Every year, Halloween falls right in the middle of the Specialty Equipment Market Association’s (SEMA) show in Las Vegas, better known as the SEMA Show. I’ve been going there for decades and my wife, Trish, never misses the simultaneously scheduled Automotive Aftermarket Products Exposition (AAPEX) Show in Vegas. So, when our kids were little, they thought Halloween was when Mom and Dad went away, Nana and Pop came down to stay with them, and the neighbors gave them candy!
As a reminder, SEMA (pronounced SEE/mah) is a massive indoor/outdoor modified car show, a bustling trade fair, a raucous drifting exposition, a Hot Rod Alley and a seemingly boundless multi-building display of auto accessories, big and small tools, new products and reproduction parts. There are also countless wheel and tire manufacturers. When the first SEMA Show opened back in 1967, SEMA was called the Speed Equipment Manufacturer’s Association. In those days, the expression “hot rod” was a pejorative term (and LA’s Petersen Automotive Museum), jump-started SEMA, now a long-standing trade association, to help legitimize the emerging hot rod industry.
