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Gene Winfield, a hot rodder and prominent car customizer who built fanciful vehicles for “Star Trek,” “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and other television series and for films like “Blade Runner” and “Sleeper,” died on March 4 in Atascadero, Calif. He was 97.
His son, Steve, said he died in an assisted living facility from metastatic melanoma. He had also been diagnosed with kidney failure.
Mr. Winfield began to attract national attention in the late 1950s with a two-door 1956 Mercury hardtop called the Jade Idol.
A custom car website, Kustorama, noted that he transformed the Mercury for a customer by adding features like handmade fenders rolled in aluminum in the front end; headlight rings made from 1959 Chrysler Imperial Crown hubcaps; a television set integrated into a new dashboard; and a steering column taken from an Edsel.
Automobile magazine described the Jade Idol as having “a sharklike presence that represented a new direction in customs.”
The car got its name from Mr. Winfield’s inventive paint scheme: multiple shades of green and pearl white, with one color artfully blending into the other, using a technique he developed. It became known as the Winfield Fade.
Mr. Winfield said that he began his paint experiments with motorcycles, followed by a white Chevy, “I put purple around the chrome strips,” he said. “When I got done, it was a little bit gaudy to me; it was different, though, and everybody loved it. So as I started to do the next one or two, I made it softer and started blending.”
Another famous custom job was a roadster, the King T, which he built in the early 1960s with Don Tognotti. They painted a Model T Ford lavender and added modifications like a Chevrolet V-8 engine paired with a four-speed automatic transmission; four-wheel disc brakes; and 15-inch chrome wheels with wood inlays. It won an award for “most beautiful roadster” at the 1964 Oakland Roadster Show in California.
Mr. Winfield chopped off the tops of many cars that he customized — including hundreds of Mercurys — and put them back a few inches lower to give the cars sleeker looks.
He did some of his TV work as a division manager for the model-car company AMT, for which he built the Galileo Shuttle for “Star Trek.” Based on a design by Thomas Kellogg, it appeared in a few episodes. He constructed it in two units.
One would be a complete exterior, full size, he told the official Star Trek website in 2011. Then we built the complete interior. This interior had what we called ‘wild’ walls. What you do is you make the walls in four-foot sections on wheels, so you can put up one wall and they could film the actors sitting on the seats and whatnot.
Robert Eugene Winfield was born on June 16, 1927, in Springfield, Mo., and grew up with five brothers and sisters, mainly in Modesto, Calif. His father, Frank, was a butcher who ran a wagon from which he and his mother, Virginia (Akins) Winfield, sold hamburgers and hot dogs for a nickel. After his parents divorced, his mother opened her own hamburger restaurant, where Gene started working at 10.
He was 14 when he opened his first shop, to which he brought his first car, a 1929 Ford Model A coupe. To it, he added oxtails, two antennas, and a blue paint job. But his hope of hot-rodding it in the streets was soon dashed when it was wrecked in a crash with a taxicab. He quickly bought two more roadsters.
He served stints in the Navy, from 1944 to 1945, and in the Army, from 1949 to 1951. While stationed in Japan, he learned welding skills from an expert Japanese welder. Back home, his custom work got better, and he began to attract customers. He also began racing in the streets and on dry lakes in the late 1940s.
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