PART 1 THE MARLBRO MANN
If you didn’t live in Wanganui in the 1970s then chances are that you’ve never heard of Fred Mann. Yet, despite his relative obscurity, he built cars back then — nearly half a century ago — so ahead of their time that if any of them were to pull up your driveway today your jaw would hit the floor even now. Fred was a visionary and a multi-talented guy, whose entire life revolved around big block Chevys, tunnel-ram intake manifolds, four-speed manual transmissions, and good times. Smooth, good-looking, and charismatic, he spent much of his amazing life living the dream in Southern California, always with a beer in his hand, a Marlboro cigarette between his lips, and a gorgeous girl on his arm. Or several … Fred died earlier this year aged 63, and it’s well past time to tell the story of a hell of a guy who lived a hell of a life; a life which might look something like the very life that many of us might have chosen — from our wildest dreams — to live if we could have.
THE CARS OF HIS WANGANUI DAYS
In an epitaph he wrote about his close friend and Los Angeles flatmate Golly Adams, of Taranaki, related some lines from a song as a synonym for Fred: “all the girls wanted to be with him, and all the guys wanted to be him”. This writer was one of those guys. I was 17. Fred was 22. I struggled to hang onto one girlfriend; Fred had girls scratching each other’s eyes out to get to him. I had a marginally cool American car; Fred had the handsdown coolest and most bad-arse tyre-frying street machine in town. In fact, though we were all too young and insular to realize it at the time, Fred had several of the baddest cars in the whole country. And it’s only in more recent years, when those of us who knew him at the time think back to what he achieved well over four decades ago, that we’ve come to realize just how ahead of his time, how influential, and how visionary Fred Mann, car guy extraordinaire, really was.
With his long-haired rock-star good looks and smooth demeanour, Fred had such extraordinary popularity with the girls that Wanganui folklore had it that he maintained a little black pocketsized diary that held the details of every girl he’d ‘had relations’ with, along with a code system that gave each girl a rating for their performance and enthusiasm, and notations about points of particular interest. As we all grew up, of course, we wondered if the old legend about Fred’s little black pocket diary was, in fact, anything more than just a legend.
Fred first came to the attention of other car guys in and around Wanganui as a result of his first car, selfbuilt during his teenage years: a tastefully modified MkII Zephyr. These cars were the hot ticket in the early 1970s, and car modifying and customizing was in its infancy — especially in small-town New Zealand places like Wanganui. Today, you’d call Fred’s Zephyr a mild custom, and he made it go just as good as it looked. This car — uber-cool for its day — kicked off lifelong friendships with other Wanganui gearheads of the time, including Chris Bennett, Mike Madden, and Bob Hannah.
“I first met Fred one night in 1974 when we were both 18 or 19 years old. It was at the burger bar on Victoria Avenue in Wanganui when we recognized we had similar cars. I had a MkII Zodiac
