CLASSIC AMERICAN PEOPLE Bob McKee Master Builder THE EARLY DAYS
At 83, Bob McKee pulled down the shutters of his engineering workshop in the small town of Palatine, 30 miles north west of Chicago, for the last time. Here, Bob tells us about his long, interesting and fulfilling career. He began: “I was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1935. My dad was a civil engineer. I wasn’t a good student at school. I was always more interested in sports. But I liked working on cars and mechanical things and had an aptitude for doing that. I used to get Hot Rod magazine and I thought, boy, this is really neat stuff. When I was 15, I bought a Model A Ford pick-up truck for $55 and I made a hot rod out of it. The Granatelli brothers ran a drag strip at Half Day, Illinois, (an old Navy Air station) which was not far from where I lived so I would go and would watch the dragsters run.
“When I got out of high school, I landed a job at Ray Erickson Speed Service in Chicago and he was running a Hudson Hornet stock car. I got going to races with that. It was pretty interesting because you were modifying cars to make them work better and stay together. A good friend of mine was
