Cartoonist/creator of fictional hot rodder 'Stroker McGurk' dies

By Mark Vaughn, Crain News Service

LOS ANGELES (March 11, 2014) — Tom Medley, best known as the creator of the hapless and humorous hot rod hero “Stroker McGurk,” died March 2 of natural causes in Los Angeles at the age of 93.

While Mr. Medley was best known for his McGurk character, he was part of the media empire that was Hot Rod magazine from just after its inception until his retirement 37 years later. Mr. Medley was a photographer as well as a cartoonist, covering the first Bonneville speed week and the Indy 500 from 1950 to 1964. He also was a publisher at Petersen during the height of the “Mad Men” era.

But it was as a cartoonist that Mr. Medley will likely be best remembered.

Stroker McGurk first appeared as a single-panel cartoon in the second edition of Hot Rod magazine in March 1948. Penned by hot-rodder Mr. Medley, the strip would appear on and off for 17 more years, chronicling the fast fun and foibles of its namesake racer in a way that connected a generation of rodders across the country.

How he came to cartooning fame involved a bit of serendipity. Mr. Medley was a student at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., and would tack up his humorous drawings on the bulletin board of the local Pasadena hot rod builder, Blair's Speed Shop.

It was in Blair's that a young publishing entrepreneur named Robert E. “Pete” Petersen saw Mr. Medley's work and brought him on board at Hot Rod as the humor and cartoon editor. Mr. Medley also created a motorcycle cartoon for Cycle magazine called “Flat Out Snodgrass.”

Mr. Medley's son Gary recalled this quote from a profile of his father that he wrote for Goodguys Gazette:

“The idea,” Mr. Medley explained in the “Best of Hot Rod” book published in 1981, ‘‘was to create a character who would become the reader's friend, one they could relate to through his trials and tribulations of just being a hot-rodder.”

Mr. Medley was born March 20, 1920, in Lebanon, Ore., from where he sometimes hitchhiked 65 miles to watch the dirt-track races in Portland.

When the war came, he marched across Europe with the 78th Infantry Division, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and crossing the Bridge at Remagen. After the war, he and his bride Rosemary settled in Los Angeles where Mr. Medley enrolled at Art Center. It was during that time that his two-dimensional musings first appeared in print.

Gary Medley credits his dad's thriving imagination with a number of racing innovations.

“Stroker's — or Medley's — inspired genius came up with a host of crazy ideas that appeared impractical at first, but were later adopted by everyday car builders and racers,” Gary Medley said.

“Multi-engine dragsters, wheelie bars, and drag chutes all sprung from Stroker's fertile mind before they were embraced in the real world.”

The character of McGurk was retired when Mr. Medley became publisher of Rod & Custom, where, among many other things, he founded the Street Rod Nationals and coined the phrase “Street is Neat.”