named hot rod of the month.

The Isky Roadster, as it is known, remains one of the most celebrated hot rods ever built and is now at the Museum of American Speed in Lincoln, Neb. Over the years, Mr. Iskenderian sent admirers thousands of photos of himself sitting in the car, with the autograph, “From one hot rodder to another,” a sign of his keen sense of promotion, marketing and advertising.

He was among the first in the automotive industry to use branded T-shirts and logo-embossed stickers and decals as marketing tools. He also signed one of the earliest sponsorship deals with a driver — Don Garlits, known as Big Daddy, the drag-racing legend.

The Iskenderian company name appeared on cars he sponsored in races. His advertisements in racing publications offered technical advice, accompanied by cartoons that showed Mr. Iskenderian striking heroic

poses and making gibes at competitors during the so-called “cam wars” of the 1950s and ’60s.

He is survived by two sons, Richard and Timothy; a daughter, Armina; a brother, Ben; and eight grandchildren. His wife, Alice Garbooshian, whom he married in 1947, died in 2024. Their eldest son, Ronald, also died that year.

Mr. Iskenderian’s boyhood during the Depression left an indelible imprint. He seldom threw anything away, friends said. The Cadillacs that he preferred for daily driving were often filled, except for a small space behind the steering wheel, with soda bottles, books, magazines, camshafts and fishing gear. More than one visitor to his office failed at first glance to see him sitting behind the mountainous pile on his desk.

When his glasses broke, by all accounts a regular ordeal, he was known to replace damaged stems with pipe cleaners and, once, with fishing line and lead weights.

His ingenuity in the camshaft world was also born in part from his generation’s experience with deprivation. Mr. Jamora, of Iskenderian Racing Cams, put it simply: “They had to use what they could.”